How Can We Make Hayward Safe?

Though things are quiet in and around Hayward—aside from a slew of local events—the statewide picture is a lot less rosy. ICE continues to abduct and terrorize residents of Los Angeles. People are refusing to go to school or church for fear of being kidnapped from their families by masked enforcers and imprisoned without due process.

And while there hasn’t been as much activity around the Bay Area, presumably because they’re so busy in LA, the specter of ICE looms large. But who is supposed to protect us? Between institutional silence from San Francisco leadership and allegations that Oakland Police illegally shared Flock Camera data with ICE, it’s pretty clear that relying on existing institutions may not be the best idea.

But all of this is supposed to be safer, right? Flock Cameras will help catch more criminals. Cops with attack dogs and assault rifles will protect you from people driving dangerously. And the multiple social media accounts, updated by dedicated personnel, are there to remind you in case you forget.

But increased surveillance and policing doesn’t exist in every city, even in the Bay Area. So tonight we’re going to take a look at community safety: what we’re told makes us safe, how that plays out in the real world, and what might work better instead.

What We’re Told Makes Us Safe

The overarching narrative, most recently out of Oakland and San Francisco, is that more police officers means more safety. The reason we have such high crime rates is because we don’t have enough police officers, and the reason we don’t have officers is because we don’t pay them enough. That’s what leads to a local trend of spending about 30% of a City’s General Funds on police.

And that has a certain logic to it: you wouldn’t commit a crime if you knew a police officer was right around the corner to grab you. The idea is that police officers prevent crime from happening. And by that logic, the Cities with the most police officers per resident would have the lowest crime rates.

To check if this was the case, I tried to look at crime data of different cities throughout the Bay Area. I took a look at City-Data.com and compared Hayward to 5 other cities in the Bay Area that just about anyone would think are fairly low-crime. The data is from 2023, so things definitely may have changed since then, but I’m establishing a baseline.

Comparing City Crime Data

According to City-Data, Hayward had a 2023 “crime index” score of 432, which the site says is 1.8 times higher than the national average. It counted up all the different crimes that year in a table you can read in your own time. For comparison, the score is higher than Union City’s 306 but lower than San Leandro’s 556.

For comparison, I thought of cities that locals might easily consider “safe”: Danville, Dublin, and Atherton. I also looked at what appears to be the safest city that showed up on in the Bay Area: Clayton.

Dublin has a “crime index” of 120, which is 2 times lower than the national average. The only crime higher than the state average in Dublin was theft—they had around 1,000 in 2023.

Atherton, for those who don’t know, is a very small very wealthy enclave on the Peninsula—so wealthy its high school has a radio station. Atherton has a “crime index” of 97, or 2.5 times smaller than the national average. Most of their crime stats are 0.

Danville comes next with a “crime index” of 63, which is almost 4 times lower than the national average.

Finally comes Clayton, the City with the lowest “crime index” score in the generously described Bay Area at 55.5, which is 4.3 times lower than the national average. Clayton has almost no crime to speak of with only 48 reported thefts for the entirety of 2023—compared to Hayward’s 3,000.

Do More Officers Mean Safer Cities?

All of these cities are “safer” than the national and State averages. The average number of Police Officers per 1,000 Residents for California is, according to this site, 2.28. Hayward in 2023 had 277 officers which shakes out to 1.03 officers per 1,000 people—half the state average!

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Surely by the logic that police make us more safe, the other cities must have a higher than average proportion of officers per 1,000 residents. Atherton seems to support this logic with 3.1 officers per 1,000 residents in 2023. But Dublin has 0.86 officers per 1,000 residents—though I had to calculate that myself off of different data—which is lower than Hayward’s. And Clayton, the safest place in the Bay Area, has 0.92 officers per 1,000 residents—nearly identical to Hayward’s ratio.

So if some of the “safest” places in the Bay Area have similar ratios of officers to people than Hayward, what could possibly explain the difference in crime rates?

Who Lives There May Make The Difference

Something that most locals will have noticed is that the lower crime cities are also stereotypically more affluent. For example, Atherton has a median household income of $250,000+—and that’s only because the American Community Survey doesn’t go higher than that. And that trend is similar throughout the Cities we’ve been looking at: Dublin’s average is $205,000, Danville’s is $223,000, but Clayton’s is a mere $172,000. But Hayward’s average household income is still $60,000 per year LESS than Clayton’s at $112,000.

