T.O. tops the FBI's safest cities list

Preliminary report has Simi Valley 7th

By Marisa Navarro, mnavarro@VenturaCountyStar.com
June 13, 2006

Thousand Oaks has reclaimed its title as the safest city for its size in the country, according to preliminary 2005 crime statistics released Monday by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Simi Valley, which traditionally ranks in the top 10 in the safest cities with 100,000 residents or more, came in at seventh place.

In 2003, Thousand Oaks was the safest city, but Amherst, N.Y., knocked the Ventura County city off the top in 2004.

Dennis Carpenter, commander of the Thousand Oaks Police Department, said he is glad that his city again can consider itself the safest for its size.

"What drives our reputation is being able to have low numbers," Carpenter said. "We live for them, to see where (crime) is at and where it's going to be."

To tabulate the rankings, The Star compiled the number of reported violent crimes, such as murders and forcible rapes, and property crimes, such as auto thefts and burglaries, released by the FBI.

Among cities with a population of 100,000 or more, the one with the fewest incidents is considered the safest. Rankings are not calculated on a per capita basis.

Thousand Oaks had 1,958 reported incidents and Simi Valley had 2,487, according to preliminary crime statistics. Ventura ranked 40th with 4,208 reported violent and property crimes, and Oxnard ranked 66th with 5,214.

Carpenter said reclaiming the title the same year that Toby Whelchel went on a shooting rampage, killing four people and injuring five, is bittersweet. The event was one of the most destructive in the city's memory.

"Last year was an unfortunate year," Carpenter said. "But that's kind of a rarity for us."

Whelchel started his rampage by killing two people in Thousand Oaks, the city's only homicides in 2005.

Whelchel went on to kill a Santa Rosa Valley woman at her home before shooting himself to death in Simi Valley.

The 2005 report includes data from more than 12,000 law enforcement agencies in the country. The final report is expected to be released in the fall, according to the FBI's Web site.

Robert J. Meadows, professor of criminal justice at California Lutheran University in Thousand Oaks, said the ranking should not be interpreted as the absolute indicator of a city's safety.

"These are only reported offenses," Meadows said. "It doesn't mean that's a reflection of what actually occurs."

Domestic disputes or crimes where the victim is related to, or knows, the suspect sometimes are not reported, he said.

Reporting a crime is not the only problem in interpreting the statistics.

The FBI releases rape results against women, not men, and vehicular manslaughter is not included in the homicide category, according to the FBI's Uniform Crime Reports handbook.

And when a burglar hits several places in a large complex such as a hotel, it is recorded as one crime, according to the handbook.

Also, some cities are not included in the survey, most notably Chicago, because it reports forcible rapes differently from the FBI's standard, according to the report.

Although Oxnard touted that its 2005 crime rate was at a 30-year low, it dropped in the rankings from 57th in 2004 to 66th. Police Chief John Crombach said he is not concerned about the drop.

"We're pretty close to 200,000 (population)," Crombach said. "It's a better picture to look at cities around the same population as us, to compare."

Crombach also said he would rather focus on what is causing crimes in his city than compare Oxnard to other cities.

If only violent crimes were tabulated, Simi Valley would have been in fifth place, but the number of property crimes dropped the city to seventh.

Simi Valley Police Sgt. Stephanie Shannon said several of the crimes could have been prevented. Unsecured vehicles with unlocked doors, for instance, account for half of all auto burglaries in the city, Shannon said.

Still, Simi Valley is not complaining about its ranking.

"The fact that we stay in the top 10, we're very pleased with that," she said.

Throughout the country, violent crime rose 2.5 percent, the largest percentage increase since 1991, according to the Associated Press.

Murders rose 4.8 percent, meaning that there were more than 16,900 victims in 2005. That would be the most since 1998 and the largest percentage increase in 15 years, the AP reported.

Criminal justice experts said the statistics reflect the nation's complacency in fighting crime, a product of dramatic declines in the 1990s and the abandonment of effective programs that emphasized prevention, putting more police officers on the street and controlling the spread of guns.

"We see that budgets for policing are being slashed, and the federal government has gotten out of that business," said James Alan Fox, a criminal justice professor at Northeastern University in Boston. "Funding for prevention at the federal level and many localities are down, and the (National Rifle Association) has renewed strength."

Still, Fox said, "we're still far better off than we were during the double-digit crime inflation we saw in the 1970s."

- The Associated Press contributed to this report.