Preserving Statistics
Dear Washingtonians:
I’ve engaged in a dialogue with two readers in this issue, so I’ve
demoted my comments to below their messages.
Gary Imhoff
themail@dcwatch.com
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2012 Neighborhood Profiles
Andi Joseph, ajoseph@wdcep.com
The Washington, DC Economic Partnership (WDCEP) released its highly
anticipated DC Neighborhood Profiles 2012 publication (The Profiles) on
February 22 at ICSC’s Mid-Atlantic IDEA Exchange. The Profiles, one of
the WDCEP’s most popular publications, offers a compendium of data and
insight on thirty-seven neighborhoods and major commercial corridors as
well as the Main Street programs and Retail Incentive Programs for
retailers and small businesses. Highlights of the DC Neighborhood
Profiles 2012 include a new design and layout, a new neighborhood
(Hillcrest/Skyland) area highlights and detailed 2011 demographics and
updated maps, a new overview section recapping DC’s retail market
growth in 2011m and updated Metrorail counts and walk scores.
National, regional, and local real estate professionals and retailers
use the Neighborhood Profiles to quickly and accurately obtain a better
understanding on how DC is changing, and help in identifying new
investment opportunities. This retail-friendly designed printed booklet
is complete with demographics, dynamic facts, comprehensive overviews
and key “need to know” points of interest specific to each
neighborhood in the publication.
The WDCEP collaborated with numerous DC government agencies and
neighborhood community organizations to produce the profiles. Each
profile includes an overview of the commercial district, demographic
information, map, neighborhood highlights, and contact information for
new business opportunities. The profiles are a central part of the WDCEP’s
business attraction and retention efforts, which has helped to attract
and expand national and local retailers to DC. The DC Neighborhood
Profiles 2012 publication as well as individual copies of the Profiles
can be found at the WDCEP’s office (1495 F Street, NW) or downloaded
from the WDCEP web site at http://www.wdcep.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/DCNP12.pdf.
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Some time ago, a home owning couple in the Mount Pleasant Historic
District faced the problem of expensive repairs to their clay tile roof.
They worked with the Historic Preservation Office (HPO) staff, and with
Historic Mount Pleasant, to come up with a compromise repair, “using a
combination of salvaged existing tiles on some of the more visible
areas, plus generous applications of copper cladding materials in a
carefully planned complementary manner” (quoting from the HPO report).
The HPO staff and our local historic preservationists agreed that this
met the legal historic preservation test that an alteration must be “compatible
with the character of the historic district.”
But the Historic Preservation Review Board (HPRB) said no, demanding
fully identical replacement materials, at whatever expense. According to
the historic regulations, “compatible” means only “harmonious,”
not “identical,” but the HPRB folks disregarded that definition,
insisting on “identical” repairs. This cost our homeowners roughly
$30,000 above what the HPO-approved plan would have cost. Financial
hardship? The District’s draconian preservation law allows no such
defense, not for anyone but the truly poor.
Wouldn’t it be nice if someone on the HPRB actually spoke for the
public in such cases? There are indeed several “public members” of
the board, and one might suppose that they are put there to provide some
balance, speaking for the home owning public. But no, the “public
members” are invariably selected only from the historic
preservationist community, and in fact represent only that fervently
preservationist element of the public, not the whole public. The
District’s historic preservation law states that “all appointments
to the Historic Preservation Review Board shall be made with a view
toward having its membership represent to the greatest practicable
extent the composition of the adult population of the District of
Columbia with regard to race, sex, geographic distribution and other
demographic characteristics”. It does not say that members must come
from the passionate preservationist community, but that’s what’s
always been done, and that’s what Mayor Gray has done now.
The current appointees to HPRB “public member” positions are
fervent preservationists, dedicated to furthering the goals of their
preservationist allies. Nancy Pryor Metzger, confirmed by the council on
February 10, is a prominent activist with the Capitol Hill Restoration
Society. D. Graham Davidson, nominated by the mayor on January 27, is on
the Board of Trustees of the DC Preservation League. Once on the Board,
they’ll sit in judgment on hapless members of the public, deciding
what is adequately “compatible” and what is not, at whatever cost to
the homeowner. Who speaks for the homeowner, forced to bear the costs
and live with the restrictions imposed by the preservationists? Not
these “public members” of the Board, that’s for sure.
[Jack, I’d like to know more about this situation. Is this HPRB
decision on roofing materials an isolated case, or has the HPRB recently
made a practice of imposing outrageous costs on homeowners in the cause
of unnecessarily accurate historic authenticity? If the roof can only be
seen from a passing airplane or in a satellite photograph, and if it’s
not in a neighborhood of clay-tiled roofs, the decision does seem like
overreaching. But it’s worth protecting against putting aluminum
siding on a brick townhouse in the middle of a row of historic brick
townhouses, and “fervent preservationists” are the people most
likely to see the value of saving the historic nature of the
neighborhood. — Gary Imhoff]
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Statistics Too Good to Be True
Richard Stone Rothblum, richard@rothblum.org
I started to read the article from The Post by Cheryl Thompson
[http://tinyurl.com/86nlpnz3]
and stopped reading as soon as I realized that it was just fluff. Thanks
to your comment [themail, February 19], I went back to give it a second
reading, this time all the way through. Conclusion: meaningless. Ms
Thompson, from thin air, suggests that closure rate is (crimes solved in
a (calendar) year)/(crimes committed in that same year) x 100. This
definition is not at all helpful. Ms. Thompson evidently believes that
the crimes and the solutions should all be from the same year.
