Thousand Oaks Is Safest Large City

Seven California cities were among the nation’s 10 most crime-free large cities in 2003, and two Ventura County suburbs topped the list again, FBI and census figures show.

Thousand Oaks nudged rival Simi Valley from the top spot among cities with at least 100,000 residents last year, the ninth straight year one of the two communities on the western flank of the San Fernando Valley ranked first.

In Los Angeles County, Glendale and Santa Clarita ranked fifth and seventh, respectively. In Orange County, Irvine ranked sixth and Huntington Beach was eighth. The Bay Area city of Sunnyvale placed ninth.

The low-crime list was dominated again by overgrown suburbs that are essentially small towns that don’t have much poverty and were created as havens for refugees from big-city problems, said demographic researcher Joel Kotkin, who is completing a history of cities worldwide.

“These places grew very rapidly and have not yet developed an underclass; they’re the slumless city,” said Kotkin, a senior fellow with the Davenport Institute for Public Policy at Pepperdine University.

“And in the case of Thousand Oaks and Irvine, they were created as being middle or upper middle class,” he said. “They were designed to have little crime, and it worked.”

The low-crime rankings were compiled by The Times based on a ratio of population to crimes reported by local police agencies to the FBI in seven categories: murder, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, theft and auto theft. Each crime is given the same weight, so a homicide counts no more than a bike theft.

When only violent crimes are considered, Irvine ranked as the safest among large U.S. cities, and Amherst, a college community near Buffalo, N.Y., was second.

In topping the low-crime list, Thousand Oaks edged Simi Valley for the first time since 1997. It was the 13th time in 16 years that one of the cities had prevailed. Amherst was first the other three times and ranked third last year.

The rankings are often seen as a boon by both city officials and business officials. Real estate agents regularly reprint articles about them, and employers cite them when recruiting.

“As the mayor of Thousand Oaks, I’m quite proud,” Bob Wilson Sr. said. “This community has made public safety and open space and education its top objectives. We have all the good things, so good people want to live here.”

But Wilson said he values low-crime rankings not for bragging rights over Simi Valley, but as a reflection of the overall safety of neighboring cities, including Moorpark and Westlake Village in Los Angeles County.

“We’re all pretty much one community, with the same goals and aspirations,” he said.

However, because Simi Valley has held the “safest city” title most recently and more often, officials there often take it more to heart.

“It’s always disappointing if we drop out of first place,” Simi Valley Mayor Bill Davis said. “But we’ve always felt that if we stay in the first four, we’ve done a really good job.”

Simi Valley, which experienced a 16% crime increase last year, created an eight-person citizens’ patrol that took to the streets early this year.

Driving old police cruisers and communicating by cellphone, the volunteers roll up alleys, through shopping centers and past houses whose owners notified police they were going away on vacation.

“If they call, we have an officer there in a matter of a minute,” Davis said.

Nationwide, preliminary reports show crime dropped last year, about 3% in violent offenses but only slightly in property crimes. In California, violent crime was down 3.2% and property crime up 2.8%, the attorney general reported recently.

Leading the way were the suburbs that ring California’s largest cities, where crime rates were about half the state’s overall. Thousand Oaks’ rate was about 16.1 crimes per 1,000 residents and Simi Valley’s was 17.6. By comparison, the California crime rate was about 39 offenses, and the U.S. rate was about 41 in the most recent reports.

In Orange County, Irvine had a rate of 21.3; Huntington Beach, 23.4; Orange, 27.6; Garden Grove, 31.9; Santa Ana, 33.5; Costa Mesa, 35.3; Anaheim, 35.4; and Fullerton, 38.5.

In Ventura County, Oxnard’s rate was 31 and Ventura’s was 40.8.

Riverside’s crime rate was 54; and San Bernardino’s was 78.8, one of the highest in the state.

San Jose’s crime rate of 26.8 was easily the best among the nation’s largest cities and was 14th lowest among all 237 large cities that reported to the FBI.

Los Angeles’ crime rate was 48.6 per 1,000 residents last year. It had 2,872 fewer violent crimes than the previous year, a 5.6% reduction, and 3,516 fewer property crimes, a 2.5% decrease.

Of the nation’s 10 largest cities, only New York at 29.2 per 1,000 and San Diego at 42.7 had lower rates than Los Angeles. The highest rates among the largest cities were Dallas’ 94.7 and Detroit’s 90.3.

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Nation’s havens from crime

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Lowest crime rates for cities with populations of 100,000 or more in 2003.* (Crimes per 1,000 residents)

*--* City No. of crimes Thousand Oaks 16.1

Simi Valley 17.6

Amherst, NY 18.0

Stamford, CT 20.3

Glendale 21.2

Irvine 21.3

Santa Clarita 21.6

Huntington Beach 23.4

Sunnyvale 23.6

Yonkers, NY 23.7

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Source: Times calculations based on FBI and U.S. Census Bureau statistics.

Los Angeles Times

*Naperville, Ill., would have ranked fourth with a crime rate of about 19.0 had its forcible rape total been reported in accordance with FBI guidelines.