Saturday, February 2, 2008

North Charleston, South Carolina Crime Report 2008

The Post and Courier reports that crime decreased overall in North Charleston last year, but the police chief says more young people are settling issues with violence.

Crime decreased by 6.7 percent in the city in 2007, but violent crime, propelled by robberies of Hispanics carrying cash, more rapes and a rash of serial business robberies, rose by 6.6 percent, Police Chief Jon Zumalt said Friday.

A troubling trend Zumalt is seeing is fewer aggravated assaults but more ending in deaths. He said young people are getting more violent every year.

"I'm pleased to see the overall rate decline," Zumalt said. "The city is getting bigger, and we are handling more calls, but we are still having a challenge with violent crime. ... We believe homicides are increasing because they are retaliatory. Folks, when they have a gun, they are trying to kill people."

Charleston Post and Courier Story

Now here's my take on the above story, first don't you just love statistics? We all know it's a numbers game and clearly a six percent change in crime is meaningless unless you take into account many other factors.

But if you like statistics here's an eye opener for you.

The North Charleston Police Department’s ability to catch bad guys, in other words the number of crimes vs. number of arrests (8166/1541) can measure how effective they are or as I'll call it their efficiency rating of 18.87%.

To look at it another way more than 80% of the crooks and violent thugs in North Charleston get away with their crimes. Does that surprise you?

I fully support Chief Zumalt’s call for new laws requiring mandatory DNA samples, stopping multiple bonds for those arrested, adding another circuit judge, making criminals serve 85 percent of their sentence and allowing probation and parole officers to conduct warrantless searches, if it will make the NCPD more efficient.

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