In last month’s column, I looked at crime statistics collected by the California Department of Justice for the years 2003 through 2007. The statistics are kept for each California county and are normalized per 100,000 population, so that you can compare counties of differing sizes without distorting the comparison. I looked at the numbers for violent crimes such as homicide, rape, robbery, aggravated assault; for property crimes such as burglary, auto theft and theft greater than $400; and for larceny such as thefts from autos below $400.

I compared San Francisco with two other groups of California Counties:

1.   The four Bay Area counties of Alameda, Contra Costa, San Mateo and Santa Clara
2. Eight large urban counties including the four Bay Area counties plus Los Angeles, Orange, Sacramento, and San Diego Counties.

The results for crimes reported per 100,000 population were:

Counties Violent Property Larceny
compared crimes crimes crimes
San Francisco 766 1,777 2,852
4 Bay Area 440 1,851 1,418
8 large urban 483 1,929 1,301

These statistics showed that San Francisco has 58 percent more violent crimes and 119 percent more larceny thefts from autos when compared with other large urban counties. How is the San Francisco Police Department dealing with this situation? We can start to get some answers by looking at the rate of arrests in the urban counties.
The arrests rates per 100,000 population were:

Counties Violent Property Larceny
compared crimes crimes crimes
San Francisco 556 552 1,687
4 Bay Area 319 428 664
8 large urban 369 463 727

The arrest statistics show that SFPD had 51 percent more arrests for violent crimes when compared to the other urban counties, which closely follows the 58 percent more crimes. For larcenies, the SFPD arrest rate was 132 percent higher than the other counties, which is a higher rate than the crimes reported. In property crimes, SFPD’s arrest rate was 19 percent higher than the other counties, even though it had a lower rate of property crime.

So where do all these numbers lead us? They show that SFPD is responding to the higher crime rate in San Francisco by making proportionately more arrests. This would tend to show that the higher crime rate in San Francisco is not due to the perception that SFPD is “soft” on criminal arrests. We will look further at the statistics next month to see if they give other clues about the cause of the increased crime rate.

Alan Silverman is a Marina resident and board member of the Marina Community Association.