State youth crime, killings fall in 2018

last 30 years leveling out,” said Robert Weisberg, a Stanford law professor and codirector of the school’s Criminal Justice Center. “The best thing about it isn’t that it went down, but that it didn’t go up.”

Criminal justice experts caution against attributing any drop in crime figures to a single policy or incident. Small peaks and valleys are common with annual datakeeping, and it’s rare for any two years to remain exactly the same. Longterm trends are a different story.

Similar to the rest of the country, California homicides have plummeted since the bloodshed seen in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Even the small gains seen a few years ago were dwarfed by the killings committed three decades ago, when the state regularly topped 3,500 a year.

The deadliest year on record was 1993, when 4,095 people were slain within California’s borders.

Juvenile arrests continued a longterm decrease in California, plummeting 17% between 2017 and 2018, from roughly 56,250 to 46,420.

The number of arrests of youths for serious and violent crimes remained about the same year to year, but are still far lower than their peak in the mid1990s. In 1994, during the height of a youth crime wave, 22,601 juveniles were arrested in California for robbery, assault, homicide, rape and other violent felonies.

Last year, that figure dropped to 7,320, even as the number of young people in the state increased.

In the Bay Area, serious youth crime rose last year in some places and fell in others. In Alameda County, 429 youths were arrested for violent felonies — a 30% increase from 2017. In neighboring Contra Costa County, arrests of juveniles for serious and violent crimes dropped 30%, from 191 to 133.

Due to limitations with how San Francisco reported data to the state, it’s unclear how many juveniles were arrested for violent felonies last year.

Across California, homicides of juveniles went from 63 in 2017 to 69 last year.

In addition to homicides and youth crime, violent crimes as a whole dipped slightly in 2018. The total amount of reported rapes, robberies and aggravated assaults, as well as murders, fell by 0.9%, from 178,553 crimes to 176,866.

However, rapes and aggravated assaults accounted for the largest gains in the last six years. Aggravated assaults rose by 18.6% from 2013 to 2018, and rapes by 5.3% from 2017 to 2018. Beginning in 2014, officials expanded the definition of rape, making comparisons prior to that time inaccurate.

The number of property crimes in California fell marginally over the past year. There were 940,998 total burglaries, motor vehicle thefts and larcenies recorded in 2018, which was 4.6% fewer than the 986,769 in 2017.

The last two years of data follow a small, twoyear spike in 2015 and 2016, when more than 1 million property crimes were recorded each year.

Progressive leaders like San Francisco District Attorney George Gascón say the recent statewide drops in crime are a testament to California’s criminal justice reforms.

Gascón, who championed initiatives like prison realignment and Proposition 47, which reduced many drug crimes from felonies to misdemeanors, said crime data also should be held up next to the state’s diminishing prison populations.

“All the naysayers said crime is going to go up (following the reforms), and it continues to go down,” he said. “I think a lot of people in law enforcement, especially when Prop. 47 passed, wanted to blame any little hiccups in the index crimes on the reforms.”

Ronald Lawrence, president of the California Police Chiefs Association, said it’s too soon to credit policies for making any significant mark.

“There have been a myriad of laws that have changed with reforms, but I don’t know if that would have any impact on violent crime,” he said. “I would like to think that we are actually becoming a less violent society, but I don’t know if that’s true.”

Weisberg said the 2018 crime data may show that crime increases seen following the enactment of certain laws are correcting themselves.

“Things have settled down since some of the policy interventions began,” he said, adding that realignment and relaxing parole conditions may have put more lawbreakers on the streets. “But it could be that some of the episodic spikes were adjustments, and that they’ve stabilized.”