In early May, Oakland’s embattled mayor, Sheng Thao, took a rare victory lap: citing police data and a local news report, the far-left Democrat took to X to tout what she called “a significant and sustained decrease in overall crime.”
Oakland, she wrote, was “turning the corner” on crime, due in part to her administration’s efforts to strengthen the city’s police department and its partnerships with local businesses.
Governor Gavin Newsom similarly noted the alleged drop in crime in a press release. Mainstream media outlets, citing the police, reported that overall crime in the city was down, and not just by a little, but by 33 percent. “Crime is falling in Oakland, but local business owners feel not much has changed,” a CBS News Bay Area headline read.
It turns out, those local business owners were on to something.
A new report by the San Francisco Chronicle, informed by an Oakland-based number cruncher, found that that dramatic drop in crime was not real, and the police department’s reported crime data “overstated the improvements actually seen on the streets.”
The data that Thao and others cited compared year-to-date crime numbers to years past through the same date. The problem: the 2024 numbers are only partial counts, so Thao and local media were comparing incomplete data from this year to complete data from past years.
“As a result, these counts inevitably, and at all times, create the impression that Oakland’s crime trends — up or down — are better than reality,” according to the Chronicle.
The Chronicle was among the Bay Area media outlets that initially highlighted the overstated crime drop: “Crime falls in Oakland through first third of year, raising hopes of turnaround,” read its headline on May 1. That was the story Thao posted on X.
It was Oakland resident Timothy Gardner who first exposed the flawed data comparison, writing on his Oakland Report Substack newsletter on May 6, that the “hopeful story is untrue.”
“This error in data interpretation might be excused if it was made by a member of the general public. But it is inexcusable when made by the City Administration itself,” Gardner wrote in his report. “They are the producer of crime statistics, and they have a responsibility to present the truth to the public without bias.”
While crime may be down in Oakland this year, it’s unclear from the incomplete police data by how much, according to the Chronicle. While the police department’s data on homicides and violent crime are likely to be mostly accurate, the data on lower-priority crimes including burglaries and other non-violent crimes is almost surely not up to date.
That’s in part because lower-priority crimes are not always investigated right away, and reports are often filed online by victims. It can take up to six weeks for those reports to be verified and uploaded into the department’s records-management system, the paper reported.
Lt. Barry Donelan, head of the police department’s burglary and general crimes detail, blamed the problem on “decrepit IT infrastructure.” He told the Chronicle there is no effort by the department’s leaders to mislead the public.
“Do we know there are shortcomings in the numbers? Yes,” Donelan told the paper. “Is there a desire among professional law enforcement to fix that? Oh yes.”
Crime has been a major problem for Oakland businesses and residents in recent years, and it has continued this year. In January, Blue Shield urged its workers to stay inside over lunch, and it arranged cars to transport workers to the office. That same month, Clorox hired security guards to escort its employees to nearby parking garages and transit stations.
Those companies, along with Kaiser Permanente and Pacific Gas and Electric, or PG&E, have since agreed to spend $10 million to increase downtown security.
In March, the In-and-Out burger chain closed its only Oakland restaurant — it was the first restaurant the chain has closed in its 75-year history, according to NBC News. The company’s CEO said the closure was due to “ongoing issues with crime.”
The city’s only Denny’s also closed in March due to crime, according to news reports. And Taco Bell ended indoor dining in Oakland earlier this year, with one employee telling a local TV news station that it was because “some people sometimes make trouble.”
One business owner who spoke to CBS in May was skeptical of the reported crime drop because he said his restaurant had been broken into twice since the beginning of the year.
“The break-ins were a couple months ago. They were pretty recent,” Jonathan Perez said, according to the CBS report. “I feel like it’s happened so regularly over time that we’re not scared of it as much. We kind of expect it somehow.”