PREVIOUSLY: BOOKED 2012 in Review, Part I: The 10,103-Person Overview

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Yesterday we gave you a somewhat misleading headline. That 10,000-plus figure doesn’t refer to actual discrete human beings, but the total number of arrests made in 2012 (apart from Sunday, June 26, for which we have no data — see the link above for an explanation). 

Of course, some people were arrested more than once in 2012. Some people were arrested many, many times. So let’s take a moment to look at the people rather than the raw booking logs.

As best we can tell, 5,925 discrete individuals were booked into jail last year (minus June 26). We say “as best we can tell” because all we have to go by is the person’s name. Although the record-keepers at the jail are very fastidious about recording people’s middle names in addition to their given- and surnames, it’s always possible that two separate individuals have the exact same name and are so recorded here as the same person. If such overlap is happening, it is happening extremely rarely.

10,103 arrests divided by 5,925 people arrested equals an average of about 1.7 arrests per arrestee, taken over the course of the year. But we can break it out more than that. Here’s a table that illustrates the frequency of frequent flyership:

Fifty people were arrested 10 times or more in 2012. In every case, they were held on “Drunk in Public” charges — by far the most frequent charge appended to someone’s sheet upon being booked into the Humboldt County Jail. More on this can be found in yesterday’s installment, and still more will come tomorrow’s. For now, find below a list of the 50 people arrested most often in 2012, along with a list of the agencies that arrested them and the charges they here held under.

For example: Take the first person on this list. He was arrested 42 times in 2012 — an average of once every 8.7 days. The Eureka Police Department took him in 23 times, the Arcata Police Department 18 times and the Fortuna Police Department once. He was held for Drunk in Public — Penal Code §647(f) — on 40 of those 42 trips to jail, sometimes in combination with various Eureka and Arcata municipal codes. Once he was held on Penal Code §374.3 — illegal disposal of waste material.