Murders are happening all over California and crime experts are directing their outrage at the usual suspects.
Gavin Newsom. Propositions 47 and 57 to lower penalties on nonviolent crimes and facilitate early release from prison. Progressive district attorneys. Democrats.
But deeper into the data, published Thursday by the state Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta, is a more complicated story, one that challenges those facile narratives of a failed California with its recklessly unsafe efforts at criminal justice reform. The biggest risks for homicides have come in conservative counties with iron-fisted sheriffs and district attorneys, places where progressives in power are about as common as monkeys riding unicorns.
Kern County leads the locales where your chance of being murdered is greatest — with a homicide rate of nearly 14 people per 100,000, compared with about 6 per 100,000 for the state as a whole and 8.5 per 100,000 in the Los Angeles County. The number of people murdered annually (a legal term that implies conviction, but you get my point) in Kern has nearly doubled since 2015 to 124 lives last year.
Former President Trump, who legitimately lost the 2020 election, won nearly 54% of the county in Kern. Trump sycophant and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy also prevailed well in Kern, getting 64% of the vote. My colleague Gustavo Arellano profiled Kern County Sheriff Donny Youngblood, who he said is a dying breed of old-school lawman, not one to take the soft approach.
Merced County had the second highest homicide rate at 9.5 per 100,000 residents. Merced is a political mixed bag, as a “blue wave” of Bay Area refugees and political converts has turned this agricultural bastion into a nearly evenly divided county, but one where Democrats are far from a shoo-in to win every election.
Third place goes to Tulare County, which runs from Delano in the south to a little north of Visalia, where people were killed violently at a rate of 8.8 per 100,000. Trump took nearly 53% of the vote there in 2020, and McCarthy, who also represents part of the area, took nearly 59%. Recently, after two suspects in a fentanyl bust were released on bail, Tulare County Sheriff Mike Boudreaux told Fox News that “California’s justice system is failing us all.”
It’s safe to say that none of these accounts coddle their criminals—presidential leanings don’t define politics, but they are an indicator of how local politicians and law enforcement think about and deal with crime. Yet not only do these counties share the same deep-blue problems as Los Angeles and San Francisco—poverty, homelessness, drugs—they do worse in homicides. It’s true, even given the fact that a few kills in the less populated counties can mean big jumps in statistics from year to year.
At the other end of the spectrum is Contra Costa County, which has managed to beat the state average on crime and has one of the only openly progressive district attorneys (along with LA’s George Gascón), Diana Becton.
Despite an unapologetic focus on “moving beyond a singular narrative of incarceration being the answer to everything,” he told me, the county is holding its own when it comes to security.
Contra Costa’s murder rate has increased slightly since last year — but remains about 4 per 100,000 residents.
So the idea that progressive policies lead to more violent crimes is not right, any more than the idea that being tough deters criminals.
Where does that leave us to figure out the numbers?
There are two things we should talk about: guns and NIMBYism.
First, let’s swim in guns. Drown in them. Becton told me there are now “more guns in people’s hands than I think in history.”
Most of our murders and aggravated assaults involve guns – in 1,734 of 2,361 recorded homicides in California in 2021, the weapon was a gun, a 33% increase in firearm homicides since 2012. This means about 75% of the time. when a Californian is murdered, the cause of death is a bullet. So-called ghost guns, legal guns, automatics, shotguns. The name, someone committed a crime with it.
Save me your Second Amendment emails. I have nothing against legal and responsible gun ownership. But many people who shouldn’t have firearms—because they’re criminals, domestic abusers, have mental health problems, or are preparing to open fire on a large crowd, for example—have them anyway. We make it easy.
Becton thinks we need to sit down and prioritize the gun issue, and I couldn’t agree more. Yes, police officers take guns every day and we have an Armed and Prohibited Persons System designed to help remove illegal guns from the approximately 24,500 people who have legally purchased guns but are no longer allowed to keep them.
Bonta said Thursday that his office is overseeing $10 million in grants to sheriffs to help confiscate those guns, but those efforts are like spitting on a forest fire.
We also have a problem with our criminal justice reforms. Just not the ones Sheriff Boudreaux likes.
Racist before reform and still, our system has locked up people of color at alarming rates, while criminalizing health issues including addiction and mental illness. So the changes we put in place to create fairness, equity and compassion are vital to reimagining a paradigm that for too long has crushed not only people, but communities.
Where we have failed is in the support and implementation of these reforms. When someone is released from prison, diverted from prison or is a victim of a crime, it cannot be the end of the story.
