Violent crime declines again in Oakland

For the fifth year in a row, violent crime in Oakland dropped, reaching levels not seen in more than a decade.

Oakland officials are lauding a decrease last year in robberies, killings and other crimes that have precipitously declined over the past five years from a peak in 2012. Violent crime overall, which lumps together homicides, assaults, rapes and robberies, dipped 5 percent between 2016 and 2017, according to the city’s numbers.

Mayor Libby Schaaf, whose re-election campaign has spotlighted the improved public safety statistics, pointed out that 2017 saw the second-lowest number of killings in the city — 72 — since the national record-keeping system began in 1985. The lowest tally came in 1999, when 60 people were killed.

City police leaders attributed the drop in 2017 to a community program that, among other goals, seeks to intervene in gang disputes and help troubled youths before they commit shootings.

“I can tell you, the last five years, we’ve seen an enormous paradigm shift in regards to how we police and are part of this community,” said Capt. Ersie Joyner III, commander of the unit that administers the program, Ceasefire, which launched at the end of 2012. “No longer are the days of doing random police work. We have a laser focus on trying to identify, using data, the individuals who are most at risk for being involved in gun violence or being engaged in gun violence.”

The Police Department also celebrated a continual drop in use-of-force incidents in each of the past five years. That number decreased by 75 percent between 2012 and 2017.

Police Chief Anne Kirkpatrick, now a year on the job, said the numbers proved heavy-handed force by officers isn’t needed to bring down crime. The department has emphasized de-escalation techniques, she said, so that use-of-force becomes “unnecessary or as nominal as possible.”

Oakland’s rate of violent crime — approximately 1.3 cases per 100 residents — is now roughly on par with where it was in the early- to mid-2000s. It had peaked around the recession, decreased, then crested again in 2012, according to data submitted annually to the FBI.

Nearly every category of crime in Oakland was down last year, according to the Police Department’s numbers, with the big exception of auto burglaries. Those were up 25 percent from their five-year average. San Francisco saw a similar jump in car break-ins.

Last year, according to Capt. Roland Holmgren of the criminal investigations division, the department cleared 71 percent of homicides — about 10 percentage points higher than the national average. The figure represents the rate at which police arrest and obtain charges for suspects.

Some of those cases were killings that happened in past years but were solved in 2017, which count toward the year’s number of cases considered cleared. It’s possible for a department to have a clearance rate of more than 100 percent for that reason.