COLMA, Calif. —
Colma, California, known as the “City of Souls” due to its 1.5 million graves, has the highest crime rate in the San Francisco Bay Area. A town of about 1,700 residents, it has a near 1,000:1 grave-to-person ratio.
The San Mateo County city is only 2 square miles, most of which is zoned for its 17 cemeteries.
In 2020, it surpassed Emeryville for the highest Bay Area crime rate, and its rate has increased 325 percent since then to 68,000 crimes per 100,000 population in 2023, according to a Bay Area News Group analysis of OpenJustice data from the California DOJ.
That’s more than three times higher than second-place Emeryville and five times higher than third-place Oakland.
The most popular form of crime is larceny-theft, with 910 incidents last year, 787 of which were shoplifting.
“A lot of people just tend to walk out [without paying]; we can’t really do anything about it,” Hana Nishitani, an Old Navy worker in Colma, told The Epoch Times. “There’s not much we can do.”
Nishitani suggested that a lot of the theft in Colma comes from people living in neighboring cities who come to Colma’s two major shopping centers, the 280 Metro and Serra Center.
“We do have a lot of people coming from Serramonte that generally shoplift here and then go [to] Ulta [Beauty and] Target,” she said. “It’s more just people outside of Colma.”
She said Colma residents are very nice and easygoing. She cited fewer police officers and people in the area as potential reasons for the crime and theft.
Colma’s July crime bulletin revealed 121 counts of theft and more than 1,200 bad checks last month.
Sandra Lopez, a worker at the Colma Ross, was a little surprised to hear about Colma’s crime rate. She thinks that while there is a lot of shoplifting in Colma, it is no more than in other places.
“[The police] are very responsive,” she told The Epoch Times. “They’re quicker than other cities I’ve seen.”
She said Colma’s close proximity to BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) could be a possible cause of all the theft. She doesn’t believe it has anything to do with the cemeteries.
Colma originally became a city full of cemeteries because in the late 1880s, San Francisco’s 26 cemeteries were full, and cemetery owners began looking for somewhere new to bury their dead. They chose the southern end of Colma because of its convenient location for transportation.
In 1900, San Francisco passed an ordinance banning burials, saying land was too valuable to be used for cemeteries.
Then in 1914, eviction notices required all cemeteries to remove their bodies and monuments, which led to Colma receiving hundreds of thousands of bodies. It officially became a city 10 years later.
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