Little town where the dead outnumber the living has Bay Area’s highest theft rate
Tiny Colma, California, is famous for its cemeteries, the final resting places of newspaper magnates William Randolph Hearst and Charles de Young, jeans maker Levi Strauss, Old West lawman Wyatt Earp and baseball Hall of Famers Willie McCovey and Joe DiMaggio.
While Colma’s 1.5 million dead are far more plentiful than the town’s living residents, tens of thousands of visitors are drawn every day to its bustling Serra and 280 Metro shopping centers and Serramonte Auto Row south of Daly City. And that helps explain another peculiar fact: Colma has by far the highest crime rate of any Bay Area city.
John Munsey, Colma’s police chief for nearly four years, is quick to defend his department, noting that with so few living residents, it doesn’t take many thefts to drive up a rate of crimes per 100,000 people. As a result, the town’s crime rate often has led the region.
“There’s no other town out there with only 1,700 residents but so many people coming into it,” Munsey said. Well, actually, the 2020 Census reports a lower population of 1,507, and that’s the number the state Department of Justice uses in calculating statewide crime rates.
But at a time when a rash of retail thefts blamed on recent California laws that lowered crime penalties has led news reports and spurred a November ballot measure to toughen punishment, Munsey acknowledges his town has been a target for thieves.
“Theft and narcotics cases have increased since 2014,” Munsey said, referring to the year voters passed Proposition 47, which lowered penalties for drug and property crimes that would be toughened a bit more by Proposition 36 on the November ballot. “The California Police Chiefs Association has endorsed Prop 36.”
According to the latest 2023 California Department of Justice data, Colma had the highest property crime rate per 100,000 residents across the nine counties of the Bay Area, and the third-highest rate for violent crime. Most of Colma’s reported 2023 crimes — 996 — involved property, an increase of 194 over 2022. The town’s 24 violent crimes last year were 20 fewer than the year before.
The Colma Police Department’s Facebook page regularly features examples on its “Misdemeanor Mondays” and “Felony Fridays.” Among recent entries: on July 26, a 27-year-old San Francisco woman was cited for taking $947.36 worth of merchandise from a retailer — a value just under Proposition 47’s felony threshold. On July 26, a 45-year-old San Francisco man was arrested for trying to buy a car from a Colma business with invalid identification. A few days later, on July 30, an 18-year-old Oakland man was arrested for stealing $1,844.96 worth of belts from a clothing store.
Though Colma’s total reported property and violent crimes (1,020) were lower than other suburban cities like Antioch (4,078), Richmond (4,798), Vallejo (6,095) and Berkeley (7,809), Colma’s small population vaulted it to the lead in per capita crime rates for Bay Area towns.
Across the Bay, Emeryville, a city of nearly 13,000, had the region’s second-highest rate for property crime and fourth-highest for violent crime. And neighboring Oakland, a city of more than 440,000 residents, had the highest rate for violent crime and fourth-highest for property crime. Both the mayor and county district attorney now face November recall votes.
“The FBI rates us one of the most technically dangerous cities based on crime, but Emeryville only has 1.2 square miles,” said Baylee Worthen, police officer and public information officer at Emeryville police department. The city borders Oakland and its population triples during the day with commuters to jobs at companies including Peet’s Coffee and Pixar Animation Studios.
This year, the department began assigning officers to regular beats in a bid to drive the numbers down, Worthen said.
“They’re encouraged to meet the business owners, the residents, get out and walk in the park and the basketball courts in those beats,” Worthen said. “They get to know the crime trends and the problems that their assigned area is having.”
Colma’s small population pushed its 2023 overall crime rate per 100,000 people to a staggering 68,016 — meaning if the little town actually had 100,000 living souls, it would be expected to log 68,016 crimes. That’s more than 30 times the 2,187 rate for San Mateo County as a whole and almost 2.5 times the rate of 27,852 for the entire nine-county Bay Area.
The Bay Area-wide 2023 crime rate is actually a bit lower than a decade earlier — Alameda is the only county with a higher rate in 2023 than in 2013. Most Bay Area cities saw similar patterns. But Colma’s crime rate has grown fourfold in a decade, with a sharp rise since 2020.
Colma Chief Munsey attributed the sharp increase in part to a change in reporting protocols and data collection systems, with the implementation between 2022 and 2023 of the California Incident-Based Reporting System. San Jose, Oakland, Santa Clara and most other California cities also have made the switch.
Munsey said that under the new system, cases in which thieves who agreed to return the stolen goods to retailers after being caught are still recorded as thefts.
“Because we have the two shopping centers that contribute to the majority of our calls for service regarding theft, we have taken more cases than we would have in the past,” he said. “This may account for the large discrepancy.”
Representatives for Colma’s Serra and 280 Metro shopping centers had no comment on the city’s crime rates and thefts.
Crime data have factored into the debate over whether Proposition 47 has driven up crime. Supporters of the 2014 measure note crime rates that in many places are lower or little changed from a decade ago, while critics argue reduced penalties have discouraged retailers from reporting thefts and officers from responding.
Whatever the cause, Munsey says he’s working to bring the theft rate back down to Earth.
“We’re trying to increase staffing; we haven’t been able to do it yet,” Munsey said. “But it’s the way that we target the criminals, as far as looking at where they are at different times of the day, so we can position our police officers to be most effective. We’ve also worked with our stores and make sure they call us all the time.”