Did Glyndwr Uni Get Unfair Pasting on Violent Crime?

This morning the Daily Post ran with a headline “Wrexham is worst university town for violent crime says survey” however the above picture shows one third of the area covered by the data and shows other crimes that skew the datasource.

The data covers crimes committed ‘within wards or electoral divisions of which parts are within 3 miles of the main campus’ so in terms of Glyndwr’s Mold Road campus, which by our rudimentary google-maps-scale-and-conversion-on-a-ruler gives a radius that pretty much covers the entire town. To the east such a scale would read as far as the edge of the industrial estate, to the west it would also cover Brymbo, Coedpoeth and Gwersyllt.

Due to this we are unsure how relevant such a dataset is to a student living in halls on the Glyndwr site.

The crime rate data used is publicly viewable on the Police.uk site, and the Complete University Guide does state “official data for crimes affecting students are not available“. Due to this they “selected three crimes as most relevant to students, namely burglary, robbery and violent crime. The ranking is based on the cumulative rate of all three crimes.”

This means that they believe students are not likley to be affected by anti social behaviour, vehicle crime , public disorder, shoplifting, criminal damage and arson, other theft, drugs and ‘other crime’.

We have taken the time to trawl back using the police data (all of it not just selected stuff like the survey used) to see how many crimes are actually mentioned as defined as being at the university , with a separate stat available for the playing fields nearby.

April 2012 – 0
March 2012 – 6 (5 ‘criminal damage and arson’ , 1 ‘anti-social’)
February 2012 – 4 (1 burglary, 1 violent crime, 1 public disorder, 1 other theft)
January 2012 – 1 (robbery)
December 2011 – 1 (anti social behaviour)
November 2011 – 0
October 2011 – 0
September 2011 – 0
August 2011 – 0
July 2011 – 0
June 2011 – 0
Total – 11 crimes.

The police data is geographically anonymised to ensure that specific addresses cannot be identified so its hard to pin point exact areas.

Further still the police site allows the public to see what happened, so in the case of the ‘violent crime’ in March 2012 the offender was given community sentence. This indicates the crime was not a high order violent crime.

The Complete University Guide mentions that crime data is “clearly a matter of considerable concern when considering where to study as an undergraduate” , however it seems the context and accuracy of that data is of use as well.

Do you think its unfair criticism?
Do think it uncovers a wider crime issue in town?
Click here to have the debate with fellow wrexhamites on our forums in this thread.