fatvegan

January 1997 to December 2006 - Steal from motor vehicle, Sydney Statistical Division

Statistically significant Downward trend over the 120 month period. The average annual percentage change was: -3.2%

I found a brilliantly fun crime trends database that's part of the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research. Dad's car has been broken into 4 times in the last couple of years. It feels like he usually has a new window smashing story to tell most times I see him. They've all started to blur into each other.

But it made me curious to know why this keeps happening to him. We never used to have our cars robbed. My theory has always been that he should get a less fancy car. I know that mostly transfers the problem to other people, but I wouldn't mind if everyone got a less fancy car. If everyone stopped buying fancy cars and donated the money to training programs or mentoring programs or something, maybe there wouldn't be anyone around to rob their slightly less fancy cars. But I wasn't sure if it was just that. Perhaps there was a sudden epidemic of car theft all round Sydney.

Now I know. There hasn't been an epidemic. In fact things are looking rather rosy for the average car owner these days. Sadly, dad seems to be much less fortunate than the average car owner. I could probably work out how far out in the tails of the distribution he is. Must be pretty far I reckon.