Forty years ago, when I first moved here, the conventional wisdom was that San Francisco was a safer place to live than most other large cities. Is that still true? Are there more crimes or is there just more publicity? One way to try to answer these questions is to look at crime statistics collected by the California Department of Justice and the California Department of Corrections.

I recently did just that 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. To get a valid perspective, I compared San Francisco with two other groups of California counties: four Bay Area counties (Alameda, Contra Costa, San Mateo, and Santa Clara), and eight large urban counties (the four Bay Area counties plus Los Angeles, Orange, Sacramento, and San Diego Counties).

The statistics are collected separately for:
• Violent crimes such as homicide, rape, robbery, aggravated assault
• Property crimes such as burglary, auto theft and theft greater than $400
• Larceny such as theft from autos below $400

The data enables you to compare the number of crimes reported, the number of arrests, and the number of admissions from county to state prisons. This allows you to compare how much crime there is, how well the police did their job of arresting the alleged criminals, and the effectiveness of the district attorney and the courts in turning the arrests into convictions. For this column, I will look just at the number of crimes reported, each as an annual average of the years 2003–2007. In subsequent columns, I will look at arrest rates and incarceration rates for the same period.

Violent crimes reported per 100,000 residents:
766 San Francisco
440 Four Bay Area counties
483 Eight large urban counties

Property crimes reported per 100,000 residents:
1,777 San Francisco
1,851 Four Bay Area counties
1,929 Eight large urban counties

Larceny crimes reported per 100,000 residents:
2,852 San Francisco
1,418 Four Bay Area counties
1,301 Eight large urban counties

These statistics show that the conventional wisdom of 40 years ago is no longer true. San Francisco has almost twice the level of violent crime and more than twice the level of larceny thefts from autos when compared with other large urban counties. Property crimes are running slightly below the average of the other counties.

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