One Area City Left Off Northern California's 'Most Dangerous' List Due To Missing Data

EAST BAY, CA – Richmond Mayor Tom Butt recently sent out a mass email celebrating the city's conspicuous absence on a list of Northern California's 12 most dangerous cities. Today, 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 email.

Oakland is featured as the No. 1 most dangerous city, along with some cities from the East and North bays that did rank, as well, on the report compiled by the Santa Rosa law firm of Li and Lozada.

Included: No. 5 Vallejo; No. 7 San Francisco; No. 8 San Pablo; and No. 11 Antioch.

If Richmond was included, it would have ranked fifth, just ahead of Vallejo. The city's overall crime rate, based on crimes per 100,000 residents, was down about 1 percent from 2014 to 2015, according to crime stats and police data included in Butt's email.

The violent crime rate there 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."

The data wasn't initially sent to the FBI because the Richmond 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.

According to the law firm, which compiled the report using 2015 crime data from the FBI, and cities with minimum populations of at least 30,000 residents, the top 12 are:

1. Oakland: POPULATION: 419,481, Alameda County
2. Stockton: POPULATION: 304,890, San Joaquin County
3. Modesto: POPULATION: 210,794, Stanislaus County
4. Merced: POPULATION: 82,409, Merced County
5. Vallejo: POPULATION: 121,257, Solano County
6. Santa Cruz: POPULATION: 64,076, Santa Cruz County
7. San Francisco: POPULATION: 863,782, San Francisco County
8. San Pablo: POPULATION: 30,290, Contra Costa County
9. Sacramento: POPULATION: 489,717, Sacramento County
10. Madera: POPULATION: 64,127, Madera County
11. Antioch: POPULATION: 110,537, Contra Costa County
12. Salinas: POPULATION: 158,185, Monterey County

See full report here, and also on the site, a table showing crime stats for 460 cities in California.

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--Bay City News contributed to this report/Shutterstock image