Jaci Woods is having trouble getting her neighbors to sign up for her WatchMail crime e-mail alerts. There's simply not enough crime in Irvine to warrant interest in dispatches about car burglaries, purse snatchings and stolen electronics.
Woods and her husband moved to Irvine from Virginia in 1971, the year the fledgling Orange County suburb incorporated, back when just a few thousand families were settling into sparkling new homes surrounded by ranch land. But the real estate broker worried that someday, as Irvine grew, it would succumb to big-city problems: overcrowding, traffic, noise, and escalating crime. But it hasn't.
Irvine -- 37 years old and now a city of more than 200,000 -- has been listed as the nation's safest city five years running, with less violent crime per capita than any other community over 100,000 people, according to FBI statistics.
Last year it experienced its lowest violent crime rate ever, with just 129 reported violent crimes and one homicide.
The tranquillity makes for a community where some feel carefree enough to keep their front doors unlocked and think nothing of taking a walk alone at night.
Woods, for instance, takes along pepper spray when she goes out for evening walks, but only for possible coyote encounters.
"We tend to get lax," Woods said. "We think: We're the safest city, we can leave things lying around, cars unlocked, purses and laptops in full view."
The top items in the crime blotter in the town's local newspaper paint the picture: stolen beer kegs from a concert amphitheater (they were empty) and a thief stealing school supplies and a clarinet from a car parked at an elementary school.
Irvine is so safe that some neighborhood watch groups have disbanded; it's the kind of place where residents call police to report dead crows on the road. And the police respond.
::
The well-to-do, educated community, sheltered in the southern half of Orange County, seems a world away from the urban gridlock of Greater Los Angeles.
It is a university town where the median household income is nearly $100,000 a year.
It is an ethnically diverse upper middle-class community that has drawn people from across the country along with a sizable population of Asian and Middle Eastern immigrants, lured by its high-performing schools, plentiful jobs and tidy environs.
