This article is a little hard to read. Crime went up 4% from September to August which to my untrained eye is bad, but last year it went up 11% in September, so that's good. This is stat is given
Larcenies, such as bike thefts and thefts from a car, rose by 8 percent.
But I can't tell on which time scale that is, August to September, January to September or what. And they didn't break bike thefts out separately. It seems Metro police it trying a little spin, because there's this fact
Between January and September, 2006 there were 899 major crimes in the system, including aggravated assaults, larcenies and robberies. During the same time period in 2005, there were 862 crimes.
Which is a pretty clear indication that crime is up, but then they say this...
The drop is due to increased enforcement and visibility “using the resources that we have in very specific ways,” targeting problem spots, Hanson said.
And then there are some crimes that aren't counted
Neighboring police departments reported responding to 27 crimes on Metro property between January and September this year, said Candace Smith, a Metro spokeswoman.
Those incidents, which included seven robberies and six stolen bikes and five stolen automobiles, are not included in Metro’s crime statistics.
6 out of 27 crimes (22.2%) were stolen bikes. If that's ratio holds up system wide, and there's no indication that it does I want to point out, that comes out to 200 stolen bikes since the start of the year. According to Metro's stats there have been 406 cases of larceny so far, but it's impossible to say how much of that was bike theft. I guess the point is, buy and use a good bike lock.
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