Safe and sound
Frederick area ranked eighth most secure large metropolitan area in the United States by insurance agency study
Jan. 27, 2007
By JOSEPH M. DELEON News-Post Staff
jdeleon@fredericknewspost.com
FREDERICK — Mary Richeimer moved from Bethesda to Urbana more than 30 years ago to enjoy a cheaper cost of living.
Now she runs The Buyer's Best Realtors, a firm representing home buyers in Frederick and Montgomery counties.
While cost influences her clients' decisions to buy a house, most are concerned with safety.
“The first thing they always say is, ‘We want to be in a good neighborhood,' especially people who relocate,” Richeimer said. “Our job is to point them to where they can get that information.”
Fair housing laws prohibit real estate agents from recommending a neighborhood. Instead, she gives her clients the phone numbers to area police agencies. Each department keeps crime statistics that could be helpful in finding a safe place to live.
But prospective home buyers want more details than raw numbers provide. That is why Richeimer was excited to learn about a study ranking the most secure places to live in the United States.
The stretch between Frederick and Bethesda is ranked the eighth most secure large metropolitan area in the United States, according to a study commissioned by Farmers Insurance.
“From a buyer's perspective, this is the kind of information our clients want,” Richeimer said. “These people need that information to make a good, smart purchase.”
Farmers started the study in 2004 when it came up with a list of 125 secure places to live. The studies begin in the summer, ending in September, and results are released each December for the following year.
Now, the study divides communities into three groups: large metropolitan areas, midsized cities and small towns.
Database experts at Sperling's Best Places looked at 379 U.S. municipal areas to compile the rankings. Researchers considered factors such as crime, extreme weather, risk of natural disasters, environmental hazards, terrorism threats and job-loss rates.
A growing desire to increase security and identify safe places to live prompted the study, Farmers spokesman Jerry Davies said.
“It came out of 9/11 when, obviously throughout the country, cities were becoming super-aware of securing their city,” Davies said. “A lot of people wanted to make sure security equaled safety, but safety isn't about numbers.”
It is about how community officials handle emergencies and how that affects the community's perception of security.
Researchers measured how emergency responders reacted to disasters, among other things. When the study considered hazardous materials, researchers looked at how trains move through a community and the effectiveness of hazardous material clean-up plans in the event of an accidental spill.
“We looked at incidents statistically to see who was involved and how it was responded to and how it was handled for the protection of that community,” Davies said. “For example, how do people in transportation respond to severe weather; are they making it safe when it snows so when people drive to work they feel secure?”
Security and growth
Richard Griffin, director of economic development for Frederick, said businesses thinking of moving their operation to Frederick consider factors similar to those the study examined. Moving a business to a new city could also mean workers and their families might relocate.
As well as safety, Griffin said, businesses and individuals take into account quality of life when deciding where to move. That may include the cost of living, proximity to outdoor recreation, quality of schools and amenities such as a minor league baseball team.
“They take into consideration all these things,” he said. “But safety and crime statistics are certainly an important part of deciding if they will invest in a community.”
Low crime rates help make Frederick attractive. Griffin is pleased with the work city and county police are doing as Frederick grows.
Frederick Police Chief Kim C. Dine said the study was good news and gratifying to read, but he thinks it also highlights the challenges growing communities face.
As population grows, so does the need for adequate social services, sustainable employment, better education, crime prevention and aggressive prosecution of offenses.
“All those things are inextricably linked,” Dine said. “The study shows that boundaries make no difference to security — Bethesda is not an island unto itself.”
To help meet the challenges, the police department bolstered community outreach with a redesigned Web site, neighborhood advisory council meetings and more press releases. The department is considering an e-mailbased distribution of information.
“It's really important that we commit to build on an array of efforts from social services to community involvement and all the good things that are important to us,” he said. “We face increasing challenges to keep that quality of life.”
Justification and rank
While Davies would not say how much the study cost, he said it is not intended for use in marketing and would not be used to set insurance rates.
“It's not anything other than the fact that we were interested in putting out how communities operate in terms of protecting properties and responding to life-threatening situations — it's kind of the pulse of what's happening around the U.S.,” Davies said. “In terms of who Farmers does business with, it was gratifying to know that many of the areas we serve are secure.”
He thinks communities in the top 20 in each category should be proud and described the rankings as a pat on the back that show officials in those communities they are doing a good job.
Among the places that did not make it into the rankings are coastal cities from Texas to North Carolina. Davies attributes that in part to increasingly frequent and more powerful hurricanes over the past four years.
Davies, who was reared in Florida, does not consider areas that did not make it into the rankings bad places to live.
He thinks places such as Louisiana and Florida actually change for the better after disasters. For example, building codes and evacuation plans improve as officials focus on security.
“It's a matter of circumstance, unfortunate circumstance,” he said. “It's a reminder that city officials are always looking for ways to improve and make the communities more secure.”
Questions about study
Roger Erickson, president of Poolesville-based 270Tech — a nonprofit think tank — is not convinced the study will help residents. He thinks such studies are flawed.
“Half the people will say it was perfect, but the other half will complain bitterly,” he said. “The useful way to use any service like that is to invert it so that anyone with a question about how it works would be able to drill backwards.”
A recent trend in data management is called a fusion process — agencies from homeland security to local hospitals combine their records to make regional data centers.
“We can't have a data center in every community, so every community should have a fusion process so when you want to make use of this data, you can go backwards through that rabbit maze,” Erickson said.
That would allow people to discover how studies and statistics apply to them personally.
“If a group with a limited data set, like farmers, looks at what they dealt with in a prior period, it may be 10 variables out of 10,000 that would affect what happened in response to an unexpected situation,” he said.
Another problem is that such studies cannot be used to predict a trend; they simply show a snapshot in time. For example, if the survey had been conducted in August 2001, it would not have predicted the attack on the World Trade Center towers, he said.
“The only way to make an intelligent data set is to pair up your own personal data with the bigger spectrum of data from these industries,” Erickson said. “Going on just one data set alone is like throwing a dart up in the air and seeing where it lands.”