Oakland Ranked Fifth Most Dangerous City

Congressional Quarterly Press has issued its annual ranked list of dangerous cities. Oakland is the fifth most dangerous city in the United States.

The list is based on 2007 data for six crime categories: murder, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, and motor vehicle theft. The study compared 397 cities with 75,000 or more population.

The 391 cities below Oakland on the list are all ranked safer. For comparision with number 5 Oakland:

San Leandro ranks 117
Hayward ranks 125
Berkeley ranks 132
San Francisco ranks 102
Los Angeles ranks 158

Source: CQ Press study using 2007 data

In past years Oakland officials tried to dismiss the annual study. CQ Press's news release seems to anticipate mayor Dellums' tired excuses:

"CQ Press's annual rankings of crime in cities, states, and metropolitan areas are considered by some in the law enforcement community as controversial. The FBI, police, and many criminologists caution against rankings according to crime rates. They correctly point out that crime levels are affected by many different factors, such as population density, composition of the population (particularly the concentration of youth), climate, economic conditions, strength of local law enforcement agencies, citizen's attitudes toward crime, cultural factors, education levels, and crime reporting practices of citizens and family cohesiveness. Accordingly, crime rankings often are deemed 'simplistic' or 'incomplete.' However, this criticism is largely based on the fact that there are reasons for the differences in crime rates, not that the rates are incompatible." (Press release, Nov. 24, 2008)

The other basic statistic about Oakland public safety is that we have half the police per population that most major cities maintain.

It is obvious that the two facts are related. We agree with former councilmember Dick Spees, who says a city the size of Oakland needs 1,100 officers and must find the fiscal means to support such a police force. "We can't be divided on this," Spees said. (Montclarion, Nov. 21, 2008)

Within two hours of the above report, councilmember Jean Quan's aide emailed a neighborhood group trying to deny it. He wrote in part:

While we recognize that crime is a problem in Oakland and actively work to use both traditional and progressive ways to mitigate its impact, we feel that it is not productive to 'rank' Oakland among other cities for the sake of sensationalism.

We have recently reached several milestones in police staffing and organization this year of which we can all be proud. We now use the Area Command structure for greater geographic accountability and we have also reached 837 officers this month. We have also hired three misdemeanor prosecution attorneys to handle the quality of life issues that incessantly afflict our neighborhoods and have been difficult to prosecute using traditional means.

How do you have a conversation with persons who cannot get the most elementary facts straight?

For example, we do not have 837 police today despite Michael repeating the statement by his boss councilmember Quan, who repeats mayor Dellums. The figure includes several dozen officers recently graduated from a contracted-out academy in Santa Clara, and they are in further local training for five or six weeks to learn Oakland-specific procedures. The officer count has always been taken at the point of finishing academy training, and these officers have not done that. By the time they get onto the street, a dozen or so more veteran police will have retired or resigned.

Quan's aide admonished, "We feel that it is not productive to 'rank' Oakland among other cities for the sake of sensationalism." Some of you have reported horrible break-ins. You return from work to find your home violated, graffitied on inside walls, important computers and family jewelry missing. It is a statistical fact that some of the victims are victims because City officials cannot deliver the relative safety of an average American city. If recognizing that fact is sensationalism, so be it.