Anyway, here you go. Part I crimes reported through April 4th, 2010. All figures come from the Oakland Police Department’s weekly crime report (PDF).

So, there you go.

When compared to the same date in 2008, reported crimes have been down pretty much all year, and that trend continues here, with overall reports down a little under 13%. It’s not the 26% drop we were looking at in February, but it is significant.

It’s not all good news, though. Take a look at the second row. Aggravated assaults are now up from last year. As happy as I am that fewer cars are being stolen, I also find it extremely disheartening to just watch Oakland’s violence problem get worse and worse and worse every damn year. The new Police Chief at least seems to feel some sense of urgency about this problem, so hopefully we will see a reversal of that trend in 2010. For now, it’s just depressing.

Anyway, as always, the numbers come from the Oakland Police Department’s daily crime reports. The numbers above reflect data as of November 12th:

Overall Part I crimes reported in Oakland continue to be down compared to last year, which is always a good thing. And as it’s getting so late in the year, it’s looking at this point like we will end up meeting the Mayor’s goal of a year-end overall crime reduction of 10%.

You may remember that early this year, reported crimes were down dramatically versus 2008 (26% in February, 22% in March, close to 20% in May). That level of drop didn’t last through the summer, but we did manage to maintain double-digit reductions (16% in June, 13% in July, and 13% in September).

And where are we today? Well, see for yourself:

As always, figures are taken from OPD’s Daily Crime Reports, and the numbers above reflect data as of October 13th (xls).

Anyway, here you go. As of September 16th:

Here are the numbers as of July 2nd (XLS).

The less good news is that we continue to creep closer to last year’s numbers. In March, crime compared to the same date in 2008 was down 22.20%. Last time I did this, a month ago, total crime was down 19.39%.

And here’s where we are as of June 8th (xls).

I’ve added a comparison to 2007 as well.

I’m particularly grateful to Tom Carden, Eric Rodenbeck, and Michal Migurski of Stamen Design for their work in creating this, since the City of Oakland, for whatever reason, simply cannot seem to manage to produce a remotely usable incident map. CrimeWatch, in addition to being just hideously ugly, is painfully slow, requires an obscene number of steps to get any information, and in general, is just like, the complete opposite of a user-friendly or helpful product.

Ick. Anyway, Crimespotting just got a whole lot cooler, with the addition of two new features. First, you can now view crime maps going back all the way to mid-2007, when the site launched. And you can now get crime data, by beat, in spreadsheet form, going back all that time. Which is just so, so, incredibly cool. Every so often, somebody asks me about getting recent historical crime numbers for their neighborhood or whatever, and I hate how I can never give them a good answer, just offer them a giant zip file of a zillion old weekly crimes reported by beat files and tell them they can sort it out if they really, really want to. So this is just super.

But wait! That’s not all. There’s another, even cooler feature, where you can view incidents by when they happened – either in hours of your choosing, or by a few already set options: day and night, morning and evening commute, or police shift.

Isn’t is great? Anyway, head over to Crimespotting and play around with their new features. And if you like them, maybe leave a little thank you note on their blog.

With overall crime still hovering at around 20% lower than 2008, we’re well on our way towards meeting the Mayor’s goal of a 10% reduction in overall crime by the end of the year. I have to say I’m particularly pleased to note that after four straight years of rising violent crime (which was more than 50% higher last year compared to 2004), we finally appear to be on a downswing. A long way to go, certainly, but you can’t get to the end of the road until you start walking on it. Let’s hope these trends keep up.

There is nothing inherent about Oakland that means we have to dramatically outpace practically every other city in the entire country in terms of violent crime. Yes, there are poor people here. Yes, the prison system has problems. Yes, the parole system has problems. Yes, the public education system has problems. Yes, we do not have an abundance of readily available well-paying jobs that offer pensions and require no skills. All these things are true.

The thing is, they’re true in other cities too. Oakland is not so uniquely challenged as many people seem to think. Show your average middle-class Oakland resident numbers illustrating Oakland’s comparatively high crime rate, and you’ll usually get a response something along the lines of “Well, that’s not really representative of what Oakland is like versus anywhere else, because there’s really high crime in East and West Oakland, but the hills are really safe.” As if ghettos and uneven distribution of crime and wealth are unique to us! Newflash, folks. Other cities have bad neighborhoods too. Other cities have to deal with the same exodus of manufacturing jobs, the same broken prison systems, and the same failures of public education. Yet, somehow, almost none of them have a violent crime rate that’s even in the same ballpark as ours. Oakland had all the same problems in 2003, but somehow, the Oakland of 2003 had a fraction of the violent crime that the Oakland of 2007 had. See below, the number of violent crimes per 10,000 residents reported in Oakland in each of those years:

Those numbers in parentheses indicate Oakland’s average unemployment rate in each year, BTW.

I don’t want to dismiss Oakland’s challenges. Large swaths of our city are marked by highly concentrated poverty, persistent unemployment, and depressingly low educational attainment, largely due to a dysfunctional school system. As long as these factors remain in place, Oakland will have more violent crime than say, Virginia Beach. I get that. But it doesn’t have to be this bad. Really.

Let’s take a look at, say, Newark, New Jersey. I’ve never been to Newark, except for the airport, but I have watched Street Fight a bunch of times, and I gotta say, it doesn’t exactly look like the ritziest of towns. A dear friend of mine, an Oakland native, abandoned us for the East Coast two years ago. Shortly after he moved, he called me up to complain about how much he hated having to take the bus through Newark on his way to work, lamenting how desperately he missed his nightly rides on the 43. “Oh, come on. You’re exaggerating,” I insisted. “You used to complain about how unsafe your neighborhood was all the time here too.” “No, I’m serious, V,” he countered. “Newark makes East Oakland look like New Hampshire.”

Now, I have actually been to New Hampshire, and I suspect that the last part isn’t totally accurate. But what is true is that Newark is worse off than Oakland by pretty much every conceivable measure of poverty and demographic disadvantage. And if you’d like an example a little closer to home, let’s throw Inglewood, California into the mix. In Newark, 38.6% of households subsist on less than $25,000/year. In Inglewood, 30.5%. Oakland, 28.6%. What about education? 21.9% of Oakland’s adult population doesn’t have a high school diploma. That’s a lot. But it’s not as many as in Inglewood, where that figure is 29.9%, or in Newark, where it’s 35.4. And in pre-emptive response to those inevitable, yet extremely irritating comments that will use coded language to basically assert that black people cause crime (which, BTW, is hell of racist), African Americans comprise 32, 41.8, and 54.2 percent of the population in Oakland, Inglewood, and Newark, respectively. I could go on and on with more and more numbers, but I think you get the point.

Now, with pathologies like that, one would expect Newark and Inglewood to have a lot of violence. And you know what? Compared to most cities, they do. But they both have less than half the violent crime rate of Oakland. Less than half. The graph below illustrates the number of reported violent crimes per 10,000 residents for January-June 2008.

Lest you think that’s just some weird anomaly, let’s try again. Here’s the comparative rates for the full year of 2007.

I’m sorry, but there is just no way to excuse, explain, or justify this. It’s just plain too high.

From the Daily Crime Report for March 15th (XLS):

Both violent and property crimes continue to be down compared to last year, although not down as much as they were when I did this in February (Violent crime at that point was down 16.39% from last year, compared to 12.97% today, and property crimes were down 29.14% from last year, compared to 25.36% today.)