Crime doesn’t fit perceptions: Police identify some surprising city crime zones
By Amy E. Turnbull
Staff Writer
February 03, 2002
While business owners, newly annexed residents and many in the inner-city clamber for more police protection, it turns out that there may be a wide misperception about which parts of Wilmington have the most violent crime.
An analysis of major crimes reported to the Wilmington Police Department in 2001 shows that certain low-income
areas and public housing developments long considered the most violent parts of town aren't even in the top five neighborhoods.
The department is analyzing statistics from every police report filed in the city to identify "hot spots" for its Special Operations Unit.
For reporting purposes, the police list violent crime as murder, rape, aggravated assault and robbery. These are a subset of what the police and FBI call Part I crimes, which add burglary, larceny, motor vehicle theft and arson to the list.
The Maides Park area holds the
distinction of having reported more violent crime than any other Wilmington neighborhood last year.
That area, a small part of east Wilmington, reported nearly 7 percent of all violent crime in the city last year - a tremendous share for only one of the 100 reporting zones.
Perhaps surprisingly, the most Part I - or major - crimes were reported in the area around South Kerr Avenue.
Nearly 7.5 percent of the major crimes in the city - 659 incidents - were reported in the South Kerr area. That's far more reports than in the Maides Park area, which accounted for only 3.1 percent of the reported major crimes.
Running a close second in both major crime and violent crime is the heart of downtown Wilmington, which accounts for 5.5 percent of the violent crime and nearly 6 percent of the major crimes.
The downtown Wilmington and the South Kerr areas each reported 28 violent crimes - only six fewer than in the Maides Park area.
Lumping some of the tracts together also yields surprising results.
Nearly 16 percent of the city's major crimes are reported in the three-tract area along Market from Kerr Avenue to the eastern city limits at Military Cutoff. That's more than the Maides Park and downtown areas combined.
A new approach
Using hard numbers and statistics can help police sort reality from myth and determine where officers should patrol, said police spokeswoman Linda Rawley.
Where people may think major crimes occur isn't always where the police need to go.
"I think that crime is definitely also a perception problem," she said. "What we are doing is trying to find out where the criminals go to work every day."
Deputy Chief Tandy Carter said the department is trying to revolutionize police work by using numbers backed up by human intelligence to identify and solve problems. Under the new approach, special operations officers will partner with analysts, detectives, patrolmen, informants, business owners and residents to fight crime.
It's a four-step process, Chief Carter explained: "Analyzing the crime in the neighborhood, making sure you have resources, deploying the resources, then making sure you follow up to make sure (the problem) doesn't come back."
The first step has been completed, with the figures reported for last year. The second and third steps got under way Friday.
The figures will be reviewed monthly and quarterly to see if the project works, and to see if resources need to move to other areas.
"This is more of a long-term project," Chief Carter said. "We'll never be able to solve all of the crimes in those areas," but for now, "we're just going to see if it's going to work."
Officer Rawley added: "The way that we're analyzing crime ... people are going to see some real changes and differences."
And she stressed that the community is welcome to suggest improvements or changes.
Perception
Conventional misperceptions about what makes up the "bad part" of any town seems to hold in Wilmington, where people are apt to point to public housing, low-income neighborhoods and non-white concentrations.
The Rev. John Fredlaw, head of the NAACP branch in New Hanover County, lives near 11th and Orange streets in an area known as The Bottom.
"I don't think it's the most dangerous place to live, but I think danger lurks around that area. Crime is everywhere," he said.
Rev. Fredlaw said he would have considered his neighborhood one of Wilmington's worst for crime, and has talked himself nearly hoarse to have the police presence stepped up in that area.
"I've asked for police and support in cleaning up the drugs," Rev. Fredlaw said. "We have a school on the other end - what's it going to take? One of those little children getting killed?"
Drug dealers, he said, "act like they own (The Bottom) - and they don't even live there."
But none of the tracts in The Bottom made it into the Top 10 for major crimes.
That may be due, in part, to the fact that federal statistical rules do not group drug offenses with major crimes, Officer Rawley explained.
"I seriously think that in analyzing crime, that by not putting (drug) crimes as Part 1 offenses . we may not always be getting a true picture of our community," she said.
What may further skew the results in areas like The Bottom is that not every incident warrants a report. In many cases, people call after they see a drug deal on a street corner, but they do not provide enough detail for police to search, much less arrest, possible offenders. Since not everyone standing on a street corner is dealing drugs, all police can do is try to break up the group and move them from that particular corner. In such instances, no crime is reported and no report numbers are generated.
Norma Crummy said she has never seen crime in her neighborhood. She lives at the intersection of two major throughways in the South Kerr area - the city's second-most violent area and top major crime scene.
"If there is crime here in our neighborhood, I don't know anything about it," she said. "I never had any trouble."
Ms. Crummy has lived on South Kerr for 44 years and said the only police she sees in the area are those working car accidents.
After being told what the police see in her neighborhood, Ms. Crummy said, "You know what? Nothing is surprising now in Wilmington - you know, things can happen under your nose and you don't know what's happening. I must say this is new to me."
John Sloan, who owns the Precision Tune shop located a block down College from the South Kerr tract, said he hasn't heard of much crime in the area either.
Vandalism, stolen bicycles - that's about it in his 10 to 12 years in that location, he said.
The police statistical report, he said "just makes me more aware of what's going on around me that I don't see."
Graduate student Junius Hammer lives in an apartment on Tulane Drive, deep in the South Kerr neighborhood. In his nine years there, he has seen the hubbub from bank robberies on College Road, but the statistics don't square with his perceptions of where crime happens.
"I would have thought that it would have been down on Dawson and Wooster - where Jervay was," he said. "That is the area of town that I would have thought."
Reality
Cecil Willis, chairman of UNCW's Department of Sociology and Criminal Justice, said that while perception may link crime and poverty, crime is more closely linked to opportunity.
In the South Kerr area, a concentration of apartments and short-term residents, coupled with traffic and businesses, make the tract ripe for crime. There are escape routes and ways to slip into the crowd.
"Unusual behavior is more likely to be observed," Dr. Willis said, in quiet suburban neighborhoods. In busy areas like South Kerr and College Road, "You don't know who the stranger is."
Joe Guarascio, for one, isn't surprised that Wilmington Housing Authority properties aren't on the "hot spots" list. He has been the WHA's crime prevention director since November.
"I'm not necessarily surprised, but I knew that it wasn't just housing - people have a misperception of that," he said.
Mr. Guarascio said crime has dropped dramatically in the past two months, since he has started patrolling WHA properties and getting to know the residents.
He said he hopes the new numbers on the city will help clear up the idea that people have about public housing.
"I hear it from people who don't live anywhere near housing development areas - like Fox Run, Georgetown - on that side of town," Mr. Guarascio said. "Almost like they're misled. A lot of it has to do with media or rumors - it seems that they always try to target those areas as crime-ridden, but it's not that way.
"And I honestly think most people would be surprised to find how much closer it is to their area than it is to housing authority areas."
Assistant City Editor Mark Schreiner contributed to this report.
(Reprinted from StarNewsOnline.com)
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