What we lack is the ability to create stability for them – addiction treatment, mental health support, housing, job training, social workers. It is the same safeguard that we lack in other crises such as homelessness, all exacerbated by the pandemic, crushing almost everyone under its stress and pain and exhausting the resources we have.
“Too much, too fast, too little support” is how Yolo County Dist. Atty. Jeff Reisig describes what happened with California’s efforts at criminal justice reform. He’s also president of the California District Attorneys Assn., and kind of a middle-of-the-road guy when it comes to justice.
“It doesn’t mean we have to send everyone back to prison, but it means we have to make tweaks to get people into programs like Care Court,” he said, calling Newsom’s plan for a civil court system to help those. with severe mental illness.
But I’m starting to think that we don’t want to change as much as we say.
Most Californians are liberal at a distance, but take it too close and it doesn’t make sense here. There is no better example than San Francisco neighbors who last year successfully blocked the conversion of a 131-room boutique hotel into permanent supportive housing for people who were previously homeless.
Or what happened a few years ago in Bakersfield when the local hospital protested that it was allowing the homeless to stay in a hotel in an industrial area because it was too close to an employee parking lot.
That intolerance has created an impossible-to-dissolve message of crime, housing, mental health, and addiction that swirls endlessly around us—all at the heart of various angles of poverty, race, and inequity. People of color are disproportionately among the ranks of our homeless, incarcerated, mentally ill and addicted, and the majority of homicide victims are Black and Latino.
We are faced with either accepting the solutions are really in our backyards, or embrace the pendulum called swing back to solutions that sweep the poor behind the bars where we do not need to look. Guess how it plays out in conservative places like Kern, Merced and Tulare where poor people of color have long been viewed as suspect, and where the poverty rate is close to 20%, significantly higher than the state average of about 12%?
All is not dark, luckily. The figures released this week are outdated, according to Mike Romano, director of the Three Strikes and Justice Advocacy Projects at Stanford Law School. Newsom appointed Romano to chair the California Penal Code Revision Committee in 2019.
Romano and his team are tracking almost real-time crime data available in California, so he’s already looking at 2022. So far, he’s seen homicides trending down or staying flat in some of the our biggest cities.
Fresno, he said, has seen a huge 29% drop so far this year. Oakland is down 6%. Los Angeles and San Francisco were also year over year. Long Beach and San Diego blew up. Other crimes, including theft, burglary, theft and arson, were all flat or down statewide in 2021, he said.
Overall, violent crime in California is the lowest it has been since the 1970s, and has been that way for at least 10 years. California has the second-lowest homicide rate of any of the 10 largest states after New York, less than half the rate of states including Illinois, Georgia and Ohio.
We are significantly safer than most other large states, even after a decade of major changes to our prison system.
Therefore, criminal justice reform may be the easiest place to blame for why some violent crimes are on the rise.
But it turns out that guns really do kill people, regardless of what the right likes to argue.
And so is NIMBYism, although it is an unnamed culprit.
What are the 5 classifications of violent crimes?
The descending order of UCR violent crimes are murder and manslaughter, forcible rape, robbery, and aggravated assault, followed by the property crimes of burglary, larceny, and theft. vehicles
What are the top 4 violent crimes? Depending on the jurisdiction, violent crimes can include: murder, murder, assault, murder, sexual assault, rape, robbery, negligence, endangerment, kidnapping (abduction), extortion and harassment.
What are the 5 general categories of crime?
There are many types of crimes. Criminologists commonly group crimes in several major categories: (1) violent crimes; (2) property crime; (3) white-collar crime; (4) organized crime; and (5) consensual or victimless crime. Within each category, there are many more specific crimes.
What are the 6 general categories of crime?
Terms in this sector (7)
- 6 types of crimes. violent, property, public order, white collar, organized, high tech.
- violent crime. murder, assault, kidnapping, manslaughter, rape.
- property crimes. arson (to some extent), vandalism, burglary, theft, shoplifting.
- public order crimes. …
- white collar crime. …
- organized crime. …
- high tech crime.
What are general crimes?
General Crimes Section. Major Frauds Section. International Narcotics, Money Laundering, & Racketeering Section (INMLRS) Public Corruption and Civil Rights Section. Violent and Organized Crime Section.
What is the most common type of violent crime?
Aggravated assaults accounted for 68.2 percent of violent crimes reported to law enforcement in 2019. Robberies accounted for 22.3 percent of violent crimes; violation (related definition) accounted for 8.2 percent; and murder represented 1.4 percent. (Based on Table 1.)
What is the most common crime to occur?
What are the most common crimes in the United States?
