Every year, the FBI gathers and reports on crime statistics for every town in America.

Using those numbers, the Wall Street Journal on its MarketWatch.com website recently posted a report, “10 U.S. cities where crime is soaring.”

Bend ranked No. 4. It joined a list populated by the likes of Pascagoula, Miss., Rapid City, S.D., and Manchester, N.H.

Redding, Calif., captured the No. 1 spot. Violent crime there increased over five years by 103.4 percent, according to FBI statistics.

In Bend, by contrast, incidents of violent crime increased by 52 percent between 2006 and 2011, according to FBI statistics quoted by MarketWatch.

Bend police attribute the jump, which officials said department numbers show is more like 25 percent, to a return to normal levels after a drop in crime during the recession that hit this area so hard.

Bend Chief of Police Jeff Sale, in a memo Friday to City Manager Eric King, pointed out that MarketWatch reported numbers for the Bend Metropolitan Statistical Area, which encompasses all of Deschutes County and “is not a true reflection of the city of Bend.”

King on Saturday said rapid growth contributes to crime in Bend and complicates any attempt to quantify it over time. Bend is “growing into itself as a city,” he said. Demographic patterns changed as the population surged to about 80,000; several years may pass before the city has an accurate picture of itself and the roots of its crime, King said.

“Bend is a very livable city,” with crime rates at or below cities of similar size. “There’s definitely a growing concern about crime, in general,” King said. “We want to stay on top of it, but I don’t think the sky is falling.”

According to Sale, the MarketWatch report drew on bad data that Oregon supplied the FBI.

Bad data

“The data being sent to the FBI by the state is incorrect,” Sale wrote. “The state has had a software problem for several years that causes individual crimes to be counted several times.”

The number of robbery cases, in particular, reported to the FBI are probably inaccurate, said Bend Police Department public information officer Lt. Chris Carney.

“A couple of things this doesn’t include is the transient population, how many visitors we have to the area, how many people are driving down (U.S. Highway) 97,” Carney said. “What is the true population in Bend on a daily basis?”

Numbers gathered by Bend police indicate that violent crimes increased about 25 percent between 2006 and 2011, while property crimes decreased about 25 percent. Sale’s analysis of data from Bend police and the Uniform Crime Reporting Program, the FBI program, shows an increase in violent crime in Bend of 9.8 percent per 100,000 people. Property crimes decreased by 33.6 percent per 100,000.

Sale reported that Bend saw a steeper drop in property crime than the Northwest and the nation as a whole; it also has the lowest rate of violent crime compared to rates in Washington, Oregon and the U.S.

According to FBI numbers, murder remains extremely rare in Bend and in Central Oregon overall. Bend saw a strange spike of five murders in 2010, but otherwise have had only one within city limits since 2007.

Robberies seem to have dropped off, and the number of rapes remained fairly steady year to year. But aggravated assaults have increased. In 2007 there were 95 aggravated assaults; in 2011 there were 151, down from 197 in 2010.

Property crimes have decreased since 2007 in Bend as well, although they appear to be back on the rise.

Recession declines

A drop in property crimes, particularly during 2008 and 2009, coincided with a drastic drop in construction sites over the same period, Carney said.

“We had our share of tools being stolen all the time, of materials being stolen,” he said. “The recession took the whole element of that out of the picture.”

Carney said crime rates in Bend dropped during the recession in 2008 and 2009, and are now back on the rise.

“We expected to see a jump in crime,” he said of the recession. “One of my big concerns was that we kept getting rid of positions. … We have less officers than we had in 2006, so my biggest fear personally when the recession hit was, ‘Oh no, we’re losing positions and the crime rate is going to go soaring because of the economy. How will we keep up?’”

The Bend Police Department has a new records management system and hired a crime analyst in order to try to figure out where and when crimes are most likely to occur. The department has also begun mapping crime to look for patterns.

“We’re trying to be more proactive,” Carney said. “Our thinking is we’re trying to do more by being smarter and accomplishing more.”

Some violent crimes, like domestic violence and random attacks, can’t be planned for. Robberies and many property crimes, however, are easier to parse for patterns.

Of the increase in assaults, Carney said his office was working to determine what percent of those assaults are stranger-on-stranger crime and what percent of those assaults involved people who know one another.

And he noted that while his department has seen a decrease in weapons offenses between 2006 and 2011, they’ve seemed to increase again since the 2008-09 drop in crime.

“One of the things that officers have talked about a lot is our calls might not be as high as they were (in the past), but the calls we’re getting are requiring more officers for safety reasons,” he said.

Read the MarketWatch.com report online at www.marketwatch .com/story/10-us-cities-where-crime-is-soaring-2012-12-16.