School Safety By the Numbers

dcogcadmin | August 31, 2009

Using records provided by the Metropolitan Police Department, a new report from the Lexington Institute and the Heritage Foundation takes a look at crime in D.C.

Using records provided by the Metropolitan Police Department, a new report from the Lexington Institute and the Heritage Foundation takes a look at crime in D.C. public, private and charter schools.  The report argues that more information about the safety of their children’s schools would assist parents in making decisions about where to send their children.  The full report can be found here, and Jonetta Rose Barras comments on the report in the Examiner here.  The report’s authors submitted Freedom of Information requests to MPD in November of 2008, seeking records related to crime in schools.  In April 2009, MPD provided records regarding 911 calls and other emergencies that had been reported in District schools.  The report’s authors caution about potentially misleading statistics due to the imperfect correlation between 911 calls and actual incidents, but use the data in an effort to assess the relative safety of different school settings across the District.