Save Newport Real News in Newport Beach
One of the items in Tuesday’s City Council meeting was whether or not to add more police to Newport Beach’s Balboa Peninsula, which councilwoman Dixon has repeatedly referred to as having a “crime problem”. This is part of Dixon’s “Lights Out” proposal, and 1,746 signatures were submitted to show public disapproval. All were summarily ignored by council.
First, let’s start with the police per-capita in Newport Beach. Here’s a graph of all of the Orange County cities covered in the 2012 FBI statistics:
As you can undoubtedly see, Newport Beach has a ratio of a whopping 24.1 police and contractors per 10,000 citizens. Even our closest “competition”, Costa Mesa, has only 17.6. Irvine, our neighbor with the largest border and ranked regularly as the “safest city in America” has only 12.9– almost half of what Newport Beach has.
But regardless of our exceptionally dense police population, it continues to be touted that Balboa Peninsula has a crime problem. How can that be the case, you ask? Because the city is doing something truly devious with the stats: They are pretending that the 11,000 residents on Balboa Peninsula are the ones committing all the crime. However, in a Study Session on March 17th, the police admitted that 84% of crime in the district was committed by non-Newport-Beach-Residents. Note that of the remaining 16% can be comprised of people living anywhere in Newport Beach– not just the peninsula. This is important to remember.
So, the crime stats that the city has delivered include the crimes committed by tourists– 84% of the total– but they do not include the headcount of the 10,000,000 tourists that visit every year (flattened daily average is 27,397, making the total population count 38,397, not 11,000). This makes the entire stat wildly inaccurate. There are only two mathematically sane ways to report crime in a high tourist area:
METHOD #1: Include tourist headcounts in the “per capita” calculations (38,397 headcount) AND ALSO include tourist crime in the “total crime” calculations (100%).
METHOD #2: Do not include tourist headcounts in the “per capita” (11,000 headcount) calculations AND ALSO do not include tourist crime in the “total crime” calculations (16%).
THERE IS NO OTHER MATHEMATICALLY SANE WAY TO CALCULATE CRIME RATE.
Whether we use Method #1 OR Method #2 to calculate the crime, Balboa Peninsula has the lowest crime rate in the entire city of Newport Beach.
Additionally, last year Newport Beach had the lowest crime rate in the city’s entire 106-year history, with crime dropping city-wide by 11%, and dropping 15% on Balboa Peninsula alone. Yet with the crime rate the lowest it’s ever been and the crime on the peninsula additionally dropping faster than anywhere else, with the peninsula already having the lowest crime rate in the city– Dixon proposed adding more police.
What do you expect will happen when we double or triple enforcement in a low-crime area? Do you think that police will end their shift and report back that they didn’t find any crime? Of course not. What will happen is that enforcement for mild infractions– like a person walking to their neighbors house with a glass of wine and other innocent things — will become rampant. With a single road in and out of Balboa, where will all these new units be placed? The answer is simple: every few blocks. Can you imagine living there? Many of us do.
Our current city council has made the horrendous decision to turn this into a police state at the cost of $570k each year, every year, forever. At a time where it is critical to relieve the stress on the CalPERS pension system, they have increased our indebtment to it, instead. They have followed Dixon down the nonsensical rabbithole.
Now, I actually personally like the majority of our councilpeople and everyone makes mistakes, but they have made themselves pawns in a game that should never even be played. They are creating a police state out of Balboa Peninsula, and while I will surely continue to work with them on other subjects, this action is simply unforgivable.
Don’t like this? TAKE ACTION! Email our council, here: http://savenewport.com/political-figures/ or if you have some free time on your hands, contact me if you want to get REALLY involved to help save our beautiful slice of paradise.
