You know by now that Parenting Magazine put out a piece yesterday that states that Wilmington is the most violent city in America, ahead of places like St. Louis, Baltimore and New Orleans:
A short drive from South Philly and Camden and midway between New York and Washington, Wilmington managed to snag the number one spot on our list for highest rate of violent crimes per 100,000 people. And while the overall state of Delaware ranked moderately well in the peace index (which looked at factors such as police per capita, percentage of population behind bars and access to small arms), Wilmington came in the top spot for sex offenders per capita.
That’s all there is. You don’t know for what year they got their violent crime data, you don’t know what year they used on the Peace Index (plus the current rating is for the whole state not the city, so there is apples and oranges), nor do you know where they got their sex offender information, much less any explanation as to why they used a per capita rate here when they used a per 100,000 rate for violent crime. In other words, if this is a genuine study, it is a mess. A mess because it looks like they jumbled up a bunch of data and a mess because they did not source either their data or methodology. So there is no way to backcheck.
Two years ago, though, Parenting Magazine ranked Wilmington as one of its Best Cities (ranking of 80) in 2010:
Wilmington was named by Thomas Penn for his friend Spencer Compton, Earl of Wilmington, who was prime minister in the reign of George II of Great Britain.
The Delaware Children’s Museum in Wilmington is Delaware’s first and only kid-centric museum, teaching math, science and technology through hands-on exhibits appropriate for toddlers through the teen years.
This time they gave more data supporting their ranking, so you could back into some of what they were trying to get to, but they still don’t source their data, which is Very Bad Form.
So what to think? Basically that Parenting Magazine is in the business of creating click bait — these galleries of ginned up lists and (psuedo) information that is largely meant to drive people to their site and drive up page views. It doesn’t seem real, but it looks like John Rago has called the magazine to get some info on where they got their data and how they used it. But there are other ranking studies out there and they all have somewhat different methods to make their assessment. Most of them tell you how they get to their answers though.
Wilmington is nowhere near as dangerous as plenty of folks want to make it out to be. It is more dangerous than it *should* be and that is due to alot of factors. We’ve been hearing alot about public safety plans (at leas you do if you live in the city), but I think that ground zero of Wilmington’s safety problem is largely about incredibly poor leadership. People have been concerned about crime in pockets of the city for a long time. A few years back, a number of community leaders and City Council began advocating for a Community Policing plan that would put officers directly in neighborhoods. After advocating for more police resources to make this happen, the city pulled back on this plan and decided to implement this as a part-time unit. You can trace alot of the current frustration with the Administration’s posture towards crime to this. And while no one can say if this approach would have worked, what is clear is that this Administration utterly rebuffed a community (taxpayers!) who cared enough about their own safety to come up with an approach to change it.
You can mark the point at which city residents began to turn on this Administration. When your leadership doesn’t take your concerns about your safety and the safety of your family seriously, you start worrying even more about safety issues. Which is how we get to today, where safety seems to be the biggest issue that Mayoral candidates (at minimum) are running on. And safety is a genuine problem — as it is in alot of cities. Wilmington is a small place, which means that the ripple effects of crime are pretty immediate and pretty far-reaching. But you can make the same claim for the leadership vacuum on public safety — the ripple effects are pretty immediate and far-reaching. The worry about crime starts occupying the space where leadership should have been and it gets harder for the people who are trying to do good things in the city to accomplish those things.
It is worth it to take a good hard look at the candidate’s safety proposals, which I hope everyone does. We’ve talked alot about some of this here (see the comments). It is clear that whoever is Mayor, there will be change in the WPD. It is harder to tell from these plans what you get in terms of change or refocus on the safety of the citizens of the city — Bovell and Spencer’s websites are pretty thin on this, as is Montgomery’s interestingly. Kevin Kelley focuses strongly on Community Policing, data driven deployment of WPD resources and marshaling of city resources in targeted teams designed to try to raise the bar in every neighborhood. Dennis Williams’ plan is focused on doing what the WPD is *already* doing — whether it is focusing on high risk offenders (the WPD has been doing this for more than a year and a half now), a gun unit (the WPD is working on standing up this unit now, if it isn’t operational already), a Community Policing unit (which we have now), strategic partnerships with other law enforcement agencies (which we have now for certain types of issues) and a list of other items that are largely a part of what the WPD does now. I can’t begin to guess what kind of changed direction policing will take in Wilmington when the candidate who is working at making public safety his calling card is basically proposing business as usual.
Business as usual isn’t going to change the City’s safety issues.