TAMPA - The city's crime statistics are still being finalized, but an early look shows that crime reported within the city limits appears to have dropped for the fifth consecutive year, police and Mayor Pam Iorio said Wednesday.
The Tampa Police Department expects to release its 2007 annual crime report toward the end of the month. However, "we're anticipating a 10 percent decrease" in the overall crime rate compared with 2006, police spokeswoman Laura McElroy said.
That would mean the crime rate in Tampa has dropped more than 40 percent since 2002, McElroy said.
Iorio mentioned the crime drop at a Wednesday luncheon meeting of the South Tampa Chamber of Commerce, saying no other cities in Florida or "any other medium-sized city across the country" has experienced a similar decrease.
"Crime is lower than when I was in high school 30 years ago," she said.
The crime rate is calculated by adding seven categories of reported offenses: murder, rape, aggravated assault, robbery, burglary, larceny and auto theft.
Annual crime statistics for Tampa in 2006 showed that crime in the city dropped 9.4 percent compared with 2005 and 36 percent compared with numbers for 2002.
McElroy on Wednesday said the police department's District 3, which covers east Tampa, downtown and Ybor City, led the other two districts in reduced crime statistics. The district worked heavily on addressing problems caused by juveniles and "fine-tuning their crime analysis," she said.
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