If you've lived in the Bay Area for a while, your car has probably been broken into, a package of yours has been stolen, or, worse, your home or office has been burglarized. As with most large metros, the Bay Area has its share of crime, and now, thanks to a new tool NPR developed, you can see just how many of those crimes remain unsolved.
The crime clearance tool uses FBI data from the agency’s annual “Uniform Crime Report,” which tracks how many crimes have been cleared by the police. A crime is “cleared” once there’s been an arrest, the alleged offender dies, the alleged offender is charged with a crime in another jurisdiction, or the victim decides to drop (or not press) charges.
The report typically doesn’t categorize crime data by jurisdiction or agency, but this one does. It also includes statistics from the last three years, 2011 to 2013, and shows the total number of crimes cleared. However, there are some issues; namely, some cities don't report their data, or their data is rejected due to errors. Clearances are also attributed to the year a crime was solved rather than the year it was committed, which often creates a false impression of a city's overall crime stats.
That said, we used NPR's tool to look at various agencies in the Bay Area for a better understanding of which crimes are committed and which go unsolved. Let's start with a big-picture view of San Francisco as a whole:
In San Francisco, burglary, property crime, larceny, and car theft yield some of the lowest clearance rates. Murder and manslaughter saw just over half of cases cleared in 2012 and 2013. In the latter year, the SFPD only solved one of every two homicides. Meanwhile, in Oakland, no clearance rate made it to 50 percent, and the total number of violent crimes recorded was higher than in SF year-over-year.
While riding BART is usually just a health hazard, it’s also occasionally a safety one as well. The last time the agency reported a clearance rate over 50 percent was in 2011 (for burglaries in San Francisco).
In Alameda County, BART clearance rates have decreased for violent crimes overall, dropping to 19 percent in 2013.
Meanwhile, the Highway Patrol in San Francisco County is doing poorly when it comes to solving crimes related to theft, although the actual number of such crimes is low.
Considering how often we hear about car brake-ins and other types of robbery in the Bay Area, the number of unsolved crimes is frustrating but not altogether surprising.
[h/t Fusion; top photo courtesy of Tex Texin/Flickr]
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