Crime is routinely under-reported in Santa Cruz. Don't know that I'd call it a secret... perhaps the world's worst kept secret. The main local paper has a preferred narrative, shall we say, and tries its best to ignore crimes that don't fit said narrative.
Stuff like assault, theft, vandalism doesn't get reported. Even deaths involving really bizarre circumstances like a guy who got himself killed in a Safeway parking lot after his vehicle got stuck in reverse and smashed multiple vehicles before running getting run over himself (
http://www.santamierda.com/2018/03/16/the-weekly-dump-3-16-18/ in the "More From UnSafeway" section) didn't make it into our local media. This story had weird and interesting written all over it, the kind of stuff the media loves, and yet nary a peep.
The under-reporting of crime has gotten so bad that a number of groups (e.g. santamierda -> translation "holy shit!") now have people monitoring police scanners and incident websites, along with eyewitness reports from regular citizens, who then blog and report on what's actually going on. Because the mainstream media can't be bothered for whatever reason.
A
recent incident of a transient trying to rape a woman in broad daylight at a busy intersection, who was eventually stopped by bystanders yet then proceeded to strip naked and masturbate in public before attacking a police officer got rather slim media coverage, and that only after some of these alternative media groups brought attention to it.
It's annoying when you see multiple cop cars, and LEO with guns drawn, and other emergency services operating in your neighborhood yet there's zero reporting on what happened. And weird that there's a sense that we the people have to keep the media honest.
I wouldn't be too quick to dismiss someone's concerns of crime unless you know for sure what's really going on in your city.