Okay, I’m not interested in the big retailers because they made a lot of noise lying (yes, lying) about big increases in national theft rates. This could easily be part of the same narrative that they’ve been using to shutter stores without scaring the shit out of shareholders.
I will listen to small businesses. So, the next thing we need to know is we need burglary statistics from other big cities in the pacific region outside of Oregon to determine if the increase is statistically significant or if it’s just noise. 19 other cities is the minimum of what we need. I think the FBI has publicly available crime data in a machine readable format, I’ll see if I can’t run it down. If we get a P-value < 0.05, there’s less than a 5% chance that the null hypothesis (Oregon’s property crime isn’t meaningfully different from the nation) is true. If I have the time to do it, I’ll get back to everyone with what I’ve found.