Law enforcement agencies like the Worcester Police regularly report data about violent crime and property crime (collectively referred to as Part 1 Offenses) to the FBI, which compiles data from these communities and posts it to UCR.  (If you ever read a blog post in which I discuss Worcester crime statistics, I’m usually pulling the data from UCR.)

Now UCR has a convenient online data tool that allows you to compare multiple municipalities’ Part 1 offenses — and download them into easy-to-read tables.  So if you wanted to compare Worcester to Springfield, Hartford, Providence, Manchester, or other communities of similar population, you could do that with a few clicks of the mouse.

One frustration some residents have had is the dearth of information about Part 2 Offenses (which include prostitution).

To that end, I’ve come across a useful site for Massachusetts UCR data — including Part 2 Offenses.  The caveat from the site is as follows: “The public is welcome to visit with the understanding that ANY reports and statistics are preliminary, subject to change, and under no circumstances to be used as official crime or statistical report.”

Taking the caveat into account, it’s got a great search feature by town (beginning with 1980, but for Part 1 offenses only).  It’s also got information for Part 1 and Part 2 offenses by town by year or by month.

For those of you who are interested in the (unofficial) counts of prostitution/vice arrests for Worcester for the past eight years, here’s a summary of information from that website:

2003 — 190
2004 — 224
2005 — 185
2006 — 132
2007 — 214
2008 — 214
2009 — 137
2010 — 129

According to the city website, there will be a discussion on creating a Downtown Neighborhood Crime Watch on Tuesday, August 30, at 3:00 PM at the library.

Bronislaus Kush has two articles in today’s Telegram about the Albion and other problem properties.

The Albion has recently gotten its lodging house license renewed by the License Commission, and has drawn the attention of numerous government officials and media outlets.

Today’s article about the Albion says that it has 70 units and that tenants pay $400-500 a month [for a single room and shared bathroom and kitchen facilities]. By my reckoning, that means that a month of full occupancy would bring in $35,000.

The management is spending nearly a third of what comes in — $10,000 — on police details for the problem hours of 9pm-1am. They’ve got cleaning crews coming in every day.

We learned in last month’s Worcester Mag article that the company recently spent $40,000 on updating the fire alarm system. They spend at least $10,000 a year on property tax as well.

One wonders how long any owners (who bought the building last year for $605,000) could afford to keep up that kind of maintenance, on both the security and cleanliness fronts. Would there ever be a time when they would not have to spend nearly a third of their income on security of one sort or another? Have the issues with drug dealers living inside the building been addressed?

It should concern all of us that the city allowed so many code issues to continue to go on at the same time that we were announcing that we’d conquered homelessness. I hope that we continue to push for better conditions at the Albion, but that we also make sure that the owners’ efforts are ones that they can continue. It’s unclear to me how long they’ll be able to afford this kind of attention to a problem property.

The new: Worcesterlicious.

(via Twitter; Worcester Restaurant Week)

The old: City on the Move, which Woonsocket has now appropriated.

Question: should we sue Woonsocket for copyright infringement, or remind them about where we’ve moved since adopting that motto?