2007 City Crime Rankings Released

And Oakland moves down a slot, to number five on the list!

Doubtlessly, this news will result in the same litany of excuses from the Mayor and Police Chief that we heard last year about how the rankings (PDF) aren’t accurate and besides, most of the good citizens of Oakland can rest easy at night, safe and sound, because crime isn’t a problem in their neighborhood. Remember this gem from last year: Read more

Jean Quan and elementary math

My little sister has this, like, handheld video game thing. It’s like a game boy except that it’s sleek and has a color, not sepia-tone screen, also, the screen is much bigger than on a game boy. In fact, there are two screens, and they both respond to touch. Also, it recognizes voice. So I guess it isn’t actually that much like a game boy after all. Anyway. She will sit on the couch for hours and hours playing this totally inane “game” that’s supposed to help prevent Alzheimers or something. Why she can’t just read a book or pick up a crossword puzzle, I couldn’t say. Wev, I spend my free time watching DVDs of months-old City Council and Planning Commission meetings (you should see my collection!), so I’m hardly in a position to judge. Read more

Oakland Crime Stats Update

We haven’t heard much lately about crime in Oakland. Maybe it’s because people were distracted with elections or the economy or the budget or who knows what else. Maybe it’s because people lost interest once the spate of restaurant robberies subsided. In any case, I figure it’s about time to check in. So here you go, Oakland crime numbers, 2007 and 2008, as of November 4th. Read more

Falling housing prices in Oakland and elsewhere

So the current San Francisco Business Times has an article about how it’s rough times for developers in Oakland, in which we learn that resale condo prices have dropped 12% since last year, from an average price of $475,614 per unit to $418,901 per unit. One blogger at Curbed SF appears to think that this crisis is a result of overbuilding in downtown under the Brown era. Reading the story, my immediate thought was that it didn’t seem like 12% was really all that bad, given the current state of the housing market. So it got me wondering, what kind of drop in price did single family homes see over the same period?

So I started looking at the market profiles over at Altos Research, where I learned that the median price of a single family home in Oakland is $290,925. As for the decline in that price since last year, well, it’s a whole hell of a lot more than 12%: Read more

Don’t believe your eyes

As Oakland residents grow more and more frustrated with the inept management of this town and fear more and more for their safety as they wake up every morning to headlines about shootouts and restaurant robberies and little kids being hit by stray bullets and the Mayor being desperate enough to ask for the help of the guardian angels, our leaders, thankfully, are stepping up to the plate and offering reassurances. The Mayor, at last night’s Silence the Violence Day at the Coliseum, said not to worry, things just aren’t that bad:

Mayor Ron Dellums said Wednesday there’s a perception that crime is on the rise in his city, but it’s not the reality.

The attitude is hardly limited to the Mayor’s office. Jean Quan staffer Sue Piper, in response to a post about local crime statistics, informed readers of one local listserv:

A word of caution about the crime stats– one needs too look a little deeper. One reason the crime stats are high is a significant increase in the reporting of domestic crime. The City has made a concerted effort to provide support systems and coordination to encourage victims of domestic crime– especially sexually exploited minors– to report to the police. And if you compare this past year to previous years, you will see that homicides are actually less.

On the other hand, burglaries, especially auto burglaries, are up.

So…which is it? Perception? Reality? Shall we take a look? Below, you’ll find year to date comparisons of reported Part 1 crimes in Oakland.

And by the way, if you, like Jean Quan, want to discount the reported domestic crimes from the numbers, since, as she’s constantly telling us, they’re being reported more, not actually happening more, feel free to subtract those figures from the aggravated assault totals. Year to date 2007, 317 of those 2184 aggravated assaults were domestic problems. This year, 326 out of 2455 were.

Vivek B: Long term crime tracking by area and beat

Hi there. My name is Vivek B, and as I’m writing this guest post since VS is taking the week off but we still need our fix. First, a quick few sentences about who I am. I’m just a regular citizen who works in a totally unrelated field, and has lived in Rockridge for about 7 years. I got heavily involved in home security a few years ago when we had a big crime wave in 2006. We had a ton of armed robberies within 1-2 blocks of my house, so I taught myself how to replace & beef up my security system, and put in a security camera network. That helped a little, but I wanted to know how I should feel about whether crime was getting better or worse. I started monitoring the weekly OPD stats that are published. A year ago, I realized that although I knew what the weekly numbers were, I didn’t know whether to feel good or bad. Is 10 stolen cars in a month really bad? Is it good? How does this compare to how it was a few years ago?

And so began my descent into crime tracking madness. I started tracking & plotting everything in sight, weekly trends, monthly trends, across a variety of categories. Last month I realized that although now I knew how crime was trending in Rockridge vs Area 1 vs all of Oakland, if it moved a few blocks south, I wouldn’t know. I just added both neighboring beats and a few miscellaneous beats to see if there’s any knowledge I can glean there. Here’s what I’m finding so far. Let me know if you see any obvious logic or process errors, this is an ever-evolving process. Read more

Oakland employment per capita, 1995 and 2005

If you haven’t done so yet, I highly recommend reading dto510’s take on Dellums’s “mistakes were made” press conference yesterday.

