The Scanner: San Francisco ranks No. 1 in US in property crime

Photo: Scott Strazzante / The Chronicle 2018 A man takes a bag through a broken window of a van parked on...

It’s official: Your backpack, laptop, tablet or phone — or the vehicle in which you left all these things behind — are more likely to catch the fancy of a thief in San Francisco than any other major metropolis in the country.

FBI data released last week show the city had the highest per-capita rate of property crimes among the 20 most populous U.S. cities in 2017, tallying 6,168 crimes per 100,000 people. That’s about 148 burglaries, larcenies, car thefts and arsons per day.

San Francisco’s property crimes spiked from the previous year, shooting up from about 47,000 in 2016 to 54,000 in 2017.

Sign up for the newsletter Get the best of the crime beat in your inbox every Monday. Subscribe to The Scanner.

Officer Robert Rueca, a San Francisco police spokesman, attributed most of last year’s surge to what the department called an epidemic of auto break-ins, while pointing out that headway has been made in shrinking this number in 2018.

Among several strategies, he said, police are working with prosecutors to zero in on the most prolific offenders.

“There’s a small group of people affecting the vast majority of those numbers,” Rueca said.

The FBI numbers reflect that Oakland saw a steady decrease in violent crimes — murders, rapes, robberies and assaults — in recent years but remained one of the more dangerous cities in the nation. The city’s violent crime rate came in at No. 14 among cities with a population of 100,000 or more.

St. Louis, Detroit and Baltimore were the three most violent cities. San Francisco was 75th out of 298 big cities.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the Bay Area also claimed some of the safest cities in the nation, according to the federal figures.

Los Altos, Danville and Los Gatos had the three lowest rates of violent crime among California’s 245 cities with a population of at least 30,000 people. Each reported zero murders and fewer than 20 rapes, robberies and aggravated assaults for all of 2017.

Perhaps the state’s most jarring property crime stats arrived from 400 miles south of the Bay Area, where the City of Industry clocked in nearly 4.5 crimes per resident. There’s a big, data-skewing caveat here, though. Only 204 people live in Industry, but the Los Angeles suburb houses more than 3,000 businesses and employs more than 67,000 people, according to the city’s website.

Oakland’s neighbor Emeryville, with its small population and many businesses and shopping centers, had a similar outcome. There were 2,084 property crimes recorded in a city that’s just shy of 12,000 residents — a rate more than twice that of San Francisco.

Photo: Oakland Police Department Oakland police towed at least 85 cars and made two arrests during a...

Oakland sideshow goes sideways

A massive sideshow last weekend in East Oakland resulted in two injured officers, close to 100 cars towed and two arrests.

This wasn’t the first time The Town has been roiled by illegal car shows shutting down roadways as drivers soundcheck their mufflers and leave behind a trail of doughnuts. But the incident late Saturday night in the area of 42nd Avenue and Interstate 880 was especially brazen, police said.

The sideshow participants allegedly threw rocks and bottles at officers attempting to break up the large gathering — and some even fired guns into the air in celebration. Two officers were said to be injured.

Police were able to break up the sideshow by about 5 a.m. Sunday, but the tow jobs took more than a dozen hours.

Photo: James Tensuan / Special To The Chronicle Tiffany Li exits the San Mateo County Jail on a $70 million dollar...

A time to bail

Tiffany Li made headlines last year after posting a staggering $70 million bail in property and cash and walking out of the Redwood City Jail despite being a potential flight risk to China.

Now she’s finally getting her day in court, as the trial began Wednesday.

Prosecutors accused Li of instructing her boyfriend, Kaveh Bayat, and Olivier Adella to kill Keith Green, the 27-year-old father of her two daughters, before getting rid of the body. Li allegedly acted in fear of losing a custody battle with Green.

Bayat remains in jail without bail, while Adella struck a deal with prosecutors by pleading no contest. He will no longer be tried for murder as long “as he testifies truthfully at the jury trial,” Deputy District Attorney Tricia Povah said.

Adella, who pleaded guilty to an accessory-to-murder charge, has spent two years in jail and could walk away after the trial.

Li, who lived in a mansion in Hillsborough, was arrested May 21, 2016, a little more than three weeks after Green disappeared. Police said he was supposed to meet Li at a Millbrae pancake house April 28 but never returned home. A hiker found his cell phone the next day in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco.

For two weeks, Green’s disappearance was treated as a missing-person case. But on May 11, Sonoma County sheriff’s deputies found his body in a field off Highway 101 near Healdsburg. An autopsy confirmed that he was the victim of a homicide.

Bayat is accused of shooting and killing Green.

Photo: Gabrielle Lurie / The Chronicle Alameda County Public Defender Brendon Woods listens while he is...

2 questions for Brendon Woods

Q: Aside from defending your clients as Alameda County’s public defender, does your office have any pet projects?

A: I’m not sure I’d describe them as pet projects. Instead, these are major initiatives to prevent the lives of poor people — including people of color — from being destroyed by a system of mass incarceration.

Since March 2014, our L.Y.R.I.C. (Learn Your Rights in California) high school outreach program has reached more than 4,000 local students, teaching them how to interact with law enforcement in a way that preserves their constitutional rights, de-escalates the situation and keeps them safe. The tragic killings of Oscar Grant, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice and many others are high-profile examples of what people in communities of color have known for years — that a simple encounter with the police can go tragically wrong in an instant.

Then there’s VOICE (Voting Outreach Increases Community Empowerment), which we launched in October 2016. With the cooperation of the Alameda County Sheriff’s Department, we’ve sent teams of attorneys, social workers and investigators from our office into Santa Rita Jail to register individuals to vote. Many people with criminal convictions mistakenly believe that they cannot vote and this simply is not true. To date, we have registered over 400 people.

Q: What’s the Alameda County public defender’s office’s focal point for reform?

A: We need to make sure our juries are truly diverse, and that means allowing people with felony convictions to serve. A jury of your peers is a falsehood for many of our clients. California Code of Civil Procedure Section 203 forbids people with felony convictions from serving on juries, no matter how old the conviction is, no matter if the person has successfully completed probation or parole, and even if the old crime is no longer a felony. Essentially, one felony conviction serves as a lifetime ban from jury service. In California, a third of African American men are prohibited from serving on criminal or civil juries. This racist, outdated rule must be changed and our office is ready to lead the charge.

The Roundup: Stories of the Week

• Matthew Muller, the suspect in a bizarre Vallejo kidnapping and rape case once dismissed by police as a hoax, will not represent himself in trial after all.

• Seventeen people were arrested or charged in what police called a $1 million robbery ring targeting Apple stores across the state.

• A grandson was charged with murder after allegedly decapitating his 82-year-old grandmother in her SoMa home.

• In other decapitation news, the headless body found in a San Francisco fish tank was officially identified.

• A San Jose woman’s Fitbit tracker led police to the 90-year-old man accused of butchering her with an ax.

The Scanner is a weekly feature from The Chronicle’s breaking news team featuring stories from the crime beat. Follow the team on Twitter: @meganrcassidy @EvanSernoffsky @SarRavani @ctuan @LaurenPorFavor @ashleynmcb @gwendolynawu @Josh_Koehn