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Happy Tuesday! Did you know that we’re turning 2 later this week? Sometimes it feels like we’ve been writing this little blog forever, but it really hasn’t been that long at all, even in blog-years. We’ll have more on our anniversary later this week but for now I’d like to give a big thank you to everyone who comes back to read our posts every week. We appreciate your loyalty and support!
Enough sappiness for now…it’s time to catch up on some reading that you may have missed over the last week.
- DC Style is Real checked out The Argonaut (via Frozen Tropics)
- Housing Complex looked at forever-stalled Union Station transportation upgrades.
- DC Metrocentric shared some updates on the Tru Orleans construction.
- USA Today called Belga Cafe DC’s newest power lunch hot spot (via Young & Hungry)
- The Nature Conservancy interviewed Chesapeake Room’s Chef Robbie Wood about the restaurants commitment to sustainable seafood.
The front page headline in Monday’s Washington Examiner: “Violent Crimes by Teens Soar in D.C., Homicide, Rape, Assaults up 10 Percent.”
The lede says that teen arrests for “homicide, rape, and aggravated assault” have “skyrocketed.” Really?
Not really. Accompanying the story is a chart comparing teen crimes through May 7, 2010, vs. May 7, 2011, that tells a different story.
Homicide arrests are the same, 6 and 6. Percentage change, zero.
Aggravated assault arrests have gone down, from 42 to 38, a 9.5% decrease.
Rapes have increased, to 10 from 1, a whopping 900% — though here one is dealing with what statisticians call the tyranny of small numbers. The sample is so small we don’t know if it’s an outlier or a trend. In any event, since the numbers represent arrests, it means the police are arresting more suspected rapists, which is good.
Other teen arrests for other crimes (e.g., theft, burglary) are up in 2011, but again, is this because there’s more crime or more arrests, or both. The Examiner isn’t saying.
Dan
Turns out, DC List has an even better, more detailed analysis of the Examiner’s alarmist teen-crime story:
http://dcist.com/2011/05/dcist_mythbusting_the_kids_are_alri.php
Dan