FBI does not rank U.S. cities on public safety

Despite my previous requests that the news media and public officials in Ventura County and city of Thousand Oaks cease claiming wrongfully that the FBI ranks cities such as Thousand Oaks and Simi Valley as being "safest in the nation," the practice continues.

The most recent printed instance was evidenced in a voter solicitation endorsement distributed via mail by Ventura County District Attorney Greg Totten supporting Andy Fox for reelection. To quote the false claim, "The FBI rates Thousand Oaks as the safest city in America and firefighter Andy Fox has provided the leadership to achieve that ranking."

The FBI Uniform Crime Reporting office has sent me a brochure which they issued widely to all city and county government officials in the nation, declaring that the FBI does not do any indexing or ranking of the crime statistics submitted to them by many major cities, and also that the FBI does not consider the crime data to be a valid measure of total public safety.

Those FBI official crime statistics issued annually are listed in alphabetical city name order and also in order of population size, but intentionally not in any ranked order of criminal activity.

The FBI issues the summary of all those crime statistics for the law enforcement agencies in cities solely as a guide to assess if there is a need for better crime law enforcement practices in their city.

In the FBI crime data listed, there is no data on motor vehicle traffic accidents, poor air quality, impurities and hazardous chemical materials in the public water supply system, etc., since the crime data listed in intended for use only by crime law enforcement officials.

In their transmittal letter, the FBI UCR office strongly discourages cities from converting the reported crime statistics to a crime index and ranking all of the cities on their annual UCR list as a measure of safety in the cities based on any contrived crime index.

District Attorney Totten knows that full well and disgraces himself by stating otherwise.

The Ventura County District Attorney, and all county and city officials who distort the FBI crime data to mean something it clearly does not, are very wrong.

They are intentionally and shamefully deluding the public into thinking that a low amount of criminal activity indicates their city is the safest in the nation and results in the public letting down their safety guard.

How many injuries and deaths occur daily to motorists, pedestrians and bicyclists due to traffic accidents, occupational accidents, home fires, health hazards such as air pollution or water impurities (E. coli bacteria in lettuce and spinach, or perchlorates or the fuel additive MTBE in local water wells) compared to injuries and deaths from criminal activities? Human injury due to any cause is painful and a death the same great loss to a family regardless of the cause.

Proclaiming any city to be "safest in America" is a deceptive and dangerous political hoax. Herbert Hutchinson Westlake Village