With a recent murder downtown and the summer crackdown on crime in the business district, it's easy to get the idea that Brattleboro is a town beseiged by lawlessness. In fact, if anything, crime reports are down in many categories over the last 5 years, compared to higher numbers reported earlier this decade. How do I know? I consulted Vermont Crime On-Line, a publicly accessibly database of crime reports from law enforcement agencies throughout Vermont, including state and local police.

At Vermont Crime On-Line, I learned that the most frequently reported crime in Brattleboro is Destruction of Property and Vandalism — but that reports were down last year from a high of 277 incidents in 2006 to only 159 last year. Other popular categories include larceny of all kinds such as theft from and of motor vehicles, theft from buildings, shoplifting, and the like. Breaking and entering was less widespread (thankfully) with only 65 incidents last year.

For the big ticket items like murder and rape, the town seems to be doing pretty well. Until this year, there hadn't been a murder since 2002. Forcible rape is lower now than it was 6 years ago in 2003 when we had 12 rapes in town. The rape numbers since 2005 have been under 5 a year, or 3, 1, 4, and 2 respectively for 2005 through 2008. Aggravated and simple assault have totaled between 80 and 96 complaints annually the last four years.

For whatever reason, the numbers of drug and narcotic charges were down in 2008 from another 2006 high of 179 to a mere 101 last year. It would be interesting to see the DUI numbers for the last decade as well, but for some reason, they aren't listed in the Vermont Crime On-Line database.

Our least frequently reported crimes include prostitution, assorted sodomies, extortion and blackmail, gambling, and theft from coin-operated machines. There were 1 or less such crimes in Brattleboro in each of the last 5 years.

When you look at the total crimes reported over the last decade, last year was the lowest at 676 while 2006 had the most at 938 crimes (2006 posted highs in a number of crime categories).

So do these numbers make us a dangerous, crime-ridden town or are we just normal, and possibly improving? Doing a quick comparison with Rutland and Burlington, which is something you can do with Vermont Crime On-Line, I learned that for the most part, Brattleboro's incidence of crime was well below that of Rutland City and Burlington, even when you factor in population. For instance, using year 2000 Census figures, you can discern that Rutland City (population 17,292) is 1.44 times larger than Brattleboro while Burlington (population 38,889) is 3.24 times larger. But when you look at our reported crime last year, the numbers in Rutland and Burlington are higher than you'd expect if you simply took our numbers and multiplied them by the correct factor for the town to be compared.

Using forcible rape as an example, Brattleboro had 2 incidents in 2008 while Rutland City had 8 and Burlington had 18. Using the population factor above, you would have expected Rutland City to have about 3 rapes, not 8. Meanwhile, going on population alone and using Brattleboro as the benchmark, you might have expected Burlington to have about 7 rapes but it had 18.

Let's assume rape numbers are skewed by the fact that Burlington is a college town and look at murder instead. In 2008, Brattleboro had no murders while Rutland City and Burlington had one apiece and the state overall had 18. Or we could look at the incidence of aggravated assault. In 2008, Brattleboro had 19 incidents of assault with some kind of weapon. Doing the population math again, Rutland is about where you'd expect at 25 cases but Burlington had 101, five times Brattleboro levels, not three times as you'd expect from the population differential.

Going back five years, I calculated the crime differentials in all categories and found no year where either Rutland City or Burlington had lower population-adjusted numbers than Brattleboro. On the contrary, Brattleboro averaged about 30% fewer crimes per capita than either of the two towns I used for comparison. If you look at just violent crimes, Rutland City averaged 25.5% more per year while Burlington has been reporting an average of 41% more with one year as high as 72%.

I mentioned above that drug and narcotics crimes were down in 2008. In fact, drug and narcotics crime has been the one category to defy the trend of lower crime rates in Brattleboro. In this category, Brattleboro has had significantly higher numbers per capita than either Rutland City or Burlington — in all but one of the last five years. The anomalous year was last year, 2008, during which Rutland and Burlington both beat estimates while Brattleboro's drug crime dropped to a five year low of 101. For the entire five year period I looked at, Rutland City averaged 17% less drug and narcotic crime while Burlington reported 21% fewer such crimes.

Just to make sure my analysis wasn't totally whack, I contacted the Brattleboro Police Department to see what they thought. Virginia Yager cautioned against putting too much stock in statistics, saying that "they can be shown to favor pretty much any viewpoint." In addition, she said, it was important to consider the type of municipality being compared.

Said Yager in an email, a "difference among Brattleboro, Rutland and Burlington is the TYPE of municipality you're talking about.  Both other locations have business areas that are widely spread out, likewise more abandoned factory/business areas (where a lot of building vandalisms occur).  Increase the square mileage and  you'll also increase certain types of crime.  Brattleboro's 'problem' areas are pretty close together and fairly visible to police and the public, so we tend to see/hear about things pretty quickly."

Yager agreed that 2008 was a lower crime year in Brattleboro, but said she could not be certain as to why.

So that's the story on local crime, as best I can discern. Brattleboro has had one high profile crime this year and a lot of petty crime, as we do most years. But not only has our crime rate been dropping slightly, we continue to have significantly less crime per capita than Burlington and even Rutland City, at least according to Vermont crime statistics. In short, Brattleboro is probably closer to what we thought it was — a small town with relatively little crime over and above the background hum of what's normal for our size population.

If you're interested in studying crime statistics yourself, you can. Just visit the Vermont Crime On-Line website (a service of the Vermont Department of Public Safety) where you can generate any number of interesting tables, charts, maps, and reports showing whatever crime data you want to see and comparing towns, counties, years, and a variety of other elements. It's free and open to the public — just make sure you take the tutorial or you'll never figure it out.

Meanwhile it's reassuring to know that Brattleboro isn't so lawless after all. If you need even more reassurance (or just enjoy grisly statistics), check out this crime map for Baltimore, MD, and remember, you could live there....

Feel free to contact me at info@iBrattleboro.com if you'd like a copy of the spreadsheets I used.