Ozzy, I Know How You Feel

It was, said Ozzy Osbourne after the £1m robbery this week at his Buckinghamshire home, safer in Los Angeles. Ozzy, I know how you feel.

Nearly six years ago, I arrived in Los Angeles as the Guardian correspondent there and started house-hunting. Were we, asked the estate agents, looking for a "walking community", by which they meant did we want to live somewhere where we could reach shops and cafes by foot, or would we prefer, perhaps, a "gated community" with supposedly better security? We chose the former and moved into Venice (Jack Kerouac, Jim Morrison, beach.) Shortly afterwards, I saw in the LA Times a handy guide to the eight designated gang areas of LA and found that we were living in the middle of one.

There was an active neighbourhood watch scheme. Too active perhaps. The local coordinator took photos of Venice's crack dealers and put the results on his website. The police had cautioned him against this approach but he continued until he was shot dead after returning from the local gym. Some houses displayed "armed response" and "attack dogs loose" placards, although I did also see one "attack cat" sign. When a colleague arrived for a visit, she was told by her cab driver that it was a dangerous area. But to me it always seemed like the friendliest of places. I often left the front door open and my car unlocked without any trouble.

In my area of north London, by contrast, parked cars are essentially adventure playgrounds for criminals. I gave up counting the number of times I got up in the morning with dustpan and brush to sweep the broken glass from the passenger seat. There was never anything there to steal - or so I thought until my tax disc and an A-Z disappeared.

So is Ozzy safer in LA? He still runs a higher chance of being murdered there though the murder rate in LA has dropped from 850 in 1994 to 515 last year. In London, the Metropolitan police's figure for murder in the past year was 210, and London has a population nearly twice as big. But an international study last month showed the US to have a significantly lower burglary rate. In Ozzy's district of Buckinghamshire, with a population of 110,000, there were no murders and 1,823 burglaries.

The new Michael Mann film, Collateral, tells the story of a hitman, played by Tom Cruise, who hires an LA cab intending to carry out five murders before getting dropped off at the airport. I asked a London cabbie the other night when he was last asked by a hitman to help him carry out five assignments in one night and he had to admit that he couldn't recall a single such fare (although he could give me a list of the names of all the MPs who tip badly).

So the message would seem to be: if you want to avoid being blasted to eternity by a hitman in a hurry, stay in Bucks. But if you want to keep those diamonds intact, head for the Hollywood hills.