Homicide Rate Down Again for 4th Straight Year

Homicide continued its sharp four-year decline in Orange County in 1997, with the county posting the fewest slayings in a decade despite a growing population.

A Christmas Day stabbing in Santa Ana brought the number of county homicides in 1997 to 108, down from 125 a year ago. The total was well below the 218 slayings in the county’s bloodiest year, 1993.

Santa Ana had 25 homicides last year, the most in the county, followed by 17 in Anaheim, 11 in Orange, nine in Stanton and seven in Westminster, coroner’s records show. Fullerton, Huntington Beach and La Habra each had four, while Buena Park, Garden Grove and Tustin had three each.

Across the county, law enforcement officials greeted the newest numbers with cautious optimism and hopes that concerted anti-gang efforts, tougher sentencing for repeat felons and community policing programs played a part.

Some cited demographics: an improving economy and unemployment rate, and less growth in the number of males in their late teens and early 20s, the most crime-prone group. Others gave some credit to strides in emergency medical care saving the lives of more gunshot victims.

“It’s hard to point to any one thing or number of things as the cause, though,” said Sgt. Joe Vargas, spokesman for the Anaheim police. “But I think that the downtrend over a number of years is a strong indication that our moral compass as a society may be changing. People are sick and tired of all the death and violence.”

A study by the U.S. Department of Justice released Wednesday charts a sharp dip in slayings nationwide, with totals in Los Angeles, New York, Chicago and Washington dipping to levels not seen in years. The tally in Los Angeles, for example, hit a 20-year low.

For Orange County, the 1997 homicide totals were the most encouraging since 1987, when the coroner’s office logged 99 homicides--the last time the number was confined to double digits. The number began climbing the next year and on into the ‘90s, a grisly spiral attributed to widespread gang violence, especially in the county’s largest city, Santa Ana.

“We’ve really turned a corner,” said Santa Ana Police Capt. Dan McCoy, who oversees homicide and street gang investigations. “It’s continued good news, particularly with gang-related homicides.”

The city had 48 gang-related slayings in 1993, but has seen a 65% drop-off in that category in the past two years. McCoy credits the downturn in large part to the department’s effort to identify and target “the worst of the worst” among gang members and the advent of the three-strikes law, which imposes a life sentence in prison for three-time felons.

“The gang members are keenly aware of the new sentencing structure, and we know that from letters we’ve seen written to them by their fellow gang members in prison,” McCoy said. “The letters warn the members on the outside to ‘stay cool’ because [police] ‘will find you and you will get sentenced.’ And that’s coming, in a twisted fashion, from our consumer group, so to speak.”

In Anaheim, there was another somewhat positive sign to be found in the 1997 numbers, said Vargas.

The 17 slayings in the city in 1997 was down from 20 in 1996, and was just half the total of 34 in 1993. And a preliminary survey by investigators this week suggests that only two of those killings might have been “stranger” crimes. In the other cases, he said, the victims knew their assailants or were involved in gangs.

“The stranger crime is what causes the most fear for the public, and they were the most rare,” Vargas said.

While McCoy cites the efforts of police and prosecutors, he and others in law enforcement worry that a looming “demographic bubble” of young people will ratchet up crime and gang violence in the years to come. He also concedes that it is very difficult to pin down precise reasons for any statistical change in crime.

“It’s an inexact science at best,” he said.

Even the homicide count itself is not concrete. Going into the new year, the coroner’s office has 123 cases under investigation, and some will almost certainly be ruled homicides, officials say.

The vast majority of these unresolved cases will be ruled accidental, suicide or natural deaths, officials say.

At least one of the 123 is certain to be deemed a homicide: the uncounted death of Arturo Reyes Torres, the 41-year-old Huntington Beach man who was fatally wounded by police after he killed four former co-workers during a Dec. 18 assault rifle rampage at a Caltrans facility in Orange.

While Torres’ four victims are included in the homicide total--and account for almost a third of 1997 slayings in the city of Orange--his death will remain a pending case until the Orange County district attorney’s office concludes its investigation, an inquiry launched in all officer-involved shootings.

There also were several suspicious deaths of children in 1997 which remain under investigation and, therefore, uncounted. Also, if the example of past years holds form, several assault victims will die in upcoming weeks and months from injuries suffered in 1997, and their names will be added retroactively to the homicide list.

The profile of the average homicide victim in the county in 1997 is a Latino male, age 19 to 21, coroner’s records show. Thirty-nine deaths were labeled gang-related crimes, according to the district attorney’s office. Six homicide victims were less than a year old. Guns were used in 75 of the 108 Orange County slayings.

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Positive Downtrend

Orange County homicides declined in 1997 for the fourth consecutive year, reaching the lowest number since 1987, when 99 slayings were logged by the Orange County coroner’s office. The county’s two largest cities have also recorded significant declines:

Orange County

1997: 108

Santa Ana

1997: 25

Anaheim

1997: 17

Sources: Orange County coroner, Santa Ana police, Anaheim police