The good news is Douglas is not listed as one of the state’s ten most dangerous cities to live in a study published this week. The bad news is we’re the 15th.
National research firm ValuePenguin published its findings this week, naming Georgia’s safest and most not-so-safe cities.
Describing the methodology used in forming its report, ValuePenguin stated, “We sourced our data from 2013 FBI crime statistics by city, which provides the most recent data available. The raw data report included violent crimes (murder/manslaughter, forcible rape, robbery, and aggravated assault) and property crimes (burglary, larceny-theft, motor vehicle theft, and arson) from all law enforcement agencies that participate in the FBI Uniform Crime Reporting program. We standardized the data to reflect violent and property crimes per 100k, to account for population. We then aggregated a ‘crime score’. In order to calculate this, we weighted violent crime at 90% and property crime at 10%; though property crime is far more prevalent, we believe that the violent crime data points are more relevant when calculating the relative safety of these cities. From there we calculated the logarithm of each towns population and multiplied it by the original (non-log) crime score. We then ranked the cities relative to each other based on their crime scores. Additionally, we only looked at cities/towns in Georgia that had populations larger than 5,000.”
Similar reports have been published over the last several months by other companies using the FBI’s 2013 crime statistics as a basis. In at least two of those, Douglas was named in the top ten ‘most dangerous cities’ category.
To read the entire ValuePenguin article, click here.
