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(http://uafjournalism.com/)

In

, I began a discussion about getting (more) people from the suburbs to come downtown and spend their money and their time. The discussion revolving around the post, not just in the comment section here, but on Facebook, Twitter, and reddit was enlightening and (in most cases) civil and productive.

I'm going to address all of these suggestions in turn. First and foremost, though, I want to talk about the most prominent among them and how it ties into my overall theme of Birmingham's self esteem and the feedback loop of negativity that we seem to perpetuate.

Most of the responses I received involved a general fear of crime (or being the victim of crime) downtown. This has been a worry in the suburbs as long as I can remember.

And who can blame them? When ranked against other cities, Birmingham is almost always one of the top contenders for "most dangerous." I hear it all the time, from my friends and family, from acquaintances in bars and restaurants, from various people in stores and on the radio: Birmingham is very high on the list of most dangerous places to live. When you rank crime data, our beautiful little city between the hills looks like 1920s Chicago.

There's just one problem with this conclusion, you're not supposed to rank the data because it makes it statistically meaningless.

In fact, the FBI, from whom we get the crime rate data, explicitly says not to rank the data. From the FBI website, "[...] these rankings lead to simplistic and/or incomplete analyses that often create misleading perceptions adversely affecting cities and counties, along with their residents."

I understand the compulsion to rank the data. We have a need to compare our city to other cities but, quite frequently, we dumb down information to make it palatable and understandable to the masses.

As if the vast and insurmountable problem of humans hurting one another can be reduced to a few slides on a webpage with two-sentence captions and pictures of ambiguous crime scenes.

So what is our rank?

This list says we're number five.

This list says we're number eleven.

This list says we're number three.

This list says we're number six.

This list says we're number twenty-five.

This guy says we're number seven, but that's only because he referenced these people.

So who is right?

None of them

. Because

you're not supposed to rank the data.

It might give you inaccurate or wildly splayed results depending on how you cut the numbers. I've aggregated all of the evidence you need above.

Stop it.



Stop writing about it and stop quoting it because you don't make any sense and you're scaring people away.

By repeatedly publicizing and spreading flawed rankings and inaccurate statistics we are only impeding our progress by contributing to our bad name, frightening money away from the city, and supplying our inferiority complex with more fuel.

Why are people afraid of crime in the city? Because we told them to be.

Furthermore, crime statistics are a fickle beast.

If we crunch the numbers from FBI crime statistics, we see that the violent crime rate in the city of Birmingham (not from Birmingham MSA*) for 2012 was 1517.82.

This means that for every 100,000 people living in the city limits, there were 1517.82 violent crimes that occurred. That may seem like a lot, but let's consider what that number actually means; what it is capable of telling us.

Notice that this figure fails to take into account three very important factors. First of all, thousands of people come into and then leave the city every day. This parameter only includes those that actually reside within the city limits. Second, the crime number is not a count of people who were affected. Rather, it represents crimes that occurred. Multiple crimes could happen to the same people (and likely do, as we'll see in a moment). Third, and most importantly, crime rates say absolutely nothing about how likely you are to be the victim of a crime.

Criminologists call this third factor "The Random Crime Fallacy." The fallacy says that– after considering crime data – people have a tendency to hugely overestimate their risk of being a victim of a crime. This happens because we tend to assume that crime is equally likely to happen in all places all the time. This is not the case, however. Crime tends to "cluster" around very small areas and tends to happen repeatedly to relatively few people who more than likely all know one another.

If you haven't been (or aren't regularly) a victim of crime your actual risk of being a victim anywhere at any time is almost nil. This holds true whether you are in your suburban home or taking part in the vibrant reemergence of a beautiful city.

Finally, I want to note that the intention of this article is not to marginalize those affected by crime or to attack anyone in particular. On the contrary, I hope that we can now begin a discussion about how to not only lessen our crime rate, but lessen the unreasonable fear that revolves around it.

I've got a couple of ideas, but I'll shelve them until next time.

Tell me your thoughts on how best to eliminate crime in Birmingham in the comments below.

*Correction: Astute commenter Pizitz noted that I used the statistics from the Birmingham MSA (which includes Bibb, Blount, Chilton, Jefferson, St. Clair, Shelby, and Walker Counties) yet referred to the city limits of Birmingham proper. This was incorrect.

However, this does not change the validity of my argument. All points still stand.