Richmond Left Off 'Most Dangerous' List Due To City Snafu, Eliciting Mayoral Oops
RICHMOND (CBS SF) -- Richmond Mayor Tom Butt recently sent out a mass e-mail celebrating the city's conspicuous absence on a list of Northern California's 12 most dangerous cities.
Friday, he sent out a retraction.
Turns out, Richmond was left off the list not because it has grown less dangerous, but because the city had not sent its most recent crime statistics to the FBI.
"No news is good news, they say," Butt said in today's e-mail, which contained the city's crime stats for 2014 and 2015.
The city's overall crime rate, based on crimes per 100,000 residents, was down about 1 percent from 2014 to 2015, according to police data included in Butt's e-mail.
The violent crime rate was up nearly 13 percent for the same period and the property crime rate was down by almost 4 percent.
Homicides were up almost 91 percent, with 11 killings in 2014 and 21 in 2015, according to the police data.
The dramatic spike in homicide numbers is attributable to gang violence, said Richmond police spokesman Lt. Felix Tan.
"It's gang on gang," Tan said. "There are a lot of old feuds that are happening."
As for the list of the region's 12 most dangerous cities, if Richmond was included, it would have ranked fifth, just ahead of Vallejo.
The list was compiled by the Santa Rosa law firm of Li and Lozada and features Oakland as the most dangerous city, followed by Stockton, Modesto and Merced.
The data wasn't initially sent to the FBI because the police department "suffered a significant data loss in November 2015 as a result of a combination of human neglect and software failure," according to Chief Allwyn Brown.
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