These numbers surprised me. I’m not sure why because, until I saw this I honestly had no idea what to expect. And I’d be interested to know what you think. Higher than you thought? Lower? About what you expected?

Arrests for possession and paraphernalia are both coded as VCUSA. It took a bit of work from the public records office to tease out the distinction. That’s actually what got me wondering about this–why are they linked together?

The argument I used to have with our last Chief of Police was over statistics. Not their validity, but rather how important it was to provide them.

He was not a fan of providing this sort of information. But for me, it’s very important. And since they are not hard to prepare I never understood why we wouldn’t provide them.

One theory is that, for some people ‘safety’ is not a numbers game; it’s a sense of well-being. If you provide a table showing that there are fewer crimes of a certain type, that may be irrelevant if people don’t feel safe. In fact, it may even anger some, “Don’t tell me things aren’t as bad as all that!”

I don’t know what to do with that because Des Moines–like every City– spends every dime possible on public safety (always over 50% of our General Fund.) And you have to have some way to determine how best to spend limited resources.