Another city is protesting a high-crime ranking by neighborhoodscout.com. This time it’s Galveston, Tx., where a downtown shopping strip called The Strand was said to be the nation’s 25th most dangerous neighborhood, reports the Houston Chronicle. “To read this thing you’d think that if you walked 25th Street someone would come up with a beer bottle and hit you on the head,” said Mayor Joe Jaworski.
Local residents and officials argued the website’s findings are questionable. Its operator, Andrew Schiller, says he has a proprietary calculation for predicting, based on FBI crime statistics, the likelihood that a person will be the victim of a violent crime in a particular neighborhood. Te FBI does not collect neighborhood-specific calculations for crime, leaving agency and local officials confused as to how Schiller tallied crimes in a roughly 70-square-block area. Schiller would not comment. Crime in Galveston is at a 30-year low, Police Chief Charles Wiley said.