And there’s some good reasons for this, as well. If you look at education, 25% of Hayward residents only have a High School Degree, and a mere 33% have a Bachelor’s Degree or higher. For Clayton, that number is 58%, and Atherton is a whopping 85%. So on average, Hayward residents are less educated and make less money than residents of these “safer” cities.

Who has a good education and a lot of money shakes out exactly as you’d expect in the United States: Danville is mostly White, so is Atherton, and so is Clayton. Dublin is mostly Asian with White coming second. Meanwhile, Hayward is predominantly Latine, followed by Asian, then White.

This affluence also translates to higher rates of homeownership—84% in Atherton, a mere 64% in Dublin, and fully 90% in Clayton. Meanwhile, Hayward has a 59% homeownership rate—the lowest in the bunch. And that ownership rate lines up pretty well with how “safe” the city is.

What Does All This Mean?

So if you compare Hayward to some of the “safest” cities in the area, it becomes clear pretty quickly what actually makes somewhere safe. With the exception of Atherton, the number of police has no direct relation to how “safe” somewhere is. Clayton has the same proportion of police as Hayward.

And Clayton still spends between 25-30% of its General Fund on Police, just like Hayward. Proportionally, Hayward is spending the same amount as Clayton on Police to get worse “safety” outcomes. What should we be doing instead?

What Actually Makes Us Safe

Looking at the data—which no policy maker would ever actually listen to—demonstrates that police have no direct influence on crime rates. Safer places do not have more police per person, so police are not what makes them safe. That means we could take some of the 30% of our General Fund that we spend on Police, and spend it on something that actually does make us safer.

After looking at the census data, it seems pretty clear why those cities are safer: household wealth, educational attainment, rate of homeownership, and race. The “safer” places don’t have more police, they’re full of wealthy—usually White—homeowners who got a good education. But maybe the real issue is that those people are the ones who have their basic needs met right now.

Having your needs met shouldn’t be restricted to the affluent White homeowners. If we truly cared about making our cities safer, we would invest in housing stability and education. Now, a lot of that is out of our control—we can’t directly invest in education without action on the State level, for example—but we could do something.

Things We Could Be Doing

The idea that police don’t make us safe isn’t new—it wasn’t new back in 2020 when the message gained mainstream attention. The idea is to invest in the community—and looking at comparison cities show where that could be done: housing and education would be a good start. But what about the crime that happens now?

I have a theory for why Clayton has such a low crime rate, other than the things listed above. It’s a small town, and those tend to be pretty safe. Have a strong community goes a long way to stop crimes before they start: you might steal from that new fool who moved in last week, but not your friend’s auntie. And there’s evidence to suggest that investing in community can pay off.

This was the promise of the People’s Budget, which has yet to get a second run. That project created the Hayward Night Market, a Community Garden, tutoring opportunities, and activated community spaces like Weekes Park. Despite its obvious and overwhelming success, that program has yet to be reactivated—we have a plan and have been sitting on it.

Linda Nubani of Michigan State and her co-authors wrote an article called Community Engagement in Crime Reduction Strategies. They conclude that when Cities bring together communities and stakeholders with decision-makers and experts, new ideas around environmental design and crime prevention policies can be developed.

They stressed that it’s important to get the community involved in finding solutions. “[Residents] have valuable context to share, which can impact both strategies and implementation.” Their paper, linked above, outlines the process they used to engage with the community and get them involved in improving the safety of their own neighborhood. “[T]he original model, with its sequence of activities and mixed methods approach, provides a useful structure for unearthing latent ideas for community improvement around crime prevention, placemaking, and community revitalization.”

Just Imagine A Different City

Hayward as a City on its own can’t house and educate everyone—there isn’t the funding or legal mechanisms to do so—but there are actions the City could take today to make things safer.

Instead of spending money on police officers who don’t reduce crime, that money could be spent on community engagement around crime prevention and community revitalization.

Instead of paying for new AR-15’s for the Police Department, we could invest in education programs and supportive housing—secure housing was most strongly correlated with the crime rate.

Instead of surveillance cameras throughout the City that HPD pinky-swears won’t be shared with ICE, we could bring the community together to build something great for our City.

Our City should be using the best evidence available to address its problems in a meaningful way. And there’s just no evidence that police reduce crime. Hopefully our elected officials realize that soon and start spending our tax dollars on something that will work.

July 7, 2025: This article was edited slightly to increase clarity.