Downtown Oakland’s Broadway corridor is just as safe as San Francisco’s Market Street, Oakland Mayor Jean Quan told an audience of San Francisco and Oakland business professionals this morning.

Quan said that a study she’d seen showed that crime rates in downtown areas of the two cities were roughly comparable.

“If you’re staying away from Oakland because you are afraid of the crime, that’s not a reason anymore,” Quan told the audience at the San Francisco Business Times breakfast. “When people ask what’s going on in Oakland I say jobs are up and crime is down.”

Apparently Quan was talking about this Colliers International real estate three-slide study that compares locations in downtown San Francisco to places in downtown Oakland in early 2013. The real estate company used crimemapping.com to compare 101 California to 1 Kaiser Plaza, 2100 Franklin (Pandora) to 1355 Market (Twitter) and 555 12th Street (Ask) to 140 New Montgomery (Yelp).

It isn’t clear why Colliers picked the locations or the particular one-month timeframe they did. But they’re right: in these particular cases, there was less crime in Oakland than SF.

More broadly, Quan has a point. Kind of. Homicides and shootings are down by double digits in Oakland, but those kinds of crime are not typical in downtown Oakland. Robberies, however, have been on the rise across the city. Those were at an all-time-high in 2012, when Oakland led the country in the per capita robbery rate and they climbed by 15 percent in 2013.

San Francisco police don’t keep crime stats as well as Oakland, so we can’t compare their crime rates for 2013. But in 2012, San Francisco (population 820,000) had 3,484 robberies. Oakland, with a population of 400,000, had 4,338 in 2012, according to FBI statistics.

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