I figured someone would say it’s not a fair comparison. That’s why I come armed with actual hard data!
The Del Mar numbers were drawn from official records, so I am pretty sure they don’t accidently include city of San Diego numbers.
As for the contention that the numbers for Del Mar are skewed because the number of residents is low compared to the number of visitors, that argument doesn’t pan out well (see below) and one could argue that Oceanside has a community college and a harbor that draw visitors, San Marcos has two colleges that draw visitors, and Carlsbad and Escondido have huge shopping malls which draw visitors.
I consider Ramona to be east county, not north county, and that’s why I left the number out. For prop crime it was 12.54 and for violent crime it was 2.28 so it is the lowest for property crime, but not for violent crime (Solana Beach and Poway are lower).
To attempt to see if the numbers were really skewed, let’s slice it a different way and see what we get: let’s take the raw number of crimes per square mile (ie, take # of residents completely out of the picture):
Notice I’ve included Ramona and Temecula this time.
Also note that, even when measured with square miles and not residents, the groupings of cities comes out roughly the same!! Del Mar did do a little better with violent crime, but not much.
I know, someone is going to claim some of those cities contain a lot of vacant land so the numbers are skewed again, but there is no perfect measure.
And someone will probably argue that the Del Mar crimes were mostly commited by visitors not residents, but to tell you the truth if I become a victim while I’m standing in Del Mar I don’t give a rodent’s rear if it was done by a resident or a visitor! I got stung while in Del Mar!
We’ve picked two measures now and the results have come out very similar. I think the numbers tell a relatively accurate story.
