Peace of Mind in Los Altos Hills

 An article came out in this week's Town Crier headlined "Peace of Mind comes at a price as residents pay for private security." It is a subtle headline, but a good one -- it points out right at the top that "peace of mind" is all the residents of Los Altos Hills are getting.

Essentially, the article is telling the story of how a group of about 85 residents each ponied up $990 (on average) to hire a private security firm to drive around town.

It is undeniable that the private security gave those people "peace of mind." They certainly felt safer. But were they safer? 

Of course, the authorities pull out the usual combination of "crime just keeps rising" and "obviously this will help." If there is anything this blog is about, it's to ask "Really?" every time we hear those phrases. So let's look at the claims in the article, and see what the data says.

Claim #1: There were 48 burglaries in Los Altos Hills between January 1, 2023, and September 28th, 2023.

Unfortunately, this number is presented without any context in the article. It's attributed to a presentation at the September 28th LAH City Council meeting, probably from the citizens' group who hired the private security, although it's not clear. Is that a high number? A low number? How does it compare to last year, or to other nearby cities this year? Is it supposed to be Big and Scary?

Here's what the CityProtect data has to say, through October 1, 2023. 48 burglaries is pretty close to the 41 in the dataset, considering it's for 10 months; and even closer if you include some of the other categories. But it's not particularly alarming. It's not much different than previous years, except for the Covid dip.

incidentType	BURGLARY (460)	STOLEN VEHICLE	THEFT	VEHICLE BURGLARY
year
2017	13	1	33	6
2018	28	5	17	3
2019	41	2	34	9
2020	30	2	36	13
2021	20	6	38	7
2022	49	2	38	1
2023 (through Sep)	41	5	18	1

Look at Theft! If we scale that 18 number up to the full year, we get 21.6, which is a 43% drop in Theft! Hooray, crime is down! Ahhhh, but you all are too crafty to fall for that. As we've learned before, never draw conclusions from a single period-over-period change.

We recently looked at property crime trends by city and through 2022 there was no reason to think that property crime in Los Altos Hills was going up. I went and pulled the most recent data in particular for Los Altos Hills:

The green line is the monthly count of incidents with parent type of "Breaking & Entering", "Property Crime", "Theft of Vehicle", "Theft from Vehicle", or "Theft". The blue line is a 6-month rolling average; that is, each month's point is the average of it plus the preceding 5 months. This tends to smooth out some of the noise.

Even with the smoothing, we see that the incident rate is up and down, but overall, things are not substantially different than they were back in 2018. Property crime in Los Altos Hills is not rising.

Claim #2: Genesis Private Security was employed to patrol between April 19th and August 27th.

There's not really any reason to doubt that claim -- the interesting question is whether it made any difference. If we mark on the chart the time when Woodside Patrol was on the beat, we can look to see if there was any change before or after.

The blue vertical lines mark the beginning and end of the Genesis patrols. I don't see any clear impact there, one way or the other.

Claim #3: “Efficiency is hard to measure when the goal is to deter crime and provide residents peace of mind.”

This statement is half true, and half spectacularly false. The true part: it's hard to measure "peace of mind." If it makes people feel safer, then it makes them feel safer. If that's worth paying money for, then great.

But the first half is just dead wrong. Efficiency is not at all hard to measure when the goal is to deter crime: after instituting a policy, we should see crime go down. Some folks try to say that "you can't measure what didn't happen" -- the prevented crimes are never seen, so how do you know?

If that were true, it would be impossible to say that seat belts save lives. After all, those traffic deaths didn't happen, so how could we possibly know?

In fact, we can compare LAH crime in two different ways: by comparing times before the patrols, and during the patrols; and by comparing different cities at the same time, LAH with the patrols and, let's say, Los Altos without. There are plenty of ways of measuring the efficiencies of measures taken to reduce crime. We simply look and see if crime went down.

Finally:

The LAH City Manager says: 

 “The Town is well aware of the rising crime problem affecting our Town, the region, and the state,” Pirnejad said. “The council has taken swift and effective measures in trying to combat the issue locally."

As we have seen, there is no "rising crime problem" in the state, in our region, and in Los Altos Hills. That statement just isn't true.

And the measures may have been taken quickly, but there is no evidence that they are effective in doing anything tangible -- only in increasing peace of mind.