- Theft / Theft. Larceny-theft hits the top of the list of crimes, above any other crime. …
- Steal it. The next most prevalent crime is theft, another property crime. …
- Motor Vehicle Theft. …
- Aggravated assault. …
- The luck
What is the most common form of violent crime?
Aggravated assaults accounted for the highest number of violent crimes reported to law enforcement at 62.4 percent. Robbery comprised 29.4 percent of violent crimes, rape accounted for 6.9 percent, and murder accounted for 1.2 percent of estimated violent crimes in 2011.
How many types of violent acts are there?
It divides violence into three broad categories according to who the perpetrators and victims of violent acts are: Self-directed violence. Interpersonal violence. Collective violence.
What are the 5 classifications of violent crimes?
In a violent crime, a victim is injured or threatened with violence. Violent crimes include rape and sexual assault, robbery, assault and murder.
What are the violence acts?
Violent crimes are typically divided into four main categories, based on the nature of the behavior: homicide (the killing of one person by another, sometimes for legally justified reasons), assault (physical attack on another person with the ‘intention to cause harm). steal (forcing to take something from…
Where is the lowest crime rate in the US?
Maine scores the best of all states for violent crime per capita, which is the most important factor in our rankings and counts twice as much as each of the other three. There were only 1,466 violent crimes reported in Maine in 2020, or 108.6 for every 100,000 people.
Why did crime go down in the 90s? Crime fell sharply and unexpectedly in the United States in the 1990s. We conclude that four factors collectively explain the entire drop in crime: the increase in the number of police, the increase in the size of the prison population, the decline of the crack epidemic and the legalization of abortion in the 1970s.
Where Are crime rates the lowest?
Iceland tops the Global Peace Index, which ranks countries according to safety and security, ongoing conflict and militarization.
Which state in U.S. has highest crime rate?
| Classification | Crime index â² | State / Population |
|---|---|---|
| 1. | 950 | Vermont / 626,358 |
| 2. | 956 | New Hampshire / 1,321,069 |
| 3. | 985 | North Dakota / 704,925 |
| 4. | 1.017 | Maine / 1,328,535 |
What is the safest city in USA?
Frisco, Texas First on our list of the safest cities in the United States is Frisco Texas. Let’s start our list by looking at Frisco, Texas. This city is just north of Dallas and is home to over 200,000 people. This city appears on this list because of low violent crime rates.
What crimes Cannot be expunged in California?
But some crimes are almost never eligible for deportation. These generally include murder, serious violent crimes and sexual crimes involving children…. These records are:
- juvenile crimes,
- charges that have been dropped or dismissed,
- arrest records,
- infractions,
- non-violent crimes, and.
- low level crimes.
Can you remove a strike in California? Can you remove a strike in California? Yes, but only if he has not served state prison time for the offense, which is unlikely. And even if you are able to have the expulsion, it counts as a strike if you are later convicted of a serious crime.
How long till a felony is off your record in California?
A typical time to complete a felony expungement in California is about 4-5 months. The cases are heard by the courts in the order in which they were presented.
How do you get a felony reduced to a misdemeanor in California? In general, a crime can be reduced to a crime in 4 ways: Through a plea deal, a diversion program, completion of probation, or showing that the elements of the crime of the crime are missing. In California, it can be done through a motion under Penal Code 17(b).
Can you be refused a job because of a criminal record?
Prior convictions are criminal or criminal offenses for which a person has been convicted. You cannot be denied a job, or be fired or penalized because you have a criminal record, if the offense is not related to employment or if you have obtained a pardon (also known as a record suspension).
Why would a background check be denied for a job?
What causes a red flag on a background check? There are many reasons a person may not pass a background check, including criminal history, educational discrepancies, poor credit history, a damaged driving record, a history of false employment, and a drug test. failed
What jobs can’t you do with a criminal record UK?
The army, navy and air force. Work involving national security. Some roles in health, pharmacy and law. Some roles in the prison service.
How long do felonies stay on your record in California?
If you have been convicted of a crime in Los Angeles, it will remain on your criminal record indefinitely. That is, unless you petition to have your conviction expunged. Certain crimes in California can be expunged â or expunged â from your record.
How long does a felony stay on your record?
If the person was 18 years of age or older at the time of the offense (ie legally considered an adult), then the conviction will be expunged from their record 11 years after the date of conviction (not the date of the offence).
Can a felony be cleared in California?
To be eligible for a felony expungement in California, you must have completed your sentence. Also, you must not have any charges pending or be serving any other sentence at the time you file the cancellation petition. Another requirement is to ensure that fines ordered by the court have been paid.