Commerce Street Stolen Car Story = ‘Work of Art’

By now, you may have heard that the stretch of Commerce Street near Jack’s Backyard is a dangerous place to park your car. I’m not sure how this stat sheet — which indicates Commerce is one of the likeliest places in America to have your car stolen — got on the radar of local media outlets, but it sure got a lot of attention. I became aware of it when I heard Gordon Keith of The Ticket reading a report on Channel 5′s website that was attributed to the owner of a site called East Dallas Times. Then I noticed that D Magazine‘s FrontBurner blog linked to a report on Channel 11′s website that was attributed to KRLD.

Here’s the biggest red flag. Scroll down to the bottom of the stat sheet, a.k.a. a NeighborhoodScout report, and you’ll find this disclaimer.

Although we work hard to provide premium quality information, the content contained in any NeighborhoodScout Report is a work of art.

A work of art? Really? After reading that, I’m not sure this whole thing hasn’t been made up.

Here’s another problem: Location, location, location. The stat sheet doesn’t indicate the exact boundaries of the area. It just says “W Commerce St, Dallas, TX 75212″ at the top. KRLD took that to mean “down the street from the Dallas County Jail and Criminal Courts complex.” The guy from East Dallas Times interpreted it as “the stretch of West Commerce Street roughly between the point at which it changes names to Fort Worth Avenue and North Beckley Avenue.”

If you take a close look at the stat sheet, you’ll notice that it falls under the fifth tab of a five-tab report. Click on the first tab, marked “Overview,” and you’ll be taken to a map with clearly defined boundaries. These statistics supposedly apply to a census tract bordered by Hampton Road on the east, I-30 on the south, Westmoreland Road on the west, and Singleton Boulevard on the north, with a little northern extension around Fish Trap Lake. That tract is 1.5 miles west of where Commerce becomes Fort Worth Avenue, and a full 2 miles from the jail.

Here’s another issue: When are we talking about? The stat sheet doesn’t indicate when the crimes that generated these stats happened. Are these 2010 numbers? Are they a reflection of crimes from the past 10 years? Who knows?

Using the incident reports available at the Dallas Police Department’s website, I researched how many auto thefts were reported in 2010 in the aforementioned Census Tract 104. There were only five within the tract, plus 11 on its fringes.

For comparison’s sake, let’s look at Census Tract 42.01, which is bounded by I-30 on the north, Sylvan Avenue on the west, Davis Street on the south, and Beckley Avenue on the east. My research shows there were 15 cars stolen in that tract last year, plus six more on its fringes.

According to the 2000 Census, Tract 104 had 926 residents and Tract 42.01 had 5,369. If you take into account the stolen cars on the tracts’ fringes, you get 3.91 thefts per 1,000 people in Tract 42.01 and 17.28 thefts per 1,000 people in Tract 104 — even though there are fewer than 1,000 people in that tract.

So, statistically, you were four times more likely to get your car stolen last year in Tract 104 than you were in Tract 42.01. But, really, what would you be doing in Tract 104, anyway? Jack’s Backyard is in Tract 43.

Oh, what’s that? You want to know the likelihood of getting your car stolen in Tract 43? That would be 10.84 thefts per 1,000 people. So it’s more dangerous than the East Kessler-Kidd Springs tract that I randomly chose for comparison purposes, but not nearly as dangerous as the West Dallas tract that started this whole discussion.