Crime Rates

[Measuring Success – IV]

What’s the crime rate in your community? In the community of people you serve? In your clients’ neighborhood, or the surrounding four blocks of your headquarters, in the nearest apartment complex to your church?

What is the drug-related death count in your county for the last forty years? How about the last five?

Who are the drug pushers, the pimps, the traffickers, the gang leaders, the theft-ring bosses?

How much vandalism happens on your street, in your community, throughout your county?

Are we measuring for crime? Does your work, call, or ministry do the work to know the changes over time in the crime rates closest to your mission?

Success can be measured, and sometimes it’s a measurement of crime.

And even deeper . . . crime is a symptom of a deeper problem, not necessarily the problem in and of itself. Crime, in a way, is an attempt (albeit usually a destructive one) at a solution to other problems.

Are we searching for and measuring those deeper issues, too?