Despite an impressive 40 percent reduction in reported shootings over three years, the Oakland Police Department continues to grapple with an above-average crime rate and a complement of officers smaller than that of most cities of similar size.

The two realities stand in stark contrast to the recently released Oakland Police Department Strategic Plan, which sets goals to reduce homicides, robberies and assaults by 30 percent over the next three years while beefing up the department’s patrol and investigative divisions.

Reducing crime is a laudable goal, but it’s not likely that the department will grow large enough to achieve it. By its own measure, officers are awash with felony-grade cases.

For each of Oakland’s 737 police officers, 10 violent felonies are committed each year — “more than any other large American city,” the plan says. “And coupled with its case load for property crimes (the rate is) more than twice the national average.”

Oakland is the nation’s robbery capital, according to the FBI’s 2015 Uniformed Crime Report, which also tied Oakland with Detroit and Memphis as among the nation's most violent cities.

The FBI report says that Oakland needs at least 842 officers — and 1,805 if the size were calculated according to the crime rate.

It’s a mind-boggling number.

“In New York, they lower crime by putting a cop on every corner,” said Police Chief Sean Whent. “That’s not going to happen here.” He’s talking about the city’s limited finances and the politics of police work in Oakland.

“We need to get our guys focused on the groups and gangs that are involved in robberies and burglaries, arrest the right people and be effective with a smaller number of officers,” he said.

Beyond the perpetual shortage of police officers however, there are bright spots and practical, commonsense upgrades in the department’s new plan that are long overdue.

The Police Department is working with local businesses to register privately owned video cameras pointed at public spaces for the purposes of solving crime. The city had to abandon a plan to install city-owned video cameras across the city after an outcry from activists who feared they would be spied on. The new plan is a work-around.

The department is also pledging to expand its crime lab over the next three years by hiring 50 civilian police technicians, 35 civilian researchers and 10 sworn officers.

Ciminal investigations are hindered because police don’t use even basic, modern tools of evidence collection, the plan acknowledges.

“At present, OPD does very little to collect or process evidence from property crimes,” says the document. It promises that the new evidence lab will give police the tools to process fingerprints and physical evidence collected at property crime scenes.

The top brass in the Oakland Police Department has the authority to reconfigure the department in any way they see fit, but one of the plan’s most important goals is to strengthen its relationship with the greater public — and that could prove to be its most elusive goal.

Unde the new plan, police officers are encouraged to speak with the public at crime scenes in an effort to ease police-community relations that have been strained for decades.

The thinking is that in a city where the yellow tape goes up for homicides far too frequently, informing nearby residents about an incident — without disclosing sensitive details — is a better practice than shooing them away. The department also wants to use more social media to strengthen public ties and identify potential criminals.

The department’s blueprint for crime prevention lays out a no-frills assessment of the city’s challenges and the approaches it can take to achieve its goals.

Whent says it’s a “good external and internal compass.”

I say the city just needs to be safer. As any longtime resident will tell you, all the promises and positive expectations will mean nothing without a real reduction in crime.

Chip Johnson is a San Francisco Chronicle columnist. His column runs on Tuesday and Friday. E-mail: chjohnson@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @chjohnson