Theft in West Campus

As a fellow Longhorn, I know word on the street says Austin, TX has a low crime rate for a city its size of about 1 million people. This website has the highest theft rates of various neighborhoods throughout the US according to statistics. Before living in Austin, I use to reside in Albuquerque, NM and the Duke City is thought to have a high crime rate for its 1/2 million residents. It turns out that none of the neighborhoods in Albuquerque made the list while Austin's West Campus west of the University of Texas was #6 on the list with the odds of being a property crime victim being 1 in 2!

Digging further into statistics, this website compiles FBI statistics and the two cities rank the same overall for property and violent crime. This is the way statistics work. Changing the bounds or limits of the included numbers within the calculations results in varying results. If these kinds of numbers put into manipulative hands, anything could be supported or not leading to what the population at large believes. What is more important though is public perception. I was told in Albuquerque that it was a really dangerous city and the opposite in Austin. This distorted my view of reality. As Mark Twain made famous, there are "lies, damn lies and statistics."