For example, if ten crimes were committed between January 1 and
December 31, and those ten crimes were solved during that period, that
would result in a solution rate of 100 percent. To see how this
calculation gives a meaningless number, consider crimes committed on New
Year’s Eve. If, of the ten crimes committed in a year, nine of them
occur on New Year’s Eve, and those crimes are solved on New Year’s
Day, that would give a closure rate of 10 percent. Conversely, if the
crimes were committed on New Year’s Day, and solved by the following
New Year’s eve, that would give a closure rate of 100 percent for
virtually the same practical result. Actually, it is hard to be sure how
the statistic is defined, because Ms Thompson did not give an exact
definition in the article. She quotes Chief Lanier as saying only that
they follow the FBI’s reporting guidelines. I have a hard time
understanding why the actual formula used by the DC Police was not
reported. Instead, we got multiple interviews with people who were asked
how they felt about the results, rather than whether they were correct
or meaningful. My take is that the overall closure rate should be
defined as “(crimes solved)/(crimes committed) X 100,” regardless of
when the crimes were committed or when they were solved. That would
reflect a criminal’s (average) chance of being caught. This would be
analogous to defining the average annual deficit to the (total
debt)/(total years). It would not show very clearly how that rate was
changing with time. To show the change with time, a moving average would
be appropriate, with the “window” for crimes committed leading by an
appropriate time (before) the window for the crimes solved. Maybe this
is what is actually done. From the article, we can’t tell.
[There are arguments for calculating the statistic for murders that
are closed both ways, and that doesn’t even begin to address the
definitional question of whether a murder “closed” is the same as a
murder “solved.” The important point is that the statistic, however
it is calculated, should allow for easy comparison from year to year,
from department to department, and from crime to crime. The Metropolitan
Police Department changed its method of calculating the percentage of
murder cases that are closed so that it included murders from previous
years that are closed in a current year. That method is different from
the method that was used in past years, from the method that is used by
other police departments, and from the method that is used to calculate
closure rates for other major crimes committed in DC. That change gave
MPD a huge jump in murder closure statistics over past years, over other
police departments, and for murders over other major crimes. In other
words, the statistics should be marked with an asterisk in the record
books, especially because the methodology change wasn’t clearly
announced publicly, leading to the public to believe that the homicide
squad had suddenly taken a huge leap in performance. — Gary Imhoff]
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CLASSIFIEDS — EVENTS
Prove It on Me: New Negroes, Sex and Popular
Culture of the 1920s,
February 24
George Williams; George.Williams2@dc.gov
On Friday, February 24, Dr. Erin Chapman of George Washington
University will discuss her latest book, Prove It On Me: New Negroes,
Sex and Popular Culture in the 1920s. The book examines African
American women’s history and the aspects of the racial and sexual
politics of US popular culture. The lecture will be held at 1:00 p.m. at
the Martin Luther King, Jr., Memorial Library. For more information,
call 727-1261. A complete listing of Library events can be found online
at http://www.dclibrary.org/blackhistory
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WTOP 103.5 FM, Brookland Heartbeat newspaper, and the League of Women
Voters of the District of Columbia are sponsoring the Ward 5 candidate
debate. The debate will take place Saturday, March 3, at 3:00 p.m. at
Catholic University. Doors open at 2:30 p.m. The debate will be between
candidates running for the Ward 5 Council seat vacated by Harry Thomas,
Jr. Mark Segraves, WTOP’s lead investigative reporter, will be the
moderator.
The debate will take place in the Great Room on the second floor of
the Pryzbyla Center at Catholic University: enter from Michigan Avenue
and continue with the Basilica on your left. Past the Basilica, bear
right into the large parking lot. Plenty of parking is available. The
Pryzbyla Center is just a few steps away from the parking lot. The Ward
5 candidate debate is nonpartisan. The League of Women Voters is a
nonpartisan political organization that encourages informed and active
participation of citizens. Any United States citizen of voting age, male
or female, may become a member. The Catholic University of America is a
cosponsor of this event.
Questions? Call Abigail Padou, Editor of Brookland Heartbeat,
at 832-4038 or E-mail brooklandheartbeat@yahoo.com.
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DC Kids and Technology Meetup #2, March 3
Phil Shapiro, pshapiro@his.com
DC Kids and Technology Meetup #2, from 1:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m., March
3, Cleveland Park branch library, downstairs auditorium. Learn about the
Roblox web site, which gets kids from eight to fifteen involved in
designing and playing games. Details at http://tinyurl.com/8xrd8fl.
The presentation will be made by Yusuf Abdi, a DC-area parent whose own
children use this web site a lot (with his involvement and
encouragement).
Yusuf worked as a computer programmer for America Online for more
than ten years and also taught computer science classes at UDC. Event
co-host Phil Shapiro is an adjunct professor of education at American
University and also teaches technology at the Takoma Park Maryland
Library.
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