Save Newport Real News in Newport Beach
Recently, the incumbents have been touting that Newport has the “Lowest Crime Rate Ever”. They said the same thing in 2015, so let’s see if the math adds up.
As you may know, I run a software development company, so I have some tools available at my disposal that most people don’t have. The NBPD has a feature where you can see crimes calls and arrests for the last 7 days, but beyond that, they show blank. That feature is located here: http://www.nbpd.org/crime/calls/events.asp?days=7
During the “Lights out at 11pm” proposal by Diane Dixon, the only entity that had police statistics were the police themselves, and you all remember how they lied, lied, lied to protect their bosses and move forward their agenda (that police chief has since retired).
That was irritating– and I wanted the history of crimes at a whim– so in 2015, I began doing a daily log of that crime report, and I store the information here: http://savenewport.com/crime
Now that we have the actual crime information, we can run our own statistics at any point to double-check the proclamations of our politicians– and even our own PD.
Here is the raw number breakdown: http://savenewport.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Arrests-Per-Month.xlsx
On an average month of each year, here is our breakdown:
| YEAR | CALLS | ARRESTS |
| 2015 | 5,771.20 | 1,872.00 |
| 2016 | 5,607.83 | 2,246.00 |
| 2017 | 5,657.75 | 2,239.00 |
| 2018 | 5,832.45 | 2,011.18 |
As you can see, since 2015, arrests have always been higher. But perhaps the police are counting calls– not arrests? In this case, the calls for service were lowest in 2016, rose in 2017, and rose again in 2018.
In fact, it appears that while the Calls for Service are rising every year, the arrest count for those very same calls is dropping.
In 2017, our calls for service rose, but our total arrests dropped.
In 2018, our calls for service rose, but our total arrests dropped.
There has been a lot of speculation in the community that crime is on the rise, and the incumbents blame this sensation on social media, where word of break-ins travels fast so the perception is that it occurs more often– but judging by the numbers themselves, we are having more crime reported each year.
There are many possibilities for this and of course I have my own suspicions– especially after our city council gave the police chief a $20,000 annual raise just a few months ago in the re-election year of the majority– but as is the nature of this sort of thing, I don’t think suspicions alone are provable.
What we can prove, though, are the numbers. And the numbers of calls are rising, meaning citizens are reporting more crime. The number of arrests are falling, which means that the police are taking less action.
You can draw your own conclusions from there, during this election season.
