Is the city of St. Petersburg really safer stronger and better than it was before? According to St. Petersburg.org government services have been improving for a long time and not just in Midtown but in the entire city of St. Petersburg.
The official St. Petersburg website says that crime is down in midtown and arrests are up. Some experts would say that those two statistics coincide. Not everyone agrees that crime is down in the Midtown town area. According to Eric Atwater crime is up. He still sees murders and fights and still hears about rapes and other violence. While I was at Atwater’s I interviewed Bonnie Harven and she also told me that crime is up and she sees the same kinds of murders and violence that Eddy told me about. When I told Eric what the website said he said “that couldn’t be true.”
The city website also said that fire rescue response times also went down over the past few years but nobody could comment on whether this was true or not.
The area where the St. Petersburg website and the citizenry agree is in the area of Economic development. Most people agree that things have been going very well in the field of Economic development. All kinds of things are showing up in Midtown from the GTE Federal Credit Union to the Sweet Bay to the new Job Core and Small Business Center. Eric said “I see a lot of new shops and business here in Midtown.” Bonnie said “that just living here in this area, I don’t think crime is down.
The St. Petersburg website says that the crime numbers have been going down since the year 2001 which is the same year that Rick Baker took office. The fire rescue response numbers have also been going down since 2001.
Everybody else that I spoke to agrees with Eric and Bonnie on the crime front and the Economic development front. It seems that the citizenry agrees that the St. Petersburg is lying on its website. Now that Baker’s term is almost over it appears that Rick Baker has been playing with the numbers to make his mayoral terms look better. Is the city of St. Petersburg really capable of something like this.