Lower crime stats welcome news
A significantly lower rate of crime is probably an ironic abstraction for somebody who has been a crime victim despite the trend. Being an unfortunate member of a smaller statistical cohort, especially in the context of serious crime, is hardly comforting.
For the rest of us it’s good news, period. Figuring out how many of us might have been crime victims before who weren’t during the last year is an abstraction, too — but those statistics represent real people and property not on police reports.
For the worst kind of crime — i.e., violent crime — the news is decidedly mixed. There were 23 murders in 2016, six more than the year before. There’s no positive spin on that grim reality. But the overall violent crime rate, which tracks rape, robbery and aggravated assault as well as homicide, was down 8 percent, according to FBI documentation.
Better still is the news that total crime in Columbus fell by a statistically significant 15 percent last year over 2015, and the overall crime rate in the city is the lowest been in more than a decade. Rape was down 22 percent and aggravated assault down 17 percent.
Personal property as well as personal safety fared better in Columbus last year, with property crime down the same 15 percent as the overall crime rate.
“It is a daily battle for our officers on the street,” Police Chief Ricky Boren told the Ledger-Enquirer, “our investigators, our criminal intelligence unit, and our neighborhood associations that continue to be a critical part of the steady progress we have made.”
That progress, we’re too often reminded, comes at the price of law enforcement safety. The job of trying to keep the rest of us safer is no less dangerous for the men and women doing it. The latest numbers suggest they’ve been doing it well.
Filling a need
Georgia has one of the nation’s lowest numbers of dentists as a percentage of the population, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. And most of the ones who are here don’t accept Medicaid. That leaves a lot of poor and disabled people without affordable access to dental care … and especially in rural Georgia, there are especially high concentrations of poor people and especially low concentrations of dentists.
Legislation that came out of the House Health and Human Services Committee earlier this week might help. House Bill 154 would allow qualified dental hygienists to provide care without a dentist having to be present. A dentist could approve up to four hygienists to provide cleanings and other basic dental care to underserved population, including residents of assisted living facilities.
Such legislation has been introduced before, and there’s a debate over whether the Georgia Dental Association supports such a measure. GDA publicly supports the bill, although one committee member said dentists doubt that it’s “a sound practice of dentistry.”
People with little or no access to any professional dental care aren’t likely to quibble.
This story was originally published February 1, 2017 at 5:06 PM with the headline "Lower crime stats welcome news."