Despite a spike in violence experienced earlier this year, East Palo Alto police Chief Ronald Davis said he believes his crime-reduction campaign is working to keep the numbers from growing.
On July 15, he pointed to an overall crime-rate drop of 13 percent as evidence that the strategies are having positive results.
The news shows a positive trend for the first six months of the year since the department rolled out a campaign targeting gangs.
City leaders and police were outraged after five people were shot in a May 5 drive-by shooting at a bus stop on Bay Road. A grandmother was among the victims, and her 6-year-old grandchild was injured by flying glass in the incident.
Davis and East Palo Alto Mayor Ruben Abrica called a press conference on May 20 to outline a collaboration between multiple cities and county law-enforcement agencies to break the gangs and end the crime wave.
Statistics released by police on July 15 showed violent crime is up while other crimes such as burglaries have plunged from Jan. 1 to June 30:
Homicides — up 25 percent (from 4 to 5)
Sexual Assaults — up 75 percent (from 4 to 7)
Robberies — no change (from 48 to 48)
Assaults — up 27 percent (from 143 to 182)
Burglaries — down 41 percent (from 200 to 119)
Larcenies — down 25 percent (from 144 to 108)
Vehicle thefts — down 10 percent (from 51 to 46)
Davis pointed to the overall 13 percent crime drop (from 594 to 515) as a measure that things are headed in the right direction.
“This is especially notable considering crime dropped 12 percent last year. In the past seven weeks, there have been only two non-injury shooting incidents since the crime emergency was initiated on May 20,” Davis said in a community announcement.
“I am confident that we can not only continue with our successes but increase them and end the year with a much lower murder and assault rate than last year,” he stated in a news release.
The department has approached crime reduction through combined enforcement, intervention and investigative programs, including:
Operation Ceasefire, which calls in gang members for one-on-one discussions and offers job and social services assistance; adult and youth prisoner reentry programs to help transition back into society; a truancy program to keep kids in schools, social-network analysis to determine crime patterns and criminal associations and targeted enforcement in hotspots.
“We must remain vigilant as gang violence continues to threaten our community,” he said.
More about East Palo Alto’s crime-reduction plan can be found at www.cityofepa.org/DocumentCenter/View/314.
So East Palo Alto burglaries are down – and reportedly Palo Alto’s are up. Go figure.
Are these figures comparing 6-month totals of this year 1st half to last year 2nd half? Or to last year 1st half? Are there seasonal variations in types of crimes here?
The burglary/larceny numbers do show a welcome decrease. Have there been changes in definition or reporting patterns?
Just trying to understand the significance of the statistics.
Yay for EPA… NOT!
The crimes need to be separated into physically harmful and non physically harmful categories. Nice to know Burglaries, Larcenies and Vehicle thefts are down, but more importantly Homicides, Sexual Assaults and Assaults are all UP!! EPA Police need to step their game up and stop the crimes that matter the MOST!
#soperturbed #ugh
Okay Mad Lady!
You are right…they really should realize that the violent crimes are the most serious and should not be included in a report of crime going down, when they are ALL UP.
PS…I know who you are!!! LOL!
Mad Lady: Fremont took that attitude several years ago, and now if a crime is committed against you, and it is not murder, you have to file a report online–the police refuse to come out! A lot of people have installed pricey surveillance equipment as a result. Even so, crime is still high there, but murders have not increased much. it’s mostly burglaries, armed robberies, assaults, etc–things the cops will not show up for!
OK, Musical. You caught them! They trot out these stats every now and then to show how crime is so down. But it’s always just spin. There isn’t really any significance to these stats any time they do them.
Sometimes it’s a valid tactic to tell people what they want to hear, and we can hope the encouragement becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy. Even if we had a really good set of consistently collected statistics, the ups and downs could be correlated to factors beyond local control. What happens when the governor is compelled by the courts to release another 10,000 inmates from California prisons?
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