Five years. That’s how long I’ve been keeping statistics of crime in Rockridge. I realized recently that while I’ve been publishing lists of reported crimes, and while I’ve been keeping a tally of how many crimes were reported in each of the 4 general categories I track, I haven’t looked at overall monthly trends. I recently added monthly totals to my master spreadsheet, and calculated for each year the maximum, minimum, and average number of monthly crime totals. Tabulated below are the numbers, with months in which the maximum and minimum number of crimes were reported.

The crime numbers in this analysis are only crimes reported to the Oakland Police. If you didn’t report it, we don’t know about it.

The real question is, what kinds of crime? The NCPC crime statistics group crime reports into 4 categories. These aren’t official police categories, but are developed by the NCPC for convenience. Official statistics group crimes by the penal code sections that they violate.

NCPC Categories:

• Crimes against the person – robberies, assaults, domestic violence
• Property crimes – thefts, burglaries, and shoplifting
• Auto related property crimes – car thefts and break-ins
• Quality of life crimes – vandalism including graffiti, littering, public drunkenness, disorderly behavior

This report will concentrate on beat 12Y (outlined in red in the map shown by the link) because that’s where most of the crimes happen. Beat 13X continues to experience far fewer crimes in all categories.

We are most concerned about crimes against the person. Here are the numbers since 2014:

You can see that on average, between 6.5 and 8.1 crimes against the person are committed in beat 12Y every month, over the last 4.5 years. Beat 13Y’s numbers in this category vary between 1 and 2 per month, except for 2017 where they had a maximum of 3 in June.

To clarify a point that can be confusing: if someone grabs your phone out of your hand and runs off with it, or points a weapon at you and demands it, that’s robbery. If you leave your phone on the table outside the restaurant while you go inside for something, and someone grabs your phone and runs off with it, that’s theft. It’s only robbery if the victim is directly involved.

Property crimes of all kinds are the major type of crime committed in Rockridge. In 2014, general property crime and auto-related crimes averaged about the same monthly frequency: around 20 incidents per month. Since then, auto-related property crime has been ahead of the general type, averaging between 3 and 12 incidents per month higher than general property crime.

For comparison: in beat 13X, in this entire period, neither kind of property crime ever averaged more than 8 incidents per month, and the highest monthly maximum in either type of property crime was 15, in Jan. 2014. It was in auto-related crime.

It’s clear that 2014 and 2017 were big years for Rockridge crime.

Quality of life crimes never averaged much more than 10 incidents per month, sometimes much less.

Considering the counts recorded thus far and that the worst months are likely yet to come, there is potential for this year to set a new record for most quality of life crimes.

In beat 13X during this period, the average number of reported quality of life crimes was never over 2 per month and the maximum number that occurred in any one month was 4. In many months, none at all were reported. Three months in 2014 (March, April, and November) each had 4 reported quality of life crimes in beat 13X.