Reported crime skyrockets at Downtown Crossing T stop
NOTE: I'd originally linked to stats on a new MBTA Transit Police site. That site is now dead and looks like they are no longer linking to stats from their old site. Feh. The information below was from the new site before it got taken down/fell apart. Channel 4 reports overall crime on the T system is down. Oy.
The latest crime stats from Transit Police show a dramatic increase in crimes at busy Downtown Crossing over last year.
As of June 30, 143 criminal incidents were reported at Downtown Crossing, compared to 61 for all of last year. Although all types of crime are up, it seems that Downtown Crossing visitors are quicker to spoil for a fight this year - there have already been 56 reported assaults, compared to just 16 for all of last year.
Comments
not a good place
Adam, that link didn't work for me.
But I'll certainly take your word on that news. It's a terrible station, featuring a truly diverse mix of surly folks, menacing folks, and impatient folks. And during rush hours, you can sense the road rage look & feel.
Overall, Downtown Crossing is both a civic embarrassment and a safety hazard. I'm still waiting for the mayoral and at-large council candidates who manage to use its deterioration into a dump as an effective campaign issue.
I browsed that page after
I browsed that page after adamg posted the link. It was a JavaScript-y page with two T maps. As you moused over each station, there was a little transient window with crime stats at the station for both the recent period and for 2008. The stats adamg mentioned for DTX were indeed there.
It was cute, and potentially useful, although the first thing you'd want is the same data in tabular form. The map view should be only to augment the tabular, for spatial or topological browsing.
A question to ask now is why the site disappeared.
Oh, fricken fracken
I should've realized it was prone to problems when I saw the domain was mbtapolice.com instead of transitpolice.us, which is their still functioning, 1999-era Web site, which used to have the crime stats but which no longer has them either.