O.C. Violent Crime Drops 8.5%

WASHINGTON — Although most Orange County residents continue to fear violent crime, FBI figures released Friday show reports of such offenses decreased again in 1996, by 6% nationwide and 8.5% in Orange County.

The FBI’s annual Uniform Crime Report also shows a 9% decrease in property crime in the county compared to 1995, and a 2% decrease nationwide.

Still, despite five straight years of decreases, Orange County residents still rank crime as the No. 1 problem in the county, according to the UC Irvine Annual County Survey.

“There is a great deal of evidence that crime is on the decline,” said Mark Baldassare, a UCI professor of urban planning. “But we haven’t seen any evidence that residents are feeling safer today than they did five years ago. . . . When we ask people what’s the most important public policy problem in 1996, crime tops the list for Orange County residents.”

Baldassare and others cited increasing urbanization and fear of diversity, as well as distrust of government statistics in general, as reasons that perception does not match reality.

“I think people’s anxiety goes beyond the crime statistics to the fact that the county is becoming more dense, more socially diverse, and that brings about concerns about public safety,” Baldassare said. “We’re more crowded, closer together with people of different cultures. . . . As we make the transition from suburban to a more urban place, people think crime naturally becomes more part of the urban scene. That may be the image, when in fact it may not be true.”

Gerald M. Caplan, dean of the McGeorge School of Law in Sacramento, said, “It’s not the number of crimes but the nature of them that often frightens the public--the random and unpredictable nature of violence” in contemporary society.

Sharp declines in major crimes in large cities have been widely reported already, but the numbers just released provide the first detailed statistical information for 1996 about nearly every location in the county, including small cities, freeways and campuses.

Although the overwhelming number of jurisdictions reported reductions in crime, there were some increases, including reports from the California Highway Patrol and from UC Irvine. In both cases, there were slight increases in many categories, from forcible rape to car theft.

CHP spokesman Keith Thornhill said that although each crime was “terrible for the individual who experiences it, the numbers compared to how many people are out there are still very low.”

Thornhill also said the increases were largely due to a change in reporting and investigation methods. CHP officers now handle most freeway crime reports. Before 1996, most crimes were reported to the police department in that city, he said.

“We used to take the victim to the local police station, or wait with them until a police officer arrived. Now we will take that report ourselves,” Thornhill said.

UC Irvine Police Chief Kathy Stanley said she was “not worried” by slight increases in forcible rape, from one in 1995 to three in 1996, and in aggravated assaults, from nine in 1995 to a dozen in 1996. She said efforts to encourage students to report crimes were partly responsible, and that in all cases of violent crimes, the perpetrator was known to the victim. There also was a slight increase in car thefts, but a big drop in other thefts on campus.

Unlike in the rest of the county, she said, a campus newspaper survey last June found that “no one interviewed indicated that they did not feel safe.”

Although the FBI did not try to assess reasons for the lower crime rate, other authorities credited an increase in community policing made possible by additional federal appropriations sought by the Clinton administration, and tougher sentencing laws enacted by Congress and some state legislatures. Others said a steadily improving economy was probably a factor.

The FBI’s annual report is based on data submitted by more than 16,000 city, county and state law enforcement agencies. The rate of 634 violent crimes for every 100,000 inhabitants was the lowest since 1987.

Regionally, reports of serious crimes--a combination of violent crimes and property crimes--declined 8% in the West, 7% in the Northeast and 1% in the Midwest. Reported crime was up 1% in the South.

Some experts said the reduction in property crimes was partly attributable to the increasing popularity of car anti-theft devices and home-security systems.

* CRIME STATISTICS

A city-by-city breakdown of murders, rapes, robberies and aggravated assaults in 1995 and 1996. B3