I guess Walton County dodged the bullet on this one... Yet, two armed robberies recently and a new string of burglary attempts (according to this post)...
How did the "hundreds" of Spring Break Arrests last year (and probably this year), effect these Crime Stats?
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EDITORIAL: FBI stats set region a-spinning
[h=5]Published: Friday, February 13, 2015 at 04:53 PM.[/h]
Soon after online sources reported that the Crestview-Fort Walton Beach-Destin area was one of the top “metros with soaring crime rates,” local law enforcement authorities, office seekers and office holders were trying to spin the stats to their advantage.
24/7 WallSt. and The Huffington Post said numbers from the FBI pointed to a 40.2 percent rise in violent crime here over the past five years.
In Crestview, where the crime rate already is roiling City Hall politics, incumbent Mayor David Cadle said crime has been on the decline since police department corruption was cleaned up. “We’re going in the right direction,” he said.
City Councilman Tom Gordon, running against Mr. Cadle for the mayor’s job, saw it differently. “Crestview’s crime level,” he said, “makes the rest of the community look bad because it’s so high.”
You’d think the two were looking at entirely different sets of numbers.
Or maybe they were looking at the numbers Sheriff Larry Ashley was using. The sheriff said crime in Okaloosa County spiked between 2009 and 2012 but has fallen since then. He said the situation improved after he pressed the County Commission for more crime-fighting funds.
“It’s only been in the two past years that the commission has addressed our shortages and manpower and capital,” Sheriff Ashley said.
In Fort Walton Beach, Police Chief Ted Litschauer had little use for any of the crime statistics being debated. “I’ve never had high regard for Ms. Huffington or her publication,” he said.
Ms. Huffington is Arianna Huffington, the conservative-turned-liberal co-founder and editor of The Huffington Post. Chief Litschauer clearly thought numbers supplied by the FBI would become untrustworthy if cited by a left-leaning source.
More likely, sources that lean left or right would spin the numbers accordingly, just as we’ve seen officials in Okaloosa give the crime stats a vigorous variety of interpretations. The only thing for certain is that any list called “Cities Where Crime Is Soaring” is not the kind of list we want to be on.
