A Tale of Two New Jersey Cities

Camden and Brick:

According to www.mapquest.com, they are a total of 63.35 miles apart ---just a touch under 1 hour, 26 minutes of drive time, without normal New Jersey traffic. Both are near a body of water---Camden is on the Delaware River; Brick on the Atlantic Ocean. They both have populations of about 80,000.

They are both at extreme ends of the state: Brick is in eastern New Jersey; Camden is in western New Jersey. That is where the similarities end.

Recently they both made it in to the top ten of the “City Crime Rankings” published by CQ Press, a division of Congressional Quarterly. This is a listing of the Most Dangerous and Safest cities in the country. Camden is number 5 on the Most Dangerous list and Brick is number 3 on the Safest cities list.

The criteria used for determining city rankings include FBI gathered per-capita rates for homicide, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, and automobile theft. Weight is given to each crime based on its seriousness.

Camden Mayor Gwendolyn Faison had no comment about the report. Brick Mayor Stephen Acroplois said, “You can make statistics say anything. When we got the number one ranking [in New Jersey] that was great, but I am not a big guy on statistics.”

Apparently, neither is the FBI: they posted a statement on their website criticizing the use of statistics for such “lists”. Go figure.