Last week at the Ocean Beach Town Council meeting, Community Relations Officer David Surwilo handed out some papers for viewing during his presentation about the recent crime wave in OB.
Among the papers was a map showing crimes for the month of December 2014 in the various police precincts for the Peninsula, including Ocean Beach. The over-all Peninsula service area is 610 and is broken down into 8 different precincts.
Most of OB is in precinct no. 614. Others include Sunset Cliffs in 618, La Playa 616, Midway District in 611.
The map for OB’s 614 displays 5 residential burglaries and 1 commercial burglary for December.
It also shows, for instance, a string of residential burglaries across Point Loma and Loma Portal precincts 612 and 613. And a cluster of commercial burglaries and commercial robberies are shown over in the Old Town precinct and out of the Peninsula service area.
Part of Officer Surwilo’s presentation was meant to reassure OB villagers that the police were doing all they could, but also to get folks to understand some history and context – and that crime statistics were actually in decline. This was potentially a hard sell that night as OBcean’s have experienced a recent spike in home burglaries and car break-ins.
To supplement the map, Surwilo also handed out a chart of sorts comparing the crime stats of the last two months of 2014 with a same month a year earlier, plus the averages within the service areas of the 610’s, the Peninsula.
For example, the chart – for December 2014 as the central month – showed that there were 15 residential burglaries in December, 17 during November, and 19 during December 2013, with an average of 16 for the past 12 months.
For “car prowls”, the chart states there were 31 for December 2014, 19 in November, 38 during December 2013, for an average of 31 over the year.
Here is the entire chart:
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
You can’t get more authentic maps than that top one, coffee rings and all.
In my experience, the SD Crime Statistic map is not entirely accurate. It seems like they intentionally leave out certain crimes/calls. For example, below is an OBR article about a stabbing in OB in 2012 that was not on the crime map. Check out the comment at the very bottom.
http://obrag.org/?p=66666
Dan,
Unfortunately the public website Crimemapping.com does not allow a search that far back to see if the stabbing eventually was shown on the website. The site does have its pro’s and con’s due to lag time for some reports to show up and like most things in life it is not perfect. All statistics police, auto sales or whatever someone may be searching for should be never considered absolute. They should be used as a guide or just one more resource to go by since not all crime is reported. We always do encourage citizens to report crimes either in person, over the phone or online at our public website. I will say that we do not intentionally leave out crimes and it was I who alerted the community to the residential burglaries, so I hope that shows I am not trying to hide crimes or show lower crime rates. Without true crime statistic we cannot justify adding more officers to our police force or the division so we do want citizens to report crimes. If you’re wondering how many officers we have compared to other cities please see the website I pasted below to compare San Diego with the rest of the nation.
http://www.governing.com/gov-data/safety-justice/law-enforcement-police-department-employee-totals-for-cities.html
I hope you and all OB Rag reads find this reply useful.
v/r
Officer David Surwilo
San Diego Police Department
Community Relations Officer
Western Division