The Tuesday Town Hall meeting had a couple of handouts, apparently. I only got one that didn’t make much sense, but there was a packet that I missed that had some additional data not on my handout, ostensibly showing the percent decrease in Class A crimes in the city. One of folks attending this meeting was Clayton Stacey, a Cool Springs resident who was brutalized in a robbery about a month ago. Mr. Stacey got one of these other handouts and he took a good look at the stats presented. And then he checked the math:
Right? So not only are they comparing 2012 to 2014 (the last year that Mayor Baker was in office v the second year Williams was in office — wtf?), whoever did this couldn’t calculate the percentage increase or decrease over this two year period. And this also proves just how deaf this Mayor is to the people who live and work in the city. When the shootings and the murders are increasing, it will always color how all of the rest of the crime is perceived. This Administration wants credit for crime reduction (and much of this is down), but can’t manage the top line problem — the one that drives all of the perception and all of the news coverage.
But there is no excuse for the math here. And a good portion of this meeting was spent on the need for better educational opportunity for city kids. Educational opportunity that the city does not control or even influence. Yet they were happy to put out their own talking points based upon really bad math.
EDIT: I’ve added here a comparison done by Kathleen Perkins from Brandywine of the crime numbers presented at the meeting and what was reported to the FBI. I can’t begin to guess why these numbers are so wildly different (even where the numbers better favor the City), but can guess that the reason is somehow related to why the math is so messed up in what they did present. Still — this just another Quality Control issue from an Administration that has plenty of them. Anyone have any idea what is going on here?
