Analysis Of Neighborhood Police Activity

The first chart below shows the total number of police calls in my neighborhood as well as the total number of police calls throughout the entire city for each month beginning in June of 2007. Because my neighborhood comprises 0.07% of the geographic area of Fort Wayne, I multiplied the total city calls by 0.0007 to arrive at the number of calls experienced by an average Fort Wayne neighborhood of my size. By taking the first column and dividing by the third column, I then arrived at the ratio of what my neighborhood experienced compared to what the average neighborhood experienced for that month.

Per this chart, you can see that during the past two and a half years, even during the calmest of times, my neighborhood still experienced four times as much police activity as the average neighborhood did. The chaos peaked in May of 2008 when there were 114 calls in my neighborhood. This was nearly eleven times as much police activity as was experienced by other Fort Wayne neighborhoods that month. It should be noted here that I feel there is a very strong positive correlation between the amount of police activity and the amount of criminal activity in an area.

Now, even though these numbers were taken directly from the Fort Wayne Police Department’s on-line activity log, I have been accused in the past of manipulating the information to suit my own purposes. Therefore, I have broken down the callls into categories of activity so one may better understand what is going on here. I have only done this for my neighborhood, not for the entire city.

WEAPONS
Includes Shootings, Shots fired, Party armed, and Cutting/Stabbing. These are the types of activities which would normally cause a person to call 911 and perhaps to fear for their own personal safety. I can assure you that what is reported in this category is far less than what this neighborhood actually experiences.

VIOLENCE
Includes Vandalism, Man down and Fights. I separated these out because the absence of a known deadly weapon usually makes them far less problematic.

ROBBERY
Includes Burglary, Theft, Armed robbery, Strong arm, Stolen Vehicle(*).

* The recover of stolen vehicles is given the same signal code as vehicles being stolen. I did not attempt to factor out the recoveries, so this category is a bit inflated.

NARCOTICS
Pretty self-explanatory. I can assure you that this category is also extremely underreported.

SUSPICIOUS PERSON/ACTIVITY
A lot of police will tell you this is little more than people getting spooked by the wind. Whether that misstatements is out of ignorance, stupidity, or sheer malice depends, I suppose, upon the individual officer making that claim. What I do know is that when I have called the police to report what I was certain was narcotics activity, it usually shows up as a suspicious person call rather than a narcotics investigation. I know this to be true from many of my neighbors as well.

TRAFFIC STOP
It’s hard to generalize about this category without having detailed information about the individual cases. One could make an argument that increased traffic violations is an indicator of greater general criminal activity in the area. But since this is the only category (I believe) which is instigated almost entirely from officers rather than from public calls to the department, it could also be argued that this category is an indicator of police vigilance in the area. It should also be noted that many of the traffic stops I have witnessed are obviously narcotics investigations, but do not appear as such on the activity log.

911 HANG-UP
I actually had one officer tell me this was “Probably just kids messing around.” This officer gave the same reason when a drug dealer once threw a rock through my living room window. I suppose that’s probably the way they classified my house being fire-bombed as well. Needless to say, I find this explanation highly dubious. While many of the persons making noise in this neighborhood are actually very young, these “kids” shoot and kill people, and I don’t consider that “just messing around.”

I believe that most of the 911 hang-ups are desperate pleas for help. They come from people who either don’t know how to properly explain the situation, fear retaliation for their call, or simply realize that the most efficient way to tell a department as dysfunctional as FWPD that they need an immediate police presence in the area is to simply call and hang up. If they talk to the operator, they will likely be belittled and ignored. I believe that the police are required by law to dispatch an officer to the location of a 911 hang-up call.

So, whether you look at the broad overview, or examine the details, one thing is clear. When I started this blog in February of 2008, my neighborhood had already been overwhelmed by criminal activity for quite a long time. And shortly after I started blogging here, things completely exploded. My original plan was to just retell the stories from the past ten years in a calm, orderly and rational manner. But the chaos of this neighborhood is infectious.

For those who saw my comments slowly change from the non-belligerent “And there will also be what I feel is the occasional improper response to this problem by the FWPD” on my original post to eventually accusing Chief York and most of his Command Staff of being lying and cowardly fools, you must have thought you were witnessing a man losing his sanity. That very well may have been the case, and if you look at the numbers from the summer of 2008 you can see why.

But things have calmed down now. Judging by the activity log as well as my own personal experience, things are far quieter in my neighborhood than at any time in the past fourteen years. I’m not quite ready to stand down completely yet. But I’m slowly coming to my senses and trying to recalibrate my mind to deal with a situation which does not require me to look out my window 24/7 or to write down the name of every person standing on the corner or the name and number of every officer who passes by my house.

Click here to see complete activity logs for my neighborhood.

Click here to see the location of my neighborhood.

Click here to see a list of FWPD signal codes.