Purely as an over-long-conference-call lark, I analyzed some new USPS dog attack data to come up with the top U.S. cities, per capita, in terms of dog attacks on postal delivery people. What’s up with St. Louis?
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USPS Dog Attacks Per Capita
By · May 13, 2011 · ·
Interesting question.
I think one possible explanation is related to why people own dogs in each area. Most people own dogs for the good company, but I think a percentage of owners have a dog for property protection. My theory is that in areas of higher property crime, you are more likely to find owners that raise their dogs to defend their property. Unfortunately, this probably results in more attacks against USPS workers.
St Louis, Missouri: 8547 property crimes per 100k people per year
Cleveland, Ohio: 5784 property crimes
Minneapolis, Minnesota: 5515 property crimes
Springfield, Ohio: 7334 property crimes
Orlando, Florida: 8574 property crimes
Columbus, Ohio: 6421 property crimes
Miami, Florida: 5190 property crimes
Seattle, Washington: 5488 property crimes
Milwaukee, Wisconsin: 6072 property crimes
Source: WolframAlpha, http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=property+cri…
Inputs: property crime: st louis, missouri vs springfield, ohio vs columbus, ohio vs miami, fl
Pit bulls and other "mean dogs" for "protection."
The assumption is that the rate of dog ownership is constant across the various metro regions. Perhaps the people of St. Louis own more dogs per capita?
I live in St. Louis metro area, and one thing skews all St. Louis related statistics is that our city limits do not include the suburbs like most other cities.
So, to make apples to apples, what you really need to do is compare the downtown/high density areas of all the above locations *or* add in data for St. Louis County (which is comprised of dozens of small suburb 'cities' in addition to the actual city of St. Louis) so that the 'softening' effects of the suburbs are included.
need the raw data used of this analysis. where can it be found?