The whole thing is worth reading. I don’t have much to add, but I do want to respond to a challenge in the post that I’m pretty sure was directed at me:

Perhaps a more research-oriented blogger may look at how many employees we have per-capita, but since…

dto510 is in luck! Thanks to a truly amazing product called the Statistical Abstract of the United States, I, without doing any research or even math of my own, can tell you that Oakland, as of 2005, had 138 full time equivalent (FTE) positions per 10,000 residents, up from 128 in 1995. I can also tell you that during the ten years we added those 400 new positions, our payroll more than doubled, and the average monthly earnings for full-time employees swelled from $4,483 to $7,397.

How do we compare to other large cities? See for yourself (PDF).

And really, please do head over to Future Oakland and read “Dellums admits budget errors, prepares to make more.

Ron Dellums, making things up. As usual.

Probably the single that annoys me the most about Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums is his habit of phrasing everything in these absurd, sweeping, hyperbolic statements. I don’t understand why he insists on doing it. Things can be good without being the best. Progress can be laudable without being unprecedented. The problem with using superlatives to describe every damn thing that you talk about is that most of the time, you’re going to be wrong. And there’s nothing I hate more than listening to people say things that are flat out not true.

And there’s no politician in Oakland who loves to say things that are just plain wrong than Ron Dellums. I’ve observed before that the Mayor appears to simply make up numbers off the top of his head when he speaks, just citing figures and “facts” that sound good to him, completely disregarding whether or not they bear any relationship to reality.

And so it was the other day, when I was listening to him talk, for reasons I didn’t entirely understand, about base reuse, and he proudly informed his audience that “Every study that has ever been done in this country” about base closures has demonstrated that after the base closure, the community has been economically enriched and more jobs were created than were ever supplied by the military base.

Why would anyone say such a thing? It’s just one of those statements that’s just patently, on its face, not true. “Every study that’s ever been done in this country”? Why!!!?? Why, why, why would you say that? No matter what you’re claiming, there’s going to be some study, done somewhere, sometime that says you’re wrong. But what’s even more annoying about Dellums’s assertion is that our very own EBASE released a report (PDF) on exactly that subject only a few weeks ago, and it says the opposite of what Dellums is claiming:

Replacing lost jobs with positions of equal or higher quality continues to challenge local reuse authorities. Civilian jobs on military bases tend to offer family-supporting wages with benefits, but new job creation fails to meet this standard. As shown in Table 1, at Fort Ord, none of the industries targeted in the reuse plan pay a basic family wage. At Norton, where the greatest job creation has occurred, the average wages of targeted industries fall just short of the basic family wage. Only McClellan’s reuse plans include jobs that exceed the basic family wage, but only for a portion of the jobs. In Oakland, where final decisions are yet to be made, reuse officials must choose between lower-paying retail jobs, or warehouse and logistics jobs that would pay higher wages and offer a more accessible career ladder.

Of the four decommissioned bases studied in the report, including our very own Oakland Army Base, only one has so far managed to create jobs in excess of those lost when the base closed. (Even this is confusing to me, since although the chart provided shows that 13,000 jobs have been created on the former Norton Air Force Base in San Bernadino, the section that discusses that base says “To date, the businesses at Alliance California have replaced early 70% of the total jobs lost.” Who knows.)

Dellums then went on to talk about the “wonderful process” going on in Oakland right now to pick a master developer for our very own Army Base, which I actually do agree has been moving along quite nicely since the fall, even if it did take us like 15 years to get here. But he had to ruin even that, by reiterating his mindless nonsense promise about how it’s going to create 10,000 jobs:

“Whatever development that comes there will generate 10,000 jobs.

Reality check. Each respondent to the RFQ included in their response the number of jobs their concept was expected to generate. These are the totals offered by the four finalists. AMB/CCG: 3,809. Federal: 4,050. First Industrial Realty: 2,600. Prologis: 7,920.

Please, please, please, for the sake of my sanity, Ron Dellums, STOP SAYING THINGS THAT AREN’T TRUE I HATE IT SOOOO MUCH IT DRIVES ME CRAZY OMG!!!!!!!

Crime over lots of time

So there’s no doubt things are looking grim in Oakland these days. Everywhere I go, it seems like people want to tell me stories about how crime has never been so bad in town ever, and they would know because their family has lived here since 1870 or something. Seriously. The things people have been saying over the last couple of weeks, you’d think Oakland in the 80s was Mayberry or something. There’s certainly no doubt that crime is disturbingly high and that action needs to be taken. But let’s have some perspective.

