Crime stats aren’t as bad as you think

Just about every time we post a crime-related story to Facebook we get a comment like this one someone left on story about a Palmer home invasion:

“I’m sleeping with 15 lb. hand weights so I can kill a … who tries to invade ME!! and bear spray is always nice, too.”

We did not name the poster because the point is that this sort of comment is ordinary, extremely ordinary.

Like a lot of our neighbors, we are frequent readers of the Mat-Su Valley News Facebook group. That page is jammed with posts about “suspicious” characters in Valley neighborhoods. These suspicious types run the gamut from extremely creepy — tried to talk his way into a woman’s home — to annoying — guys trying to sell school books — to extremely benign — two pre-teen girls knocking on doors.

But invariably someone jumps in with a statement about how the Valley is a dangerous place and you would do well to be armed.

But is it really that dangerous?

We took a look at the numbers. Between the year 2000 and the year 2010, according to U.S. Census data, the population of Mat-Su grew by 33 percent.

According to Alaska State Troopers’ annual reports from 1999 and 2009, in that time, the percentage of people robbed here — robbery is defined legally as theft through violence or threat of violence, so stealing someone’s television while they’re away doesn’t count — grew 11 percent and the percentage of people killed here grew 56 percent.

Further, both of those statistics are likely inflated because that was the period when troopers started referring major crimes to a statewide investigative unit, meaning that all of those 2009 homicides were not Valley homicides and all of those 2009 robberies were not Valley robberies, though a lot likely were.

Take that as you will but we find no cause for alarm. In some instances, the stats actually dropped — fewer people were victims of assault in 2009 than in 1999 — and in other, incredibly predictable ways they exploded — traffic tickets more than doubled.

But one of the facts people seem unaware of about these cases is that it is vanishingly rare for the victim of a violent crime to have been victimized by a stranger.

To put it another way, in our experience covering crime over the past decade, we can recall no instance in which a Valley murder victim did not know his or her assailant. In our view, crime stats for our region don’t support the need to be fearful to the point of arming oneself over the worry that some unknown intruder will enter your house and cause you or your family harm. Statistically speaking, you’d do more to increase your safety by keeping a gun handy when interacting with your spouse.

So why the paranoia? Part of this, of course, is our fault. One of the criteria that makes something newsworthy is that it is out of the ordinary. So the few times we can recall when a stranger robbed another stranger at gunpoint — all of them were convenience store or grocery store robberies — we treat it as news and likely print it on our front page.

Also, it’s news when .018 percent of Mat-Su residents are killed each year but not news when 99.982 percent of our neighbors make it through the year without being murdered.

That reminds us of the story of a friend’s young son who used to present the news of his broken toys to his mother in reverse news fashion: “But mom, look at all the toys I didn’t break.” Said another way, just the act of reporting a murder draws the public’s focus.

Also there’s more crime news now. What crime we don’t report is often reported on several social media sites that gather specific Mat-Su Valley news. More awareness of crime also tends to increase the perception that the Valley is crime-ridden and dangerous.

We are fortunate to meet Valley residents and make new friends as we cover the news here week to week. From those experiences, we can report that we are still a place where good folks far outnumber the bad.