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Indybay Feature

Where are the child molesters in Berkeley?

by cp
When I heard that Arnold was reporting the release of California's new online home address list of violent sex offenders, including photos, I decided to look up my neighborhood near UC Berkeley. Because where I live near People's park has quite a lot of mentally ill and homeless people, and also a number of assisted living houses for previously homeless people, I had a prior expectation that there might be more sex offenders released from prison. However, there was only one person listed in the whole neighborhood.
This was interesting. The purpose of the database is to identify your local molester and to monitor and shun them. Clicking through the photos, who tend to be fairly ugly men on average, it also seemed clear that Berkeley's sex offenders tended to be rapists of adults rather than children.
When you listen to O'Reilly on Fox News, or Rush Limbaugh on the radio, or generally listen to conservatives, it is easy to get the idea that conservatives would expect San Francisco to be filled with child molesters. The media repeatedly tells the story of protective parents who choose to live in suburbs and small towns in order to keep their children away from the risks of degenerate cities. Big cities, particularly the 'barbary coast' would be somewhere where criminals could go to live in anonymity, while everyone supposedly knows their neighbors in small towns and would use group shunning to drive out bad people. There are always movies about runaway teens who go to New York or San Francisco and get raped or molested. I typed in San Francisco in their city search, and while there is a cluster of sex offenders in residential hotels on 6th street, there actually aren't that many at all. I typed in other cities, and a pattern develops, but I wish someone with background in sociology would figure this out and explain it to us.
There are a lot of comparisons between San Francisco and San Jose for being the same size, and both have expensive housing stock with a few cheaper areas, and computer professionals, yet San jose is clearly the more conservative city considered to be less risky. Yet about 3X more released sex offenders live there.
So next, the obvious guess would be that sex offenders can't get jobs and must live where it's cheap, yet... Richmond, CA, which is considered to have cheap housing due to the oil refineries always leaking toxic fumes, and to be so dangerous that suburbanites won't even stop for gas there, has a per capita child molester rate that is much lower than that of Bakersfield, which has a rate 5X as high as that of San Francisco. What explains that? Yreka is a small town where ex-offenders couldn't necessarily get a good job or low rent, but you could say that the spike there is artificial because plus or minus a few offenders would make their per capita rate go up.
It seems like very high wealth will make the offender population be very low, but why does Livermore have a higher rate than Berkeley or San Francisco. Salinas, which has a more working class latino population than Sacramento, has half the rate of Sacramento, and also Bakersfield. West Hollywood is supposed to have a big teen runaway scene with Sunset Boulevard and whatnot, but has few rapists listed. Can someone figure this out? It is almost as though having a liberal cultural history is one covariate which always tends to lower the number of released sex offenders, because poverty can't explain more than some of this.

from highest to lowest per capita
city population #molesters number offenders/10,000 residents
------------------------------------------------------------------
grass valley 11131.0 57.0 51.2
yreka 7290.0 35.0 48.0
bakersfield 271035.0 1010.0 37.3
sacramento 445335.0 1583.0 35.5
stockton 271466.0 772.0 28.4
West Sacramento 37897.0 95.0 25.1
Modesto 206872.0 516.0 24.9
fresno 451455.0 1098.0 24.3
Lancaster 125896.0 303.0 24.1
Yuba city 48998.0 101.0 20.6
Oakland 398844.0 803.0 20.1
richmond 102327.0 195.0 19.1
riverside 281514.0 494.0 17.5
susanville 13541.0 23.0 17.0
san jose 898349.0 1518.0 16.9
Santa Cruz 54000.0 91.0 16.9
Hayward 141336.0 238.0 16.8
arcata 16651.0 28.0 16.8
Santa Barbara 88251.0 145.0 16.4
Salinas 147840.0 230.0 15.6
long beach 475460.0 655.0 13.8
Concord 124977.0 146.0 11.7
fairfield 102762.0 114.0 11.1
los angeles 3819951.0 3997.0 10.5
anaheim 332361.0 330.0 9.9
san diego 1266753.0 1248.0 9.9
elk grove 82499.0 74.0 9.0
Santa Ana 342510.0 302.0 8.8
Livermore 77744.0 66.0 8.5
san francisco 751682.0 586.0 7.8
berkeley 102049.0 77.0 7.5
Torrance 142621.0 107.0 7.5
Daly city 100819.0 73.0 7.2
Burbank 103359.0 62.0 6.0
Novato 48383.0 29.0 6.0
Simi Valley 117115.0 70.0 6.0
West Hollywood 36731.0 19.0 5.2
walnut creek 65151.0 23.0 3.5
albany 18000.0 6.0 3.3
soledad 25248.0 7.0 2.8
irvine 170561.0 23.0 1.3
Manhattan beach 36007.0 3.0 0.8
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