Simi Valley Tops List of Safest U.S. Cities

This suburban community was the safest U.S. city with a population of at least 100,000 last year, marking the fourth time in five years that a municipality in eastern Ventura County has topped the nation’s list of safe larger cities, according to FBI statistics released Sunday.

Thousand Oaks, which ranked first in 1989-91, was third in 1993, FBI crime and population figures show, and the Los Angeles County suburb of Santa Clarita ranked fourth.

In displacing Amherst Town, N.Y., as the safest urban area, Simi Valley’s serious crime fell 18.4% in 1993 because of citizen involvement, a surge in arrests of drug users and a police crackdown on theft rings from the San Fernando Valley, officials said.

“It’s nice to be recognized again as the safest city in America,” said Mayor Greg Stratton, noting previous designations in the mid-1980s. “It restores (our reputation) that we have a really great place to live and do business, where you can still walk the streets at night.”

Simi Valley’s image was tarnished in 1992 after a jury sitting at the East County Courthouse found four Los Angeles police officers not guilty in the beating of Rodney G. King, sparking the Los Angeles riots.

A recent fatal schoolyard stabbing of a 14-year-old boy heightened fears about youth crime in Simi Valley.

But the FBI statistics put residents’ growing fear of crime in a different perspective, Stratton said.

“Our crime totals are back to where they were five or six years ago,” the mayor said. “I think a lot of what we’ve seen has been a wash-over from the opening of the freeway to Los Angeles. People started to realize there was this nice place called Simi Valley that was fresh pickings. We started to get a lot of out-of-town criminals.”

Reported major crime grew steadily to 3,547 offenses in 1992, or 34 per 1,000 residents. But last year the total dropped to 2,892, or 27.8 per 1,000, because of sharp drops in burglary, theft and auto theft. Even violent offenses--already extremely low--declined slightly to 257, with no murders.

Police said that three or four San Fernando Valley theft rings were busted last year, which alone could have resulted in hundreds fewer crimes. In a similar situation two years ago, Camarillo police attributed 600 thefts to two Van Nuys gang members.

Simi Valley Police Chief Willard Schlieter said the 1993 improvement could be the result of many more arrests by a street narcotics unit that was doubled to six officers. An expanded anti-gang patrol also helped, he said.

“It’s the overall street visibility,” Schlieter said. “And part of it is the nature of this community. It’s not so much an affluent community that wants to buy its way out of crime, it’s a community that really wants to get involved in fighting crime.”

Neighborhood Watch groups are expanding, he said.

Thousand Oaks, which each year vies with Simi Valley for low-crime bragging rights, also had a drop in crime overall, from 3,374 to 3,276 incidents.

“We’re fortunate that we have an overall reduction,” said Cmdr. Kathy Kemp of the Ventura County Sheriff’s Department, which is under contract to patrol the city. “And we had a relatively small increase in violent crime. But the type of crime is a concern because it’s by our youth--it’s gang members.”

Confrontations between teen-agers increasingly end in violence, she said. In February, two Westlake High School students were wounded in an after-school fight at a park. Two of the four youths charged with assault and illegally discharging a firearm are gang members.

A communitywide anti-crime symposium on Saturday will address the problem of rising youth violence in Thousand Oaks, Kemp said. But she said the community remains relatively crime-free because of the extraordinary involvement of residents in Neighborhood Watch.

Oxnard, Ventura County’s largest city and one of its poorest, had a crime rate about average for the nation last year. But its crimes per 1,000 fell from 67.3 to 58.1 in 1993--the most dramatic decrease in the county.

Overall, Ventura County had a crime rate of 38.3 per 1,000 residents last year, down about 9% and better than the nationwide 3% decrease, the FBI reported.

Other low crime rates in California included Irvine’s 40 crimes per 1,000 residents, Fremont’s 40.6 per 1,000, Sunnyvale’s 41.4 per 1,000 and Glendale’s 44.4 per 1,000.

Of the state’s 10 largest cities, San Jose had the lowest crime rate, 45.7 crimes per 1,000, while Santa Ana had 64.2 per 1,000.

Oakland had the highest rate among the largest California cities, with 117 crimes per 1,000 residents, followed by Fresno, 115 per 1,000; Sacramento, 104 per 1,000; San Francisco, 90 per 1,000; Los Angeles, 88 per 1,000; Long Beach, 81 per 1,000 and San Diego, 74 per 1,000.

San Bernardino had the highest rate among all the state’s cities with more than 100,000 residents--132 crimes per 1,000 residents.