Monday morning, I blogged about the success of a project to reduce residential burglaries through sliding glass doors at apartment buildings. I noted that only three of these had occurred during December. So what happens? Four more, of course.
Reporter Nancy Hicks called me on Christmas Eve, and jokingly asked me if I'd have any news for her on Christmas. Like me, she works on Christmas, and she's always the one calling me that night trying to find something for the December 26th news. I told her she could always do the standard story about the stupid ways people end up in jail on Christmas. I told her that Christmas is usually quite slow, but that the events that occur just seem to stand out in contrast to the joy that should be prevailing. I spent a good deal of the morning putting some data together for her to debunk the myth that there are more domestic assaults on Christmas, in order to illustrate the point.
Micah Mertes ended up doing the story on this, which ran in this morning's Lincoln Journal Star, and included the data I worked up on the 24th (click to enlarge):
So what happened on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day this year? You guessed it. The 23 assaults topped the average of 21.8 on every other Monday and Tuesday of 2007, and the 15 of those that were domestic assaults blew the average of 9.8 out of the water.I'm beginning to wonder if this blog is the Lincoln police equivalent of the Sports Illustrated Cover Curse.
6 comments:
These two spikes are probably just a local maximum. We'll know for sure in a couple of years.
By the way, I'm grateful we didn't have something like that bizarre Omaha double homicide yesterday, because that's definitely the last crime for which we need to have a burst of incidents. If that one wasn't drug and/or alcohol-related, I'll be very surprised.
Lets not forget on Christmas day several years ago an officer was shot near 23 and Q street.
Christmas Day, 1990. Mr. Tillman is still in prison, sentenced to 28 years, and eligible for parole in 2010.
It's a safe bet that in 2010, you'll be sending a representative (or maybe even rolling there yourself) to give some input at Mr. Tillman's parole hearing. I'm stunned that a jury of his "peers" (in the idealogical sense of the word, obviously) acquitted him on the 2nd Degree Murder charge.
Correction on my last: Aquitted on the Attempted 2nd Degree Murder charge.
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