Here's Jean Quan's statement today acknowledging that the 100-blocks crime plan she repeatedly touted as reducing violent crime was based on incorrect data. Quan says:
I was given incorrect data last year regarding areas with a high concentration of homicides in our city. I have been using that data to describe the 100 Blocks Initiative. As Mayor I should have taken more time to analyze and verify the data and its accuracyas it related to the concentration of violent crime in our community. This isregrettable and I take full responsibility for the error.
Full statement, in which she also defends the strategy behind the plan:
Last week, Quan's chief of staff, Anne Campbell Washington, said that Quan's repeated assertion that 90 percent of Oakland homicides and shootings occur within the same 100 blocks is incorrect. Quan was in Brazil at a U.N. conference on sustainable development at the time.
Criticism of the already controversial plan erupted earlier this month when the Urban Strategies Council released a report that said the following, directly contradicting the premise of the 100-block initiative:
In the five year model (2007-2011), we determined that 17%, or 598 homicides and shootings, occurred within the top 100 blocks in the City. There were a total of 3601 total homicides and shootings in the City over this period.
In 2011, we found that 20% of homicides and shootings (165) were within the top 100 blocks in the City, compared to 845 homicides and shootings in the City overall.
The city initially defended its data, and since then, Quan has taken some hits in the press, like these...
- Oakland Mayor Jean Quan needs to get facts straight (Chip Johnson)
- Jean Quan is, alas, somewhere else (Jon Carroll)
- 100 block crime plan a house of cards (Tammerlin Drummond)
A couple of weeks ago, KQED's Tara Siler talked to Steve Spiker, the research and technology director of the Urban Strategies Council, about its report debunking the Oakland data. He criticized the city for refusing to release "any data whatsoever that's testable or in any level of detail to give anyone the ability to check and see if this is actually the truth, if there is dropping crime in these neighborhoods."