San Diego Safest U.S. City - FBI Report (Oakland: violent crime, homes)

[RosieSD]

Originally Posted by CNYC

I live in North County and sometimes leave packages outside my door for days at a time. It blows my mind that nobody takes them.

It gives me hope for humanity !

When people asks me where I live I say La La Land / West Coast.

It's a nice place to be.

I always thought La La Land refers to Los Angeles.

But, I agree, San Diego is a nice place to be, even if it isn't perfect.

[4SR]

I gotta wonder how the sprawl influences this number. Just because all the new suburban areas in North County are now labeled as "San Diego" (4S ranch, Black Mountain Ranch, Del Sur, Carmel Valley, Torey Highlands). In reality, they are the suburbs and in most big cities would have different city names. It'd be interesting to see the numbers for urban city center San Diego...not that I think its going to be insanely high or anything. San Diego is generally safe all around.

[Mezter]

That’s great! And it really shows actually. I felt very safe during my visit last month.

[sdurbanite]

Originally Posted by 4SR

I gotta wonder how the sprawl influences this number. Just because all the new suburban areas in North County are now labeled as "San Diego" (4S ranch, Black Mountain Ranch, Del Sur, Carmel Valley, Torey Highlands). In reality, they are the suburbs and in most big cities would have different city names. It'd be interesting to see the numbers for urban city center San Diego...not that I think its going to be insanely high or anything. San Diego is generally safe all around.

The link below breaks down the crimes by San Diego neighborhoods thru July 2017. Interestingly, the neighborhoods with the most murders (3 each) are North Park and Pacific Beach. No one here would call those neighborhoods are bad. At the same time, neighborhoods considered bad, ie, Barrio Logan, Emerald Hills, Encanto, Lincoln Park, Mt. Hope, among others, have zero murders.

https://www.sandiego.gov/sites/defau...neighbor_0.pdf

[sav858]

Originally Posted by 4SR

I gotta wonder how the sprawl influences this number. Just because all the new suburban areas in North County are now labeled as "San Diego" (4S ranch, Black Mountain Ranch, Del Sur, Carmel Valley, Torey Highlands). In reality, they are the suburbs and in most big cities would have different city names. It'd be interesting to see the numbers for urban city center San Diego...not that I think its going to be insanely high or anything. San Diego is generally safe all around.

The City of SD has such sprawling city limits compared to places like SF, DC, etc..with much older, smaller city limits confined to the urban core so I think that would dilute crime stats BUT even the county/metro has very low crime. So I doubt the urban core of SD would be that bad or even above average.

[RosieSD]

Originally Posted by 4SR

I gotta wonder how the sprawl influences this number. Just because all the new suburban areas in North County are now labeled as "San Diego" (4S ranch, Black Mountain Ranch, Del Sur, Carmel Valley, Torey Highlands). In reality, they are the suburbs and in most big cities would have different city names.

Well, the city of Los Angeles (503 square miles), Houston (637 square miles) and Dallas (385 square miles) are all spread out over more square miles than the city of San Diego (372 square miles) and yet have higher murder rates (per thousand population).

Not an exact answer to your question, obviously, but that would suggest that a city's sprawl and low murder rates do not correlate.

I guess to fully answer your question, you'd need to compare each city's number of murders divided by each city's square mileage, instead of population. The thing is, murders happen to people, not mileage, so I guess that's why the FBI reports the rate per thousand population, not per mile.

[LuvSouthOC]

Demographics play a big part in this.

[shmoov_groovzsd]

This is really great to see how we top these lists, for what seems like year after year for a metro our size.


Having been involved at a macro and mirco level with the local govt here in Lemon Grove, it was enlightening to see crimes reported within this particular jurisdiction.

I dont have the Sheriffs dept stats on hand, but cumulatively from the reports I have seen over the years, at least here in the LG City boundaries, well more than half of the reported crimes (high crime) were coming from non Lemon Grove residents.
For a city this size, bordering neighborhoods and population density there is a lot of human traffic. After a while to see how the Sheriff's Dept polices vs SDPD or LMPD, they use totally different tactics, which certainly have some impact on reported stats.
I also think it would be safe to say that this holds true for areas along the coast with high car theft or break ins, but not violent crime.

The actual facts of the numbers speak for themselves. Drawing conclusions and making claims that validate a biased point of view on why these events happen can have some truth to it from a certain lens. But I think its worth noting, because human behavior isn't chalked up to binary code of 1's and 0's, the underlying behavior patterns or asterisk behind the numbers may challenge those perceptions and best determine how conclusive or inclusive the numbers really are.

[Neroburnedit]

For the sake of comparison, San Diego's twin city, Tijuana, Baja California, Mexico had 910 homicides in 2016. What a difference an international border makes.

[RosieSD]

Originally Posted by shmoov_groovzsd

This is really great to see how we top these lists, for what seems like year after year for a metro our size.

Having been involved at a macro and mirco level with the local govt here in Lemon Grove, it was enlightening to see crimes reported within this particular jurisdiction.

I dont have the Sheriffs dept stats on hand, but cumulatively from the reports I have seen over the years, at least here in the LG City boundaries, well more than half of the reported crimes (high crime) were coming from non Lemon Grove residents.
For a city this size, bordering neighborhoods and population density there is a lot of human traffic. After a while to see how the Sheriff's Dept polices vs SDPD or LMPD, they use totally different tactics, which certainly have some impact on reported stats.
I also think it would be safe to say that this holds true for areas along the coast with high car theft or break ins, but not violent crime.

The actual facts of the numbers speak for themselves. Drawing conclusions and making claims that validate a biased point of view on why these events happen can have some truth to it from a certain lens. But I think its worth noting, because human behavior isn't chalked up to binary code of 1's and 0's, the underlying behavior patterns or asterisk behind the numbers may challenge those perceptions and best determine how conclusive or inclusive the numbers really are.

Good points. The FBI also cautions against drawing too many simplistic conclusions from this data about the differences between cities, regions and states for reasons that include things like you've mentioned.

Another example of this would be Del Mar. Year after year, Del Mar falls at the bottom of the SD County list in terms of overall crimes per 100,000. If that's all you looked at, you'd probably conclude that Del Mar was a dangerous place to live. But, once you dig deeper, you discover that Del Mar's overall crime rate is because they have a higher property crime rate, not because it's filled with murders. A higher property crime rate in Del Mar makes some sense if you know anything about the economic demographics of the county. After all, if you were a burglar looking to steal stuff from homes to pawn for big bucks, would you focus your attention on low income areas or high income areas where the good stuff is more likely to be found?

So, you definitely need to be careful about drawing conclusions from the overall data without considering and comparing other factors.

Someone last night suggested that sprawl might correlate to crime. I looked to see if the FBI tracks that at all, but the closest thing they have would be that in one of the reports they break the national rates out into cities, suburban areas, and other areas. I haven't had a chance to dig into that data yet though and it doesn't seem to be available for SD County or even at the state level.

But those of us who live here in San Diego, pretty much know where those areas fall anyhow.