Fields: Sometimes Statistics Prove Nothing
BY SAM FIELDS
There are liars, damn liars and statistics.
According to Florida Department of Law Enforcement, (FDLE) Miami Beach has three times the violent crime rate of Hialeah. Whaaa?!
It’s almost twice the rate of Miami.
How can it be?
The FDLE defines violent crimes as murder, rape, robbery aggravated assaults, burglary, larceny and car theft. Take the total number of those crimes in a given year and divide it into the local population and Miami Beach ends up with 11,853 crimes per 100,000.
Hialeah and Miami respectively end up with 3,687 and 6,833 crimes per 100,000.
With a population of 88,000 it seems as if Beachites can expect to be the victim of a serious crime once every seven years.
If this seems to defy your commonsense and common experience you are right.
The problem has less to do with accurate crime reporting than the way the population of Miami Beach and every other tourist town is counted.
The 88,000 permanent residents of Miami Beach are dwarfed by the 5.3 million tourists that flood in to party. On the average they spend 5.5 nights. That means you can count on another 80,000 residing on Miami Beach on any given day.
Add to that number those who travel to the island to populate the beaches and bars every day. Mix generously with copious amounts of alcohol and other substances and more crimes are as certain as bikinis Collins Avenue.
But I’d be willing to put down a few shekels that the vast majority of the perps AND victims of crimes on Miami Beach are visitors whose numbers are NOT counted as part of the local population when configuring crime rates.
The bottom line is this. Because of the way FDLE—and for that matter the FBI—counts population the numbers for Miami Beach make it seem like a rape-and-robbery capitals when it just ain’t so.
Now if you want to talk about securities fraud and real estate scams…well, that’s a different story.
May 21st, 2012 at 9:46 am
I thought this was a political site not a site about statistics. Boring.
May 21st, 2012 at 8:16 pm
Like Lamberti and crime stats? Oh wait..they are way up to.
May 22nd, 2012 at 2:52 am
It’s not just population – look also at the list of “violent” crimes! For example, “car theft” – somebody sees keys in the ignition & takes a joyride – sure, that’s a crime, but how exactly is this a “violent” crime?!? A violent crime necessarily involves actual physical harm to a real person’s body!