Birmingham, AL - New crime statistics released by the City Action Partnership (CAP) indicate that serious crime in the 90-block CAP District downtown dropped 29% in 2009 while violent crime decreased by 35%. The figures, collected by CAP Executive Director Teresa Thorne from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Birmingham Police Department, further indicate that the CAP District is one of the safest places in the entire metro area, as it has been for several years.
According to Ms. Thorne, overall serious crime (defined by the FBI as Murder, Rape, Robbery, Aggravated Assault, Burglary, Larceny , Auto Theft and Arson) in the City of Birmingham dropped 10% last year, a significant accomplishment. Across the U.S., crime decreased an average of 4%. From the inception of CAP in 1995, crime has decreased in the CAP District by 67%! “We owe this to many factors, including the great partnership between CAP and the BPD,” Thorne says.
Thorne also said “By looking at the numbers as a percentage of the chance of one’s being a victim of a crime, we can make a comparison to other areas (cities) that measure crime. Given the caveat that a city uses its population and CAP uses the number of people who work and live downtown, the risk of being a victim of a serious crime is as low as our safest “over the mountain” suburban neighbors.”
The chance being a victim is expressed as a relationship between population and number of crimes. Using the number of people working and living in the downtown for a “population,” the chance of someone in Vestavia, Mountain Brook or the CAP District being a victim of serious crime is about 1 in 100. The risk of being a victim of violent crime downtown is less than 1% of that, or 1 in 1,000. Those figures do not take into consideration the 3.5 million people who come into the downtown for unique events/services at the BJCC, the Art Museum, the Civil Rights Institute, the McWane Science Center, and the Alabama Theater, which would make the rate even lower.
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