The San Diego Police Department just released its crime statistics for the Fourth of July holiday period.
At a press conference last week, Mayor Jerry Sanders said that because Independence Day falls on a Wednesday this year, the holiday period would last from Friday, June 30, all the way through Sunday, July 8.
However, a police spokeswoman just told me that because news vultures like me want the stats as soon as we can get them, the police department generally puts out a news release on July 5 detailing the crime figures up to and including Independence Day.
So here are the statistics for San Diego’s Northern Division beaches — that’s Mission Beach, Pacific Beach, La Jolla and Torrey Pines:
The department also put out a table of stats for Western Division beaches (Ocean Beach, Sunset Cliffs and Point Loma). However, that table only lists crime stats for July 4 itself in 2007, while the numbers from previous years include the full holiday period. That’s not comparing apples to apples, so it’s not really fair to compare the different years.
Misdemeanor arrests and citations were both up from last year on Northern Division beaches. But just check out those parking citations — nearly four times more this year than in 2006.
As soon as I get some comparable figures from the department for Western Division beaches, I’ll update this post.
Correction: The original version of this post, and the accompanying graph, incorrectly reported that the number of parking citations fell from last year. We regret the error.