Two Suburbs See Shootings as Aberrations

Athletes and politicians have long known a simple truth that two of Southern California’s leafiest and sleepiest suburbs are just discovering: You can be on top for a day or a year, but the moment you drop the ball or falter in the polls, people will want to know what went wrong.

Nothing, you say. It was just an aberration. You know you’re the same world-beater you always were, but that’s not going to stop people from wondering if--maybe even hoping--your glossy facade has finally cracked.

So it is with Simi Valley and Santa Clarita, which annually rank high on the list of the safest large cities in the nation. So accustomed to being on the list are they that one Simi Valley City Council member could say in May, when the latest FBI crime statistics placed Simi Valley once more at the apogee of safety, “We’ve come to enjoy having this title. And we work hard to keep it.”

So what do you say if you’re a Simi Valley booster the day after a gunman breaks into a house and kills three people, two of them children? And what is a proud Santa Clarita resident to think in the aftermath of an Idaho-style standoff just outside the city limits with a man who kills a sheriff’s deputy and burns to death in his suburban bunker rather than submit?

If you’re Simi Valley’s city manager, Mike Sedell, you point out that bad things happen even in the nicest places. Low crime doesn’t mean no crime. As jarring as these incidents may be, they do not signal a change in the broad trends on which rankings are based. “The number of crimes in Simi Valley continues to be very low,” he said. “Because crime is low, [a major crime] becomes much more noticeable. That’s why something like this becomes newsworthy.”

Jason Smisko, a spokesman for the city of Santa Clarita, said people there recognize the unique circumstances of the incident in Stevenson Ranch last week and are not panicking. “What you are concerned about is how does your city feel after an incident like this?” he said. “I’m not hearing anybody saying they feel less safe.”

They would seem to be justified. The most recent FBI statistics show that Simi Valley, with a population of 111,351, had the nation’s lowest crime rate last year for a city of more than 100,000. With 15 major crimes per 1,000 residents, the city’s crime rate was much lower than the nation’s average of 43 per 1,000. Santa Clarita, with 151,088 people, was third with 18 crimes per 1,000 residents. (Thousand Oaks was second.)

Even so, this has proven a hot summer for high-profile crimes, particularly in Simi Valley. In June, an off-duty Los Angeles police officer fatally shot his ex-girlfriend’s boyfriend in front of his house and took his own life. In July, a handyman was arrested in a series of rapes that had kept the city on edge for years. Then on Wednesday, a man in a rented Ford Explorer parked and calmly walked inside a home on Yurok Court that was crowded with visitors. He shot five people. Three died.

Despite the graphic, highly public nature of these crimes, experts aren’t convinced they mean much. “Any crime can happen anyplace,” said James Q. Wilson, emeritus professor at UCLA. “People are mobile. They have cars.”

Nevertheless, looking at the types of people moving into your city can tell you a lot, because “the vast majority of crime in a city is committed by people who live in the city,” Wilson said. By calling them safe, he said, “what we’re really saying is the people who have moved into Simi and Santa Clarita are by and large law-abiding. These events, though they deserve headlines, don’t alter my view of these places.”

If there is a useful lesson to be drawn from these incidents, experts say, it is to question the ability of statistics to fully explain the world. The FBI thinks we might value them too much and draw conclusions that have little connection to reality. The truth is, the FBI’s uniform crime reports do not even rank cities against each other.

The reports are simply thick volumes of crime groupings for cities across the country. Their greatest value, said FBI spokesman Paul Bresson, is in comparing crime trends within individual cities. “If you see rapes increase 200% in a year, that’s helpful to the police department” in deciding how to allocate resources, he said.

Rankings by city began when journalists took the raw FBI figures and performed calculations to produce a crime rate that could be compared from one city to the next. Bresson said the FBI specifically cautions against doing that.

Comparing cities “might be of interest,” he said, but it’s not fair. Pointing out that many different factors influence crime, Bresson said reducing all these factors to a single crime rate “may unfairly portray a city as more violent or dangerous than it might be.”

For one thing, most rankings mix violent and nonviolent crimes together. Yet the vast majority of crimes are of the nonviolent variety--auto burglary, minor theft and the like. So a community with little violence may end up with 40 or 50 crimes per 1,000 residents--a relatively high ratio--just on the basis of an uptick in car stereo thefts.

Police departments also report crime differently, particularly in the case of minor thefts. The city of Ventura briefly slipped into last place among Ventura County’s larger cities a few years ago after the department started keeping closer track of minor thefts.

The state Department of Justice believes the reporting of minor thefts among police agencies is so uneven that it doesn’t include those figures in its yearly reports.

On the other hand, violent crime often does track fairly well with nonviolent crimes. A breakdown of Simi Valley’s crime rate this year showed that it was only the second safest city overall in Ventura County, behind Moorpark, which, because of its small size, is not included in national rankings. But its violent crime rate was even better at 1.2 per 1,000 residents.

Though the statistics can reveal something worth knowing about the kind of people who live in these cities, they do not indicate whether the city has enough parks to make it livable, or whether it is safe only because there are no stores and therefore none to be robbed.

Even the most enthusiastic civic boosters in Santa Clarita and Simi Valley would not argue that they can predict where and when the next crazed gunman will strike.

“Tragic as the events in Simi Valley and Santa Clarita were,” said Wilson, the UCLA professor, “I don’t think we ought to beat our breasts about them.”