Governor Cites Tougher Laws for Drop in Crime

New state laws mandating prison sentences are the “major reason why the crime rate in Orange County and across our state has stopped accelerating year after year,” Gov. George Deukmejian told 300 people, mostly law enforcement officers, at an anti-crime awards banquet in Irvine on Wednesday night.

Deukmejian also announced the 11 recipients of the Governor’s Crime Prevention Awards, including the Irvine Police Department and Newport Beach resident Barbara Long. The awards banquet held at the Irvine Hilton Hotel was sponsored by the California Stop Crime Coalition, an organization Deukmejian helped found in 1976.

‘Approach Is Working’

“For many years, you in this room and I advocated tougher laws which would guarantee the certainty of punishment by requiring judges to impose mandatory sentences for many crimes,” Deukmejian said. “We argued that if we had these laws, such as the ‘use a gun, go to prison’ law, and could remove more criminals from our communities and convince other would-be criminals to start behaving. Our approach is working.”

In 1975, he said, 16% of the convicted felons were sent to state prison. Today, he said, more than 35% go to prison. “That’s one major reason why here in Orange County we have seen a leveling off of that crime rate.”

The governor repeated his long-held criticism of the California Supreme Court. Specifically, he attacked the court for failing to uphold the death penalty in more than 200 cases in which juries recommended it. The court’s handling of capital punishment cases has already become a campaign issue in the 1986 statewide elections.

The two Orange County recipients of the Crime Prevention Awards were involved in forming neighborhood anti-crime programs.

The governor said Barbara Long of Newport Beach had been responsible for organizing Neighborhood Watch programs throughout her city. According to the stop-crime coalition, Long personally had recruited more than 80 block captains and 3,000 members.

Coalition spokesmen said she had computerized the membership to help provide crime information bulletins. They said this contributed to a 45% decrease in major crimes during the past three years in Newport Beach.

‘I Was Incensed’

“I was a member of our community organization (Neighborhood Watch),” Long said. “We were having a lot of burglaries in our neighborhood. I was incensed and just wanted to do something about them.”

The governor cited the Irvine Police Department’s preventive services unit for reducing burglary by 25% during the first six months of this year in a high-crime area of the city. The Irvine police worked with nearly 100 community associations under the auspices of a “Neighborhood Alert Program” involving 6,200 households.