The Sacramento Police Department's Crime Statistics System tracks all crime reports filed by police officers in the field, report-writers who take crime incidents over the phone and those filed by computer over the Internet. The statistics are available both in raw data form and in more easily understood breakdowns by neighborhood. The Bee obtained the databases of 425,866 crime reports from 1991 to 1997 to track trends over years and a geographical analysis of crime based on neighborhoods and police subdistricts. Such detailed information was not available from the Sacramento County Sheriff's Department nor from the sheriff's departments in Placer and El Dorado counties. There is a possible error rate of 10 percent because the information is often recorded by hand and entered into the computer manually.
Larger neighborhoods have more crime reports because of their size.
The police also divide the city into 48 neighborhoods, many of which bear the same names as those used by city planners, neighborhood associations and the post office. However, the boundaries used by police and these other groups do not always correspond. In this series of stories, The Bee is using the police's neighborhood designations. The category of violent crime includes homicide, assault and battery, child and spousal abuse, robbery, rape, kidnapping and disturbance. Property crime includes auto burglary, residential burglary, business burglary, theft and forgery, auto theft and vandalism.