San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Vallejo leads spike in Bay Area killings
Homicides rise 14% in 1st half of year, with more in S.F., 5 other large cities
With trains emptied, shopping districts shuttered and tourism on an indefinite timeout, Bay Area residents had some cause for relief during their pandemicinduced isolation: Crime, in many areas, stayed home too.
But while reports of robberies, rapes and smashandgrab auto burglaries fell in the region’s largest cities, the most serious of violent crimes — homicides — crept up 14% during the first half of 2020, stalling a broader historical trend of fewer killings, a Chronicle analysis found.
Some of the increase can be traced to bloodshed in Vallejo. By the end of June, that city’s 13 killings were nearly triple the five recorded over the first six months of last year and had eclipsed the 12 total people slain there in all of 2019. On Thursday, the city recorded its 14th killing of the year when a 21yearold man was shot to death.
Overall, killings in the region’s 15 largest cities increased to 112 from the 98 reported from January through June of last year. But while cities like San Francisco, Hayward and Berkeley witnessed more deadly violence, nowhere in the region experienced a spike as stark as Vallejo’s.
“I think it’s the chickens coming home to roost,” said Hakeem Brown, a Vallejo councilman running for mayor. “I think it’s a lack of invest
ment in our youth, a lack of opportunities ... systemic racism in Vallejo and generations of poverty among poverty.”
In a city with a notoriously frayed relationship between residents and law enforcement, Vallejo police killings in recent years have drawn outrage and attention from residents, civil rights advocates and now California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, who last month announced a probe of the city’s force.
The Chronicle’s homicide counts do not include killings by police or those deemed by authorities to be in selfdefense, which aligns with state and federal figures and allows for historical comparison.
Amid calls to reform and defund police in Vallejo and other cities, this year’s pace of violence, despite the pandemic, underscores an urgent need for more community resources, said Phil “Maui” Wilson, who founded the antiviolence community group Vallejo Peace Project.
“Shelters, our schools system — our education system is in pretty rough shape right now, and that has a lot to do with that crime in general,” Wilson said.
Wilson said he believes the violence reflects a lack of funding to underserved communities. He said diverting tax dollars away from the police force and into public services could help root out the gangs and retaliatory shootings that helped fuel this year’s spike in Vallejo.
“You can have as many police as you want in an area,” Wilson said, “but if people are still competing for resources, there are still going to be drugs and murders.”
According to police crime data compiled by The Chronicle, six of the area’s largest cities experienced an increase in homicides in the first half of 2020, five cities recorded a decrease, and four cities’ counts stayed the same as the first six months of 2019.
San Francisco’s killings rose from 19 to 24, Hayward’s went from three to eight, and Berkeley jumped from zero to three. Homicides in Oakland fell from 37 to 34 during this time period, and San Jose remained steady at 17 for both years.
Preliminary research suggests that the rise in Bay Area homicides is consistent with the rest of the country, even as other types of crime have fallen.
David Abrams, a University of Pennsylvania Law School professor who has studied crime trends during the pandemic, found significant drops among several types of crime in many major cities.
“Homicides are the exception,” he said, noting that the crimes have either climbed or stayed flat in most cities he studied. “COVID has definitely had a major impact on crime, with the exception of homicides and shootings.”
Killings in California have been trending down for decades, with the most recent decreases coinciding with a drop in violent crimes committed by young people, according to data from the California Department of Justice. The state had 1,679 killings in all of 2019, representing a 3.5% decrease from the previous year.
Homicide arrests among people under 18 in 2019 fell to 5% of the total, while adults 40 years or older made up 23.7% of those arrests — the highest rate among that age group for any year over the past decade.
Vallejo is now on pace to top the 25 homicides reported in 2013, the highest figure in the last 10 years. Contributing to the body count were two unrelated multiplevictim shootings — tragedies that are often difficult to link to a single trend.
In April, 50yearold Raymond Jackson shot his domestic partner and her 14yearold daughter before turning the weapon on himself, police said. Then in June, a group of shooters opened fire at a toddler’s birthday party, wounding three — including a 10yearold child — and killing two women.
Vallejo Police Chief Shawny Williams and other highranking officials in the department declined to be interviewed for this story.
In addition to homicides, Vallejo saw reports of auto burglaries, rapes, robberies and shootings climb in the first half of 2020 compared with the same period in 2019. The only categories of crimes that fell were arson and residential burglaries.
In a statement released this month, Williams noted that the increase in crime was coming “during a time of assessment and reform for the department.”
“There is a lot asked of the men and women of the Vallejo Police Department, and we are doing everything we can to meet the current needs of our community while working toward our vision of exceptional service,” Williams said.
Robert Weisberg, a Stanford law professor and codirector of the school’s Criminal Justice Center, said that while Vallejo is an outlier this year, its homicide percentage increase appears more dramatic because the total numbers are comparatively small.
“Vallejo is a very troubled city right now, with a very troubled and controversial Police Department,” he said. “And it’s got a crime problem.”
But, Weisberg cautioned, the Bay Area and many other parts of the country have enjoyed historically low homicide rates over the past few years. It’s too soon, he said, to tell whether the historic events of 2020 have impacted crime.
“The irony is there are so many things going on now with policing and COVID — all kinds of interesting speculative explanations get raised,” Weisberg said. “But the very fact that you have a confluence of factors means no social scientist could draw conclusions in a short term.”
“Vallejo is a very troubled city right now, with a very troubled and controversial Police Department. And it’s got a crime problem.”
Robert Weisberg, codirector, Stanford Criminal Justice Center