Police Don’t See Crime Wave in Rising Murder Rate

It was a winning streak that police officers from Buena Park to San Clemente pointed to with pride: For six straight years, the number of homicides in Orange County plummeted to levels not seen in decades.

The streak is now history, with murders rising more than 8% last year. But officials aren’t wringing their hands, and many are betting that the spike in slayings doesn’t mean a return to the high-crime era of the early 1990s.

Indeed, many cities that saw a jump in murders last year continued to record healthy declines in overall crime, from robberies and assaults to burglaries and thefts. The conflicting pattern has led police officials and some experts to believe that homicide isn’t necessarily tied to trends in overall crime.

“Homicide is a distinctive offense,” said Gilbert Geis, emeritus professor of criminology, law and society at UC Irvine. “You can’t say that the same things are feeding into it as other street crimes. That’s why it’s going in a wacky direction.”

In Garden Grove, for example, killings rose from seven to 11. But detectives said there is little to explain the uptick.

At least half of 1999’s murders were committed by acquaintances, including the high-profile stabbings in December of two middle-age residents allegedly slain by a friend of the couple’s son.

Three other homicides involved shootings at two separate family-owned auto accessory stores, baffling investigators. In addition to the three deaths, five customers were injured.

“Murder is one of those crimes that quite honestly police have very little impact on,” Garden Grove Police Capt. Dave Abrecht said. “The majority of those murders aren’t gang related. Most of them are domestic violence situations that we have very little control over.”

Overall crime in the city actually declined 7%, including a hefty 13% drop in burglaries. Abrecht said these numbers give comfort to officials and lead them to believe that the spike in murders might simply be an anomaly.

Other cities are seeing a similar pattern.

* In San Juan Capistrano, the number of slayings jumped from none in 1998 to four last year. Yet overall crime fell a whopping 19%.

* In Stanton, homicides rose from three to five last year at the same time that overall offenses fell 16%.

* In Huntington Beach, murders rose from zero to five but total serious crimes plunged by 17.5%.

Police in Surf City said last year’s jump in killings will cause little concern unless it continues this year. Otherwise, officials said they believe the decline in overall crime is likely to continue until reaching an inevitable plateau.

“I think it could go down some more, but are we always going to have crime? Absolutely,” Huntington Beach Police Sgt. Janet Perez said. “It would be ridiculous for anyone to think that we’ll ever be free of crime.”

Some experts, however, are more worried about the rise in killings, which is occurring not just in Orange County but in cities like San Diego, San Francisco and Sacramento. These experts believe that more murders signal the beginning of a new crime wave.

“Call it the criminal justice limbo stick--at some point you can’t go any lower,” James Alan Fox, a professor of criminal justice at Northeastern University in Boston, said earlier this year. “What this basically signals is that the party may be over.”

The party ended last year for Westminster and Seal Beach, which both recorded their first increases in total crimes in years, bucking the countywide trend.

Offenses in Westminster rose by nearly 6%, with robberies driving the increase with a 19% jump from 116 to 138. In Seal Beach, serious offenses rose by 13%, with burglaries leaping by 70%, from 85 incidents to 145.

Seal Beach Police Capt. John Schaefer said officers were unable to find any single explanation for the dramatic rise. But in 2000, he said, crime seems to be falling back, with 18% fewer serious offenses reported compared to this time last year.

“That pattern that we saw erupting last year,” he said, “seems to be rescinding.”