Upbeat Crime Report Issued by Burgreen

In an unusually positive report on the city’s crime situation, San Diego Police Chief Bob Burgreen said Wednesday that homicides, rapes and gang violence have decreased markedly from a year ago and that the rate of increase in auto thefts has leveled off.

Nevertheless, the city remains in the grip of a crime crisis perpetuated primarily by the drug trade and the lack of space in jails for most of the suspects police arrest, Burgreen said.

Overall, crime rose 9.5%, a figure that included an 11.3% rise in motor vehicle theft, an 11.1% increase in theft and a 9.1% increase in aggravated assault, according to Burgreen’s report to the City Council’s Public Services and Safety Committee. The report compares crime statistics from the first half of 1989 with the same period last year.

But the figures also reflected decreases of 18.6% in murders and 15% in rapes. “Prostitution-related arrests” declined nearly 30%, gang-related drive-by shootings fell from 64 to 33, and gang-related homicides decreased from 15 to 8, Burgreen said.

Still an ‘Emergency,’ He Says

Hailing progress in gang control and new cooperation between the City Council and the County Board of Supervisors to provide pre-arraignment jail space, Burgreen maintained that the crime “emergency” declared by the city in May because of gang- and drug-related violence still exists.

Burgreen said the city still needs the $34 million that it requested from Gov. Deukmejian as part of the emergency declaration. Deukmejian in June rejected the request that he also declare an emergency and declined to send the city more state money. A bill seeking similar funding was killed by the Legislature.

“I definitely would not say the crime wave has broken,” Burgreen told reporters. “We’ve made it difficult (for gangs) to operate . . . . (but), if we turned our backs on them for a moment, they’d be back out there.”

Burgreen’s report came a day before a scheduled joint meeting of the City Council and the Board of Supervisors at which the two panels are expected to approve a joint effort to build a pre-arraignment jail that could eventually house 2,700 inmates.

The county’s jails are the most crowded in the nation, a situation that causes police to release more than 100 misdemeanor arrestees a day, some of them for crimes involving drugs or weapons. As he has in the past, Burgreen Wednesday cited that state of affairs as the major impediment to law enforcement.

Pre-Election Report

The report will be Burgreen’s last update before the Sept. 19 elections for four City Council incumbents. John Hartley, challenger to 3rd District Councilwoman Gloria McColl, has attempted to make crime the top issue in his campaign. McColl is chairwoman of the committee before which Burgreen presents his quarterly reports.

Hartley also testified before the panel Wednesday, asserting that crime in the Mid-City neighborhoods that McColl represents has not declined.

Assistant Police Chief Norm Stamper said that Burgreen did not highlight improvements in the crime situation because of the impending elections. Noting the drug trade, on which the Police Department spends more than 50% of its budget, and the continued lack of jail space, Stamper said that “we’re in no immediate danger of those problems being solved.”

Burgreen told the council that the city’s murder rate is returning to normal after last year’s unusually high level. There were 70 homicides during the first six months of last year, and 57 during the same period this year.

“We felt last year was an aberration, even as it was happening,” he said. “We anticipated a return to normal . . . and that’s what’s happening,” he said.

Stamper said police are unable to account for the decline in rapes, from 207 during the first six months of last year to 176 during the same period this year.

Gang Violence Suppressed

Burgreen praised the efforts of the newly formed, 86-member Special Enforcement Detail for playing a key role in the dramatic decline in gang violence over last year, proclaiming that gang activity “is a fire we have a circle around.

“We have 86 people out there every night,” Burgreen said. “We know the gangs. We know where they hang out.”

Burgreen called the decrease the first in gang activity since police began tracking it in 1976. But figures supplied by Lt. George Saldamando, head of the Police Department’s gang detail, show that the number of gang-related homicides has fluctuated since 1980.

For example, there were 15 gang-related homicides in 1983, 8 in 1984 and 6 a year later. In 1986, the figure rose to 8, and there were 28 gang-related homicides during all of last year, Saldamando said. (There were 8 gang-related slayings during the first six months of this year.)

Burgreen and Saldamando said that police are troubled by an apparent increase in Filipino gang activity, some of which is occurring in North City neighborhoods that traditionally have had little problem with gangs.

The number of shootings at occupied dwellings rose from 23 last year to 37 during the same period this year, and 17 of the 37 incidents involved Filipino gang members, Burgreen said. Police have arrested 68 Filipino gang members this year, up from 12 during the same period last year.

Prostitution, a key issue in the 3rd District, which includes prostitution-plagued neighborhoods along El Cajon Boulevard, has declined because of the March 7 decision by Sheriff John Duffy to book prostitutes into the Las Colinas jail for women.

“As we predicted, when prostitutes go to jail for their offenses, they go someplace else,” he said.

Though the rate of auto theft jumped 11.3%, Burgreen noted that, during the first six months of last year, it had increased 36.3%. He credited the slower rise to the creation of the auto-theft strike unit, which so far this year has made 256 arrests, recovered 265 vehicles valued at $1.9 million and closed 40 illegal “chop shops” where stolen cars are dismantled.