Crime up in Oakland, much of Bay Area

Image 1 of / 7 Caption Close Crime up in Oakland, much of Bay Area 1 / 7 Back to Gallery

With nearly 12 robberies a day and murders, rapes and assaults all on the rise, Oakland is the Bay Area's crime hot spot - but new FBI statistics show that the city is far from alone in confronting rising mayhem.

Eleven of the Bay Area's 15 largest cities recorded higher levels of violent crime in 2012 than the year before, according to preliminary totals that the FBI released Monday. The figures represent an abrupt turnaround from a year ago, when data showed that crime had dropped significantly compared with 2010.

The new data confirmed that all types of violent crime - murder, rape, robbery and aggravated assaults - increased in Oakland in 2012, as did property crime such as burglaries and thefts. The statistics show that Oakland has the highest per-capita crime rate in California.

It's a trend that has rolled into 2013. Over the weekend and early Monday, 17 people were shot in incidents ranging from a sideshow - an illegal car rally - to a triple shooting outside a downtown nightclub. Among the victims was a 17-year-old boy, David Manson Jr., who was shot in the middle of the day Sunday on an East Oakland street.

Asked Monday about the surge in crime, interim Oakland Police Chief Sean Whent would say only, "We're working on it."

Robberies up

Oakland saw a nearly 29 percent jump in robberies, with 4,338 stickups reported last year - the equivalent of about a dozen a day. But Richmond had a slightly larger percentage increase in heists, FBI records show. Daly City and Antioch came in third and fourth, respectively, with increases of about 28 percent.

Overall, among cities with more than 100,000 people, violent crime went up in Antioch, Berkeley, Daly City, Fairfield, Hayward, Richmond, San Francisco, San Jose, Santa Clara and Sunnyvale, the FBI said. It was down in Concord, Fremont, Santa Rosa and Vallejo.

Crime experts cautioned that the figures may not necessarily paint a complete portrait of a city's problems. Homicide rates can fluctuate for reasons that can be hard to quantify and might not align with other violent-crime trends. For example, although violent crime in Richmond increased by 12 percent from 2011 to 2012, the number of homicides dropped, from 26 to 18.

'Relatively uneven'

"My take on what's going on in Northern California is that it's relatively uneven," said Franklin Zimring, a UC Berkeley law professor and criminologist. "You have Oakland way up, and you have Richmond, which is every bit as crime-impacted, substantially down with respect to life-threatening violence. So whatever is going on is much more uneven than a single arrow pointed in a single direction."

In San Jose, which like Oakland has laid off police officers in recent years because of budget problems, violent crime went up by a little more than 10 percent last year, and the number of homicides jumped from 39 in 2011 to 45 in 2012.

But San Jose is "still probably one of the lowest-homicide-risk big cities in the United States," Zimring said. And, he said, "most of the Northern California cities are closer to San Jose than to Oakland" with respect to crime rates.

Robert Weisberg, a criminal justice expert at the Stanford Law School, pointed out that financially strapped Fresno, which has also had a sharp decrease in the number of police officers in recent years, saw no significant change in its crime rate.

"The smartest thing to say is that you can't draw any conclusions whatsoever from change in one year," Weisberg said. "Somebody, somewhere, will either take credit or attribute blame, connecting a plus or minus to some policy and, as is often the case, get opposite figures related to that policy the next year - and nobody remembers the original statement."

San Francisco Public Defender Jeff Adachi said he believes the city's 7.5 percent increase in violent crime last year was an aberration.

"Violent crime is still much lower than it once was," Adachi said. "However, it's a reminder that we have to continue to invest dollars in crime prevention, particularly in terms of programs for minority youth, since the data shows that the increase in violent crime hits this demographic the hardest."

Smartphone thefts

Adachi noted that there was an 18 percent jump in property crime in San Francisco last year, which he believes was buoyed by the large increase in smartphone thefts.

"If the companies manufacturing these phones installed a device that would neutralize the phones when they were reported stolen, that would go a long way in decreasing theft crimes, particularly robberies and grand theft," Adachi said.

The FBI's report surveyed about 18,000 law-enforcement agencies across the country. The agency's figures for murder do not include justifiable homicides and officer-involved fatal shootings in which police were cleared of wrongdoing.

San Francisco Chronicle staff writer Matthai Kuruvila contributed to this report.