GOP presumptive presidential nominee Donald Trump received some Twitter vitriol from Oakland’s mayor after calling California’s leading city for violent crime one of the most dangerous places on earth.
Trump initially joked in an interview with the New York Times, when asked what is the most dangerous place in the world Trump has been to. The initial answer was Brooklyn, but he amended his answer to the Times saying, “There are places in America that are among the most dangerous in the world. You go to places like Oakland. Or Ferguson. The crime numbers are worse. Seriously.”
Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf swiftly took to Twitter in reprimand:
A recent report labeled Islamic terror-stricken San Bernardino California’s most dangerous city, despite Oakland’s far and away highest crime rate. When considering policing and community factors along with crime rates, Oakland comes in at number six on the list.
Oakland’s violent crime rate is, however, “more than 2X the crime rate of San Francisco and more than 3X of Los Angeles,” according to the same report. Oakland benefitted in the analysis from high spending per capita on police, the fourth highest spending of the 68 California cities included in the report. The city has the third highest number of police per 100,000 residents, with only Los Angeles and San Francisco having more officers.
Oakland’s crime rate is over 1,685 per 100,000 residents, according to the study. The statistic is based on 2014 crime data from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting program. Ferguson, Missouri comes in with a much lower rate when only considering violent crime among the city’s 21,090 residents. That does not factor in police and community. Ferguson was at the center of riots that broke out just before Thanksgiving in 2014. Rioters and looters set parts of Ferguson aflame over the death of area resident Michael Brown, which was used to inflame the Black Lives Matter movement.
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