Update: I just double-checked, and it seems that Oakland’s had about 5 murders this year, which sounds lower than recent if you extrapolate it as an annual rate, but not all months are created equal—for instance, as of Feb. 25th of 2009, we had only had 9 homicides here (down 60% from the same period in 2008), but we still ended 2009 with 108 (down only about 15% from 2008). So you can’t necessarily take a limited time period in the winter months as a guide to how the rest of the year will go.

I don’t want to damage your LA County pride, but there’s a good chance you’d lose that bet, although it probably depends which particular metrics one chooses. Every year an outfit called CQ Press (once affiliated with Congressional Quarterly, but no longer) crunches some FBI crime statistics to produce a list of the cities with the country’s highest crime rates. Every year, Oakland, Compton, and Richmond take spots somewhere in the top 15. And every year, officials in Oakland complain that the methodology is flawed, and that Oakland is getting a bad rap. (The lines have been rehearsed so many times that you could just change the dates and put out last year’s press releases, and no one would notice.) Anyway, in the most recent list, Oakland was #3 (behind Camden, NJ and St. Louis), Compton was #12, and Richmond was #14.

I always find it weird that people choose to quibble about whether Oakland deserves to be in the top 5 or not, when (tired clichés about rivers in Egypt notwithstanding) it’s obvious to everyone that Oakland has a totally unacceptable violent crime rate, and that something needs to be done about it. (Where people start disagreeing is when you start talking about what should be done.) One reason that people are impressed by our new police chief is that he seems more interested in addressing the crime problem than in nitpicking about Oakland’s place on the CQ Press list. That’s a refreshing change from his feckless predecessor.

I live and work in Oakland, and I call it crime central. Those of us that don’t say it out loud, think it.

Denial is not just a river in Egypt.

Meanwhile – crime is citywide – we live at the top of the hill in Montclair – last three months – neighbor on the right and two doors down on left burgled, us robbed from car – brand new printer with serial number – but since there ZERO database integration for stolen property, even if recovered it will merely be sold to benefit the police auction of another City. Meanwhile, a worker of ours was held up a shotgun on the flats by “masked African American’s” and had his tires slashed the week after by a coke head that has a paranoia problem. Truly, this is just not working anymore.

That said, we are pretty out of ideas – losing our home shortly anyway -along with millions of others, the future is particularly murky and us hiring people right now is shall we say postponed. In a country that choose to bail its banks and Wall Street (the “master minds” of all this) over its people, the only thing I know for sure, is that it is hail Mary time and a few brave Executive Orders from our fearless leader would be well received

I don’t dispute Oakland’s spot in the top tier of crime ridden cities. My main problem with “crime central” in the headline isn’t that it’s factually inaccurate—my problem with it is that it’s not a term whose accuracy can even be usefully debated, since it’s more an epithet than anything else. I wouldn’t take issue with someone calling Oakland “crime central” on top of a blog post, or an opinion column, but I don’t think it belongs on top of a news article in a paper which, as far as I know, still aspires to a dispassionate tone in its news pages. (My preference for more clinical language in the headline especially applies in this case, since the article is about crime statistics rather than something fuzzier like perceptions of crime, or how crime has affected people’s feelings about Oakland in neighborhoods like yours or mine or Jenny’s, or something like that.)

I agree with you about the unknowns. Since violent crime is down even more dramatically in the other cities I mentioned in the post, I wonder if more people should be asking what Oakland has done wrong in the past couple of years, instead of asking what it has done right. My sense, anecdotally from talking to people and reading my local NCPC listserve, is that crime in my particular neighborhood along Park Blvd has ticked up a bit in the past month or two, but I haven’t seen or heard any hard statistics, and thankfully we still seem to be mostly free of the more violent crimes which plague other parts of the city.