Define "Safe"
(Crime • Fort Bend County)
As the reader may have gathered by now, city fathers at nearby Sugar Land are exceedingly public-relations conscious. Today, for instance, I received five email press releases, one of which noted that the city now has a Twitter account.
My favorite, though, was the one declaring “Sugar Land has been named the 11th-safest city in America, a distinction based on an analysis of FBI crime statistics.” It turns out that something called CQ Press gathers publicly available FBI statistics each year and turns them into an opportunity for America’s cities to brag and, one supposes, purchase a few bound copies for city government coffee tables. Lots of promotional possibilities all around.
But you know what they say about statistics. You can throw ‘em into a big paper sack, whap ‘em against the wall and bend ‘em around to mean darn near anything. (That is what they say about statistics, isn’t it?).
Now, I don’t mean to infer Sugar Land doesn’t have fewer violent crimes per 100,000 population than many other cities its size. That we know of. Uh-uh.
All I’m saying is it has to be just a tad humiliating for a municipality to allege it’s one of America’s safest when, less than two weeks earlier, its very own mayor stepped out of his own car in his own driveway only to be greeted by a man who pushed a gun against His Honor’s head. Said gunman then, by the way, went on to not only rob the mayor, but also made him crawl underneath his vehicle, apparently just because he could. Many of the sordid details are here, although you’ll have to use your own imagination to gauge how much fun it’s been to work as a Sugar Land patrol officer these days.
Now that’s security we can believe in.
→ B.Dunn, Nov 30, 2009, 03 52 pm
I like the example of the mayor and what happened to him not so long ago in his own drive-way. Most who live here also know that the two cities listed in that report are not very safe cities when you look at the rest of the county. They are in fact very much close to Houston which is one of the most dangerous cities in the country.
— numbers Nov 30, 07:00 pm #
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