Property Crime Rates on the Decline
Dave Cortese’s supporters want you to believe property crimes are skyrocketing. Repeated mailers show graphs with upward slopes showing large increases in burglaries or auto thefts between the years 2008 and 2012, suggesting crime has run rampant throughout the city.
The San Jose Mercury News editorial board attributed these misleading mailers to a “fear-mongering campaign by Cortese and his supporters” in a September 28, 2014 editorial. Why are the mailers wrong?
First, they completely ignore the data over the past two years, when property crime has dramatically dropped. Property crime felonies like auto theft, larceny, and burglary dropped a collective 10% in 2013, and more than 6% so far this year, according to the San Jose Police Department. If current trends continue for 2014, property crime felonies will be lower this year than in 2007, when Dave Cortese was on the council.
Second, these campaign mailers also ignore that virtually every city in California saw substantial spikes in property crime in 2011 and 2012, with auto theft rates up 15% over this time, and even higher rates in larger cities. Obviously, there were larger forces at work throughout that time throughout the state. What larger forces? A recent Public Policy Institute of California study attributes the jump in statewide rates of property crime to the state’s efforts to reduce overcrowding in state prisons, a policy known as “realignment,” during this time. The release of some 35,000 state inmates to local cities and counties resulted in statewide increases in property crime – and local city police departments received no state funding to address these impacts.
Third, they ignore the larger context of the reductions of crime citywide. As the Mercury News correctly reports, “The number of violent criems, both actual and per capita, was down in 2013 compared to 2013–and even compared to 2008, Cortese’s last year on the city council.” In fact, San Jose had the lowest rate of violent crime of any major city in the U.S. last year, according to FBI data.