Bay Citizen: 2011 Oakland Homicides have unusual patterns (crime, how much)

[jade408]

Interesting article in the Bay Citizen. Homicides are up overall in the city, but victims are older and more are happening on the weekdays. Pretty strange, there are no conclusions yet.

Unusual Homicide Patterns Puzzle Oakland Officials - The Bay Citizen

According to new data from Measure Y, the city's violence-prevention program, homicide victims this year are, on average, older than the victims of years past, and slightly more homicides are occurring on weekdays, rather than Friday and Saturday nights.

According to the Urban Strategies Council, a nonprofit hired by the police department to analyze city crime data, last year victims between the ages of 18 and 34 accounted for 57 percent of the city's homicides, while victims over 35 years old comprised 31 percent of homicides.

This year, the portion of victims over 30 is nearly the same as the number between 18 and 30 — 45 percent and 48 percent, respectively — according to Page Tomblin, who collected the most recent homicide data and oversees Measure Y programs.

[NorCal Dude]

Well I guess you can throw the "SF has random crime, Oakland doesn't" nonsense everyone has been talking about out the window now.

Almost as funny as when certian posters here tried to say there were "no gangs in Oakland".

[04kL4nD]

You really don't have a life, do you?

[ambient]

I expect this is just a statistical coincidence. Given the large continuous sample of killings in Oakland, you can always find mini "patterns" like this one if you stratify time-based portions of the data in various ways.

[NorCal Dude]

Originally Posted by 04kL4nD

You really don't have a life, do you?

Nope, most people who are married with kids don't. Whats your excuse?

[Nineties Flava]

Originally Posted by NorCal Dude

Well I guess you can throw the "SF has random crime, Oakland doesn't" nonsense everyone has been talking about out the window now.

Almost as funny as when certian posters here tried to say there were "no gangs in Oakland".

It's about the mindset... a gang has initiation, codes, allliances, networks, etc. whereas most of the stuff in Oakland is simply in the neighborhood. You're not automatically "enemies" against someone because they're part of a different gang. The only people who play that in Oakland are Mexicans.

[rah]

Originally Posted by NorCal Dude

Well I guess you can throw the "SF has random crime, Oakland doesn't" nonsense everyone has been talking about out the window now.

I don't know how you drew that conclusion from that article. Of course both places have "random" crime. But going by events from the past several years, you're more likely to be murdered at random by a crazy person while minding you own business in SF than in Oakland.

[Hemlock140]

Makes perfect sense to me, the criminals are simply getting older, and more of them are out of work in the bad economy and have more weekday time on their hands to get into trouble.

[sav858]

Originally Posted by Nineties Flava

It's about the mindset... a gang has initiation, codes, allliances, networks, etc. whereas most of the stuff in Oakland is simply in the neighborhood. You're not automatically "enemies" against someone because they're part of a different gang. The only people who play that in Oakland are Mexicans.

What are you talking about? There are so many murders involving blacks that are gang related in Oakland. There is a huge debate going on about gang injunctions in the city. It seriously baffles me how much some people here try to play down the gang violence issue in the Bay Area as if it's not a problem here and that only SoCal deals with that.

[dragontales]

Instead of focusing on the crime problem in Oakland some of you are deflecting it by pointing the finger at SF.