Until recently,the official story around here was that crime is down,
and that that’s a good thing. Now the story is that crime is up slightly in
Charlotte-Mecklenburg, but not to worry, they have it under control. Overall,
that’s true, but statistics can hide a lot, particularly when it comes to crime.
Since the crime stats for all of Charlotte-Mecklenburg’s Police Department divisions
are averaged together when they come up with these statistics, the rosy picture
in one area often covers up the very real fear people live with in another,
or the fact that property crime could be holding back development in yet another.
No one really talks about these disparities, but that doesn’t mean they don’t
exist.
In many cases, those disparities are stark. Women who live in the tiny 5.8
square mile Central police division, which covers most of the center city and
parts of Central Avenue, Park Road and South and East boulevards, have the highest
likelihood per capita of being raped or sexually assaulted. In fact, they are
10 times more likely to fall victim to sexual assault than those who live in
the county’s lowest-crime police division, the 62-square-mile South patrol division,
which covers the suburbs from the Sharon and Carmel Road areas down to the county’s
southern tip.
But the disparities aren’t just between urban and suburban areas. In terms of crime, the South Division, for instance, is in a league of its own. Those fortunate enough to live there are two to three times less likely to be the victim of any kind of major crime — from murder to aggravated assault to burglary and car theft — than those in any of the other 11 Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Districts in the county, including other largely white-bread suburban enclaves like the Providence and North patrol divisions.
Because the police department bases the population statistics for its 12 patrol divisions on 2000 census data, crime-per-person calculations can’t be exact, but they’re still a good indicator of the real crime picture in the areas of the county Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police patrol.
Despite the huge strides the CMPD has made in lowering violent crime in general, the overall decline in violent and property crime numbers hides the fact that the highest per capita violent crime numbers in the county can still be found in and around uptown.
Take, for instance, the Metro Division, which runs from Graham Street in a counter-clockwise arc around uptown to parts of Wilkinson Boulevard, and the North Tryon Division, which is bounded by Graham and Tryon streets and the Brookshire Freeway. These two police districts have the highest murder, aggravated assault and armed robbery rates per person in the county. To put that in perspective, one in about 60 people were victims of armed robbery in those divisions between January and November of this year, compared to only one in 600 in the South Division.
Meanwhile, police have done a bang-up job of getting a handle on violent crime in the Freedom Division, which stretches from I-85 to the county’s border and from Freedom Drive to Oakdale and Sunset roads. Murder, rape and aggravated assault are not only down, but the area once known as one of the more violent in the county now falls somewhere in the middle in terms of violent crimes per person. But property crime there is the worst in the county, and until police get ahold on it, the city will have a hard time reaching its goal of revitalizing the Freedom corridor. In the first 11 months of 2004, one in 41 people had their homes broken into, by far the highest residential burglary rate in the county. Commercial burglary was up 20 percent this year, shoplifting by 24 percent.
But that doesn’t tell the whole story, either. Most local citizens couldn’t guess which police division was the only one in which murder, rape, aggravated assault, armed robbery and burglary not only rose, but rose by more than 20 percent. Give up? It’s the county’s North Division, which stretches from I-85 and the University City area to the county’s northern tip and takes in parts of Sunset Road and Mount Holly-Huntersville Road as well as most of the sprawling suburbs in the North and Northwestern parts of the county.
The Steele Creek, Westover and Hickory Grove divisions, meanwhile, are a hodgepodge of increasing and declining crime statistics that land them in the middle of the pack in terms of safety.
The bottom line is that where you live in Mecklenburg County still has a major impact on how safe you really are. Crime numbers may look great on paper compared to a decade ago, but there are still large pockets of our county where those numbers don’t come close to matching the reality on the ground. The goal now should be to make sure those who don’t live in the South Division know what living in the new, low-crime era really feels like.
Contact Tara Servatius at tara.servatius@cln.com
This article appears in Feb 9-15, 2005.
