FBI Study Adds Credence to O.C. Crime Concerns

Only days after a poll showing that two-thirds of Orange County residents still ranked crime as their No. 1 worry, newly released federal crime statistics show they have reason to be concerned.

While the rate of property crimes like burglary and auto theft declined 4.6% in Orange County from 1992 to 1993, violent crimes--murder, rape, robbery and assault--dropped a mere 1.1%. And murders during that time period jumped 13%, equal to 7.8 killings per 100,000 people.

But other statistics measuring crime in the first six months of 1994 show that the number of Orange County murders has continued to rise, jumping another 9.5% in the county’s eight largest cities.

Violent crime overall increased nearly 4% in Orange County during the same six-month period, while the rest of the country saw a 4% decrease in murders, rapes, robberies and assaults.

The growing violent crime rate locally mirrors the mounting anxiety among Orange County residents who responded to the 1994 Orange County Annual Survey released last week. UC Irvine Prof. Mark Baldassare conducted the poll Aug. 19-29 for the university’s School of Social Ecology.

Of those polled, 44% said they were afraid of becoming crime victims and 66% said they favored tougher gun control legislation. Crime was rated as local residents’ greatest concern.

“We’ve seen violent, violent crime come to places where it usually doesn’t happen: hate crimes at the beach, a boy killed with a paint roller, drive-by shootings in Irvine, drive-by shootings in Mission Viejo,” said Garden Grove Police Chief Stanley L. Knee. “Crime, reported by the media, has spread to parts of the county that thought it was safe. . . . It has an unsettling effect.”

According to new FBI statistics, the county’s three safest cities are Laguna Niguel, Yorba Linda and Laguna Hills. None of the cities had a murder in 1993 and together the cities had 16 rapes--one less than the city of La Habra by itself. The number of assaults in Laguna Hills dropped 50% from 130 to 65.

The three cities with the highest crime rates are Costa Mesa, Stanton and Laguna Beach. Laguna Beach had nearly five times as many assaults as the more residential Laguna Hills, which has more than double its population.

The serious crime rate for Anaheim could not be calculated, because of a change in way that the city’s police reported aggravated assaults.

There was good news for the nation in the FBI’s latest statistical tally of homicides, rapes, robberies, aggravated assaults, burglaries and thefts. Nationwide, overall crime dropped 3% in the first six months of 1994, which comes on top of a 2% decline in 1993.

In Orange County, the number of nonviolent property crimes continued to drop in 1993, with burglaries down nearly 10%.

Some cities showed declines in crime nearly double or triple the county average. Among the top crime-busters: Orange, where overall crime dropped 12.9%, and Fullerton, where crime dipped 8.7%. But while the violent crimes increased in Orange, Fullerton saw its number of violent crimes drop 7.7%.

“We’re just seeing the fruits of what we’ve been doing for a couple of years,” Fullerton Capt. Ken Head said. “Our gang detail is maturing and it’s starting to pay off.”

Head said it took two of the department’s crime-fighting programs--its gang detail and Operation Cleanup, which targets three of the city’s crime hot spots--several years to establish themselves in the community and begin showing significant results.

But Head said some crime statistics in Fullerton have remained relatively static, simply because the crooks couldn’t plunder more than they already were.

“We’ve been hit hard with auto thefts, but I don’t know if they could steal any more cars in the city,” Head said. “There’s only so many criminals.”

Irvine, a city of nearly the same population as Fullerton, had 3,336 fewer crimes, but a smaller drop in crime. Cited as one of the safest cities in the nation last year, Irvine again had a low crime rate, with crime declining 8.2%. Most of the drop was fueled by a 19% dive in the number of burglaries from 1,226 in 1992 to 990 in 1993.

But law enforcement officials countywide cautioned that the statistics don’t always paint a clear picture of a city’s crime troubles.

“You could have a rash of 20 residential burglaries in one neighborhood in a month’s time and that can throw off your whole year’s statistics,” said Orange County Sheriff’s Lt. Kim Markuson, chief of police services for Mission Viejo. “That’s where these statistics are deceiving.”

Mission Viejo, which contracts with the Sheriff’s Department for police services, showed an astonishing 21.4% rise in crime from 1992 to 1993, all of it in property thefts. Auto thefts alone jumped 30.2%. Meanwhile, the number of violent crimes has remained nearly the same--and less than local cities of comparable size. There were 13 rapes, 32 robberies and 142 assaults in the city in 1993, compared to 25 rapes, 42 robberies and 205 assaults in Newport Beach, which has 8,000 fewer residents.

“We’re fortunate in Mission Viejo that we don’t have a lot of violent crime,” Markuson said. “Our problems are of the property crime type, but I don’t see them to be overwhelming. It seems cyclical. Sometimes they’re up, sometimes they’re down.”

Huntington Beach also saw a big jump in crime, up 7.1% over 1992, with 10.5% more assaults.

“I’m very concerned about rapes and assaults going up,” said Mayor Linda Moulton Patterson, who leaves office Monday. “There are more handguns out there and frankly we don’t have enough police officers.”

Moulton Patterson said Huntington Beach has one of the lowest ratios of police officers to residents, about 1.2 per thousand residents. She compared the ratio in Huntington Beach to that of Newport Beach, another coastal city with lots of tourist traffic, but one that has nearly double the ratio of police to residents. But she said the city is doing battle with the statistics, recently approving the hiring of eight more police officers.

“I think Huntington Beach is still a very safe city,” she said.

Garden Grove Chief Knee saw violent crime in his city decrease 6.0% from 1992 to 1993, but he said reports of violent crime will most likely increase next year--and he’s happy about it.

Knee said beefed-up community policing efforts have encouraged people to report violent crimes at a greater rate than in the past. This year his department already has seen a 25% increase in the reporting of assaults such as domestic violence, he said.

But for the purposes of crime statistics, it’s a Catch-22, Knee said. His officers encourage reporting, so there are more violent crimes reported in Garden Grove.

* CITY-BY-CITY ANALYSIS: Crime in O.C. from 1992 to ’93 falls by 5,524 incidents. B3

Crime Statistics Show Mixed Results

While Orange County property crimes declined almost 5% in 1993, and violent crimes were down about 1%, murder increased 13%. The overall decline from 1992 to 1993 is the second consecutive year in which crime fell in the county, and the fourth consecutive year in which the rate per 100,000 residents has dropped. Crimes in the FBI index include murder, non-negligent manslaughter, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, grand theft (larceny) and motor vehicle theft.

Crime in Decline

After peaking in 1991, the number of serious crimes reported to Orange County police has continued to fall. Over the past five years, the rate of serious or felony crimes has steadily fallen:

Total Crimes 1993: 135,212

*

Crime rate per 100,000 residents 1993: 5,386.5

Rate Comparison

Laguna Niguel had the lowest crime rate per 100,000 residents during 1993. Examining cities by rate rather than absolute number of crimes removes size as a factor in analysis, allowing comparison on an even basis. Here is how the cities compare, from the lowest rate to the highest

Note: Anaheim’s rate is not available

Sources: FBI; California attorney general’s office, Bureau of Criminal Statistics