Here’s some food for thought. There are some statistics available concerning assaults in Waikiki and elsewhere on Oahu, and it isn’t a pretty picture.
I suggest downloading the Honolulu Police Department’s annual crime statistics for 2009, the latest year available.
The island is broken down into districts, sectors, and beats. Districts are the largest, beats the smallest areas. Maps of the districts are in a separate section of the HPD website.
Waikiki makes up District 6.
District 6 is the smallest police district on Oahu.
District 6 encompasses the Waikiki peninsula, which is approximately 1.5 square miles bordered by the Ala Wai Canal, slopes of Diamond Head, and Pacific Ocean.
Sector 1 runs from Lewers or Seaside over through Hobron Lane and to the Ala Wai. Sector 2 runs from Seaside through Kapiolani Park.
Now turn back to the annual report, which lists crimes down to the beat level.
Beat #657 reported 34 aggravated assaults and 15 robberies during 2009. This beat appears to run between Kuhio and the Ala Wai, from Kaiulani to Lewers.
Beat #658 reported 43 aggravated assaults and 18 robberies. This beat is across Kuhio Avenue, and appears to run to the ocean, also between Kaiulani and Lewers.
I haven’t had time to digest the figures, but it looks like the 43 aggravated assaults in Beat 658 are the highest of any police beat on the island, and Beat 657 is also among the highest numbers reported.
I think the category of aggravated assault includes only the more serious assaults that cause serious injury or in which a weapon was used. It does not include less serious assaults. Those numbers are not included in this HPD report, but I would expect they would fall in the same general areas.
To provide a better comparison, it would be necessary to translate these numbers into rates, that is, the numbers per some number of population. This is complicated in Waikiki because the population includes both the resident and visitor populations on any given day. I’ll leave that task for another time.
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Is it possible to calculate gun-violence incidents per capita and compare several Honolulu Districts to other cities? Would shed some light on the claims that Hawaii uses fists, not guns. NYC and DC would absolutely be worse, but I wonder about other places, like Seattle, Phoenix and Portland, for instance.
nice find! data normalization is a must here too. else it’s meaningless. here’s a broad brush start:
2010 census has a waikiki resident population of about 23,000. DBEDT lists the average daily tourist census at about 180,000 for the state. let’s assume 50% are in waikiki any given day.
then daily waikiki population is around 110,000 or so. this is for both sectors mentioned above.
There should be no surprise of the number of assault cases in the district and on beats #657 and #658. These areas encompass a concentration of night clubs and discos that have a lot of young people drinking until 4 am.
I wouldn’t be surprised at all, if the parties involved in the death of the young man from Kailua last Saturday had come from one of those night clubs. I remember the security folks at the Royal Hawaiian Shopping Center who said that the opening of Senor Frogs came with a substantial increase in problems ranging from fights to urinating in the elevator.
The area also includes the notorious The Shack that was in the news and where a number of alleged assaults took place by the security staff. So as the night clubs close up, the kids who are overly drunk and hyped up on heavily caffeinated energy drinks can let loose on each other.
My suggestion is to ban the sale, use and mixing of those energy drinks. They lead to nothing but trouble and seem to encourage driving while drunk because the caffeine makes the user think they are alert enough to function properly behind the wheel.
Keep in mind too that per square mile, there are by far more police officers, uniformed and plain-clothed, in Waikiki than anywhere else on the island
HPD has a research statistician whose job it is to figure out the crime per capita rates to aid the department in deciding how to allocate police officers. He might be of assistance to you, Ian, in your effort to determine if the number of crimes is higher than would be expected just based on the average per capita incidence island wide.
Lets shut down The Shack, Zanzibar and Black Pearl. All we have to do is face down the politically-connected owners.