OPD’s website helpfully provides historical data for Part 1 offenses going back to 1969, and it’s an interesting chart to look at, and anyway, I’ve prepared some quick visual representation of some of the numbers contained therein. Enjoy. Read more

Crime Stats, Oakland 2008

Below you’ll find 2007 and 2008 numbers reported for Part I crimes in Oakland as of June 26th (xls!).

Oakland crime stats update

People seemed to like the last chart like this I made when I put it in a comment. I find it interesting. Do you guys? This takes me like five minutes to make, so if people want to see regular year to date updates on crime numbers, I can start making them a normal weekend feature.

Anyway, below you’ll find 2007 and 2008 numbers reported for Part I crimes in Oakland as of June 19th (xls!).

Jean Quan doesn’t believe crime is up

For whatever reason, I’m not on the mailer list. I haven’t missed an election since I moved here, and I’m a registered Democrat, so I don’t know what the deal is there. But dto510 is on the list, and is always helpfully willing to share the ones he gets with me, so I get to see them anyway. In May, OakPac sent out a series of mailers criticizing Nancy Nadel’s record on crime and blight. One of these mailers featured a large picture on the front cover of a little girl rolling her eyes and sticking her fingers in her ears, as kids like to do when they don’t want to listen to you. I can’t remember the caption, but it was something like “Why does Nancy Nadel ignore our rising crime rate?” Hopefully it was more clever than that. And then it was accompanied by all these bar graphs showing how much crime has increased since the beginning of Nadel’s most recent term.

Anyway, I only bring this up because I couldn’t help but think about it as I watched Jean Quan sit there last night at the Public Safety Committee, desperately trying to explain away the dramatic violent crime spike we’ve experienced over the last several years. I’ve written about this before, but if you need a reminder, see the chart below illustrating the number of aggravated assaults reported in Oakland since 2003. The 2003-2006 numbers come from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report and 2007 numbers come from OPD, available here (PDF!):

Jean Quan’s theory for this increase in assaults is that due to improved outreach, information, and police training regarding domestic violence, largely because of Measure Y efforts, people are reporting more domestic violence incidents, even though they haven’t actually increased. Okay. So, it is true that we have had a dramatic increase in domestic violence reports in the past few years (nearly doubling from 2003-2004 to 2006-2007). It’s also true that this is likely due to better reporting of domestic disputes, rather than a doubling in the actual number of domestic incidents. The City’s efforts to increase awareness of the domestic violence problem are commendable, and this is an area where they’ve actually done a really good job. Everyone involved should be proud.

Having said that, Quan is wrong, wrong, wrong about this. A small percentage of the domestic violence related reports we receive rise to the level of aggravated assault. Aggravated assault is an attack intended to inflict severe injury, and usually involves the use of a weapon. If you shoot someone, but they don’t die, that incident gets added to the aggravated assault totals. If my boyfriend punches me and I get a black eye and busted lip, that’s considered a simple assault. That doesn’t mean it isn’t terrible, but it does mean that the FBI doesn’t consider it a Part I crime.

Anyway, Quan went on and on last night (Seriously. At one point Larry Reid had to interrupt her to remind her that they had a long meeting ahead of them!) about how we need to be comparing “apples to apples” and that it only looks like we’ve had an increase in aggravated assaults because domestic violence assaults are getting lumped into the the totals, saying:

There’s an e-mail floating around on the community neighborhood listservs that said that violent crimes went up, tripled under Chief Tucker’s reign. My guess it that what they’re doing is that they’re counting domestic violence assaults.

Quan, in her desperate attempt to explain away rising crime, even managed to imply last night that the FBI was somehow at fault here for including domestic incidents in the totals.

Okay. Here are the facts. In 2006, we had 3,614 aggravated assaults reported in Oakland. Of those, 407 were domestic violence incidents. In 2007, we had 4,023 aggravated assaults reported in Oakland. Of those, 494 were domestic violence incidents. (And just for the record, right now we’re at 1,698 aggravated assaults for the year, 234 of which are domestic violence incidents, and both of which are 10% higher than last year’s year to date numbers.) You don’t have to be a genius or a statistician to look at those numbers and understand that we have an actual problem with rising violent crime and that it has nothing to do with better domestic violence reporting.

Last night, Jean Quan said:

We know that murders went up, but except for domestic violence, none of the other crimes seemed to go up that rapidly.

What the hell numbers is she looking at? Quan’s willful blindness to skyrocketing violent crime in Oakland is astonishing! It’s also demoralizing. How can we ever possibly hope to address serious problems facing the city when our leaders refuse to even acknowledge they exist?

Related Posts:

• 04.24.2008: Jean Quan: out to lunch in San Ramon
• 11.19.2007: Murders spread throughout the city
• 11.19.2007: Oakland named 4th most dangerous city in the US
• 11.14.2007: Crime over time
• 11.13.2007: How underpoliced is Oakland
• 10.01.2007: Oaklanders remain “crime obsessed”

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