Violent crimes increased in California and across the nation in the last year but continue to remain well below historic peaks, according to FBI data released Monday.
Murder increased nearly 11 percent nationwide. In California, it was 9.5 percent, according to data provided by local law enforcement agencies to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program, which compiles data on murders, aggravated assault, car thefts and other crimes.
UC Irvine Professor Charis Kubrin, of the department of criminology, law and society, cautioned that the numbers may look alarming but “there’s no evidence of a national homicide wave.”
Instead, crime trends have held steady, she said.
“It is important to remember that at the end of the day, even with this increase, we are still lower than 30 years ago,” Kubrin said. “In California, if you look at major cities with populations over 400,000, the state has fared pretty well.”
Los Angeles, for example, saw an uptick in 2015 in murders from the year before, but the rate has remained at seven murders per 100,000 residents. By comparison, Kubrin noted, the murder rate in Chicago, Milwaukee, Philadelphia and other cities is much higher.
A study released last week by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law analyzed crime data from the 30 largest cities in 2015 and found that crime overall remained the same as in 2014, but murder had increased by 14 percent. Three cities – Baltimore, Chicago and Washington, D.C. – were responsible for half of that increase.
Nationwide, agencies reported a nearly 4 percent increase in the number of violent crimes and a 2.6 percent decrease in the estimated number of property crimes for 2015, compared to the previous year.
California’s violent and property crime rates increased by about 8 percent each in 2015 compared with 2014.
“It is not uncommon for crime rates to ‘bounce around’ a bit, and given that we remain at historically low levels of crime, I wouldn’t be too concerned,” George Tita, a UC Irvine professor of criminology, law and society, said in an email.
In California, the rate per 100,000 people increased to 426.3 from 396.1 for violent crimes.
In Los Angeles, violent crime increased 31 percent from 2014 to 2015 and property crimes went up by 12.5 percent during that same period.
The number of violent crimes reported in Riverside increased by 4 percent, and by 3.7 percent in Ontario. Property crimes in those cities increased by 6.8 percent and 11 percent, respectively.
Long Beach, meanwhile, also saw a 20 percent increase in its violent crime rate.
In Orange County, Anaheim’s violent crime rate increased 22 percent and Irvine’s 20 percent.
But in Irvine, the relatively low number of total violent crimes in 2014, 120, made for the wild swing, percentage-wise, when it rose to only 144.
Irvine actually recorded the lowest rate of violent crime per capita of any city in the nation with a population of more than 150,000.
Across Orange County, overall crime rose 23 percent last year, compared to 2014, the greatest single year jump in at least a decade, according to a Register analysis earlier this year. The steepest increases came in reports of stolen vehicles, aggravated assaults, thefts and burglaries.
In this year’s report, FBI Director James Comey said the agency is working toward developing a database chronicling incidents of police use of force.
Staff writer Joshua Sudock and Jeff Collins contributed to this report.
