Highland City: 10-Year Crime Trends

After writing my previous post about Highland/Alpine being ranked as two the safest cities in Utah – we share the same police force and so our numbers get reported together. I wanted to look at a trend over time instead of just one year’s worth of data. Below you will find charts and graphs that show what type of specific types crimes were committed in Highland and Alpine over a 10-year period of time (2008-2017), and how we ranked within the state and nation over that time period. All data came from the FBI Uniform Crime Reporting system.

I again used two additional metrics to compare crime in general:

• Combined Crime:  II multiplied the number of violent crimes by the national ratio of property crimes to violent crimes (~6) to equalize these two types of crime.
• Cost of Crime: I used a report published in 2010 entitled “The Cost of Crime to Society: New Crime-Specific Estimates for Policy and Program Evaluation” to attach a value to the specific types of crime reported by the FBI. This creates a total cost of crime to a community. I put the relevant tables from the report at the end of this post.

Highland/Alpine Safest Cities in Utah

Earlier this year a number of articles were published indicating that Highland is the safest city in Utah. Lone Peak Police serves both Highland and Alpine so in truth Highland and Alpine are the two safest cities in Utah. The source data for these articles was the 2016 FBI National Crime Report. I wanted to see how Highland fared on a national level and so I downloaded the FBI data and looked at it from several points of view: Violent Crime, Property Crime, Combined Crime, and Cost of Crime.