Valley Crimes Drop 5% in 1st Half of the Year

Despite increases in homicide and rape, reported crimes in the San Fernando Valley dropped 5% during the first half of the year, according to Los Angeles police statistics.

The drop was bolstered by decreases in reported robberies, aggravated assaults, burglaries and auto thefts. A total of 46,784 serious crimes were reported to police in the Valley during the first six months of the year. That was about 2,460 less than were reported during the same period last year. Crimes defined as serious include murder, rape, assault, burglary, theft and car theft.

Explaining the increases or decreases in crime is an inexact science, police said.

But Deputy Chief Mark A. Kroeker, commander of the five Valley divisions, said Monday that he was particularly encouraged by the decreases in robberies, down 6%, and auto thefts, down 5%, because each crime has different but significant effects on the quality of life.

“Robbery is down some, and to me that is the most encouraging of all the trends because that goes right to community fears,” Kroeker said. “A robbery is a mugging. When you have a robbery, the hysteria flows in the community. The level of fear goes up, sometimes even exceeding the level of reality. It’s the kind of thing that make people say, ‘I’m leaving.’ ”

On the other hand, auto theft is a widespread crime in the Valley. Police said 10,643 cars were reported stolen in the first six months of the year--or about one car every 24 minutes. Kroeker said such an epidemic affects how residents view the quality of their life here.

“It is a crime of irritation,” Kroeker said. “It makes you mad. Robbery makes you afraid, auto theft makes you mad. I am encouraged by the decreases in these areas.”

In other crimes, the six-month statistics show a 4.6% drop in burglaries and a 4.3% decrease in aggravated assaults.

“We shouldn’t take too much satisfaction in the reduction,” Kroeker said. “It could be we are just coming off a period of high saturation of crime. It’s similar to a patient with a 104 degree temperature dropping to 103. That’s great, but the patient is still sick. The level of crime is still high in the Valley. We still have a lot of work to do.”

Despite the overall improved crime picture, the Valley decrease lagged behind citywide figures that showed a 6.7% decline in all reported crime.

And reported rapes in the Valley rose 10% to 235 in the first six months and homicides jumped 15% to 76. Almost all of the homicide increase was accounted for in the Devonshire Division--the Valley’s northwest area--where homicides nearly doubled from nine in the first six months of last year to 17 during the same period this year.

Finding reasons to explain increases for such crimes against people is impossible, police said.

“There is no way of explaining it,” said Detective Tom Broad, head of the six-officer homicide squad in the Devonshire Division. “It’s part of human nature to want to explain something. Why is the sky blue?

“But right now in 1993, we still don’t know why the sky is blue. Crime is no different and homicide is even more difficult to explain. The human factor is involved. There are as many reasons as there are parts of the human experience.

“We’ve had a little bit of all of that in our homicides this year,” Broad said. “We’ve had a son who killed a mother, a father who killed a son, a friend who killed a friend. We’ve had narcotics involved, everything.”

Burbank police also released statistics for the first half of the year that showed overall crime has increased about 11%. The jump was largely due to a 22% increase in reported thefts to 1,316 and an 8.6% rise in all assaults to 429 offenses. Meanwhile, auto thefts dropped 5%, while murders, rapes and robberies remained largely unchanged.