Serious Crime in O.C. Drops Again--by 13%

Serious crime in Orange County plunged for the seventh straight year in 1998, falling 13% to the lowest rate since at least the 1970s, according to state Department of Justice figures released Tuesday.

Nowhere were the declines more noticeable than in homicides. During the crime wave of the early 1990s, Orange County recorded nearly 200 murders a year. But last year, the number dipped below 100 for the first time in more than a decade, hitting 85, compared with 102 homicides in 1997.

Santa Ana, which just a few years ago posted a record 47 homicides, last year reported 21. Santa Ana Police Chief Paul M. Walters said the continuing drop in homicides and other crimes has transformed whole neighborhoods and given residents new peace of mind.

“It’s tremendously different. There are some areas that in the past people would have designated as high crime areas. But there aren’t any now,” said Walters, noting that the number of police assistance calls in one downtown district has dropped 97% in the last few years.

Walters and other law enforcement officials credited the crime drop to a variety of factors, including a buoyant economy, greater attention to community-oriented policing and get-tough policies against repeat offenders.

Several cities also attributed the trend to generous federal grants, which have allowed departments to try innovative crime-fighting measures such as providing adult mentors for gang members.

Despite dealing with less crime, local police agencies actually solved fewer cases last year than they did in 1997, the state reports found. Police cleared 9,418 cases in 1998, compared with 10,058 in 1997.

But because crime is dropping, the county’s overall clearance rates rose slightly compared with 1997. Clearance is defined by authorities as arresting and handing a suspect over to the courts for prosecution.

A Times analysis of state crime records last year found that two-thirds of Orange County’s cities fell below the average clearance rates for statewide law enforcement agencies.

Among the cities posting the heftiest crime drops in 1998 were Laguna Niguel, Anaheim and Newport Beach.

Communities patrolled by the Sheriff’s Department--including unincorporated areas as well as Laguna Niguel, Laguna Hills, Villa Park, Stanton, San Clemente, Mission Viejo, Lake Forest and San Juan Capistrano--also were safer last year, experiencing a collective 23% drop in offenses, according to the state’s crime index.

Most local cities experienced some dips in crime, but a few did not. Fullerton and Irvine saw small upticks in overall incidents, while Placentia’s crime numbers rose nearly 7%.

But even with these jumps, Orange County’s crime decrease outpaced that of the rest of California. Statewide, the number of violent offenses--homicides, rapes, robberies and assaults--dropped by 11%. In Orange County, violent offenses fell by 15%.

The state’s crime index includes records of violent crimes and burglaries and motor vehicle thefts. The Department of Justice on Tuesday also released numbers for larceny and arson incidents. The numbers, the latest in a parade of statistics released by federal and state authorities, expand on a preliminary report released by the state earlier this year showing a drop in major crimes in Orange County and California’s largest cities.

California’s crime rate now stands at a level not seen since President Lyndon B. Johnson was in office. Orange County’s rate is the lowest since 1979, the last year for which state officials had records.

George Wright, chairman of the criminal justice department at Santa Ana College, said the numbers are significant but should be taken in context. Crime statistics often overlook white-collar crimes, which are much harder to track down and prosecute than other offenses.

“As Will Rogers used to say, ‘If you steal a loaf of bread you go to jail. If you steal a railroad you go to Congress,’ ” Wright said.

Still, many police officials expressed satisfaction at the declining crime figures, with some giving special credit to federal grants.

Santa Ana has received $15 million in federal money over the last five years, enough to add 60 more officers.

In Newport Beach, a $163,000 federal grant two years ago helped the Police Department fund a crime prevention officer to teach neighborhood watch groups how to prevent burglaries, Sgt. Mike McDermott said. The result: a 27% drop in burglaries.

“Burglaries are one of the areas where we concentrate our resources,” he said.

Bucking the overall downward trend in crime was Placentia, where robberies leaped by more than a third and assaults rose 25%.

But Placentia police spokesman Matt Reynolds said the outlook is not as bad as the figures suggest. Assault numbers have risen because the department recently tightened up its enforcement of domestic violence cases, he said. As of April 1999, he added, assaults are down 28% compared with the first four months of 1998.

In Irvine, Sgt. Rick Handfield said it’s wrong to draw broad conclusions from a year’s data.

“When you go from one homicide to four, that’s a very small number,” he said. “These are very small shifts.”

Though rapes and homicides were up in Irvine, vehicle thefts accounted for much of the increase in Irvine’s crime numbers. Usually, such thefts are committed by professional thieves stripping cars of their hardware.

But, Handfield said, Irvine has recently seen more thefts at the hands of local youths stealing cars for transportation and then dumping them when finished.

Times staff writer Daniel Yi contributed to this report.

* City-by-city breakdown on crime statistics, B4