VC State of the Region Report notes
SP crime has its ups and downs

June 17, 2015
Santa Paula News

While Santa Paula battles its image it can take comfort in a new report that shows although the city last year had the highest rate of violent crime in Ventura County, it is still a safe city. And a city that had the second lowest number of domestic violence calls during the reporting period.

The 2015 State of the Region Report sponsored by the Ventura County Civic Alliance, released in recent weeks, offers a statistical snapshot of the county and its 10 cities on issues ranging from education and household incomes to healthcare and crime.

Santa Paula City Councilman Jim Tovias referred to the report at a recent council meeting and said one statistic was particularly troubling.

Tovias noted violent crime addressed in the report shows Santa Paula’s per capita rate is the highest in Ventura County with 7.42 violent crimes per 1,000 residents.

But the report also noted that there are no cities in Ventura County that would be classified as “unsafe” as the county overall is one of the lowest crime rates in the nation.

When it comes to crime rates the City of Ventura leads the pack primarily due to the high rate of property crimes there were reported in 2014.

Last year the City of Ventura had 35.58 serious (based on value) property crimes reported per 1,000 residents, more than double the property crime rate of every other county city except Oxnard. The City of Ventura’s property crime rate was more than four times higher than Moorpark, which had a 7.90 rate of property crime per 1,000 residents.

Of course such statistics must be kept in perspective as Moorpark is considered one of the safest cities in the nation.  

In 2014, the City of Ventura had 35.58 property crimes per 1,000 residents more than double the property crime rate of every other Ventura County city except Oxnard with 31.47 property crimes per 1,000 residents. 

Santa Paula had a 14.68 per 1,000 residents property crime rate, well below the county average of 19.83 property crimes per 1,000 residents.

The report noted, “Ventura County is the safest large county in California. Among the 15 most populated counties in California, Ventura County had the lowest rate of violent crime and the second lowest rate of property crime in 2013.”

In addition, “The crime rate in Ventura County dropped tremendously in the 1990s — a 46.7 percent decrease between 1991 and 1999 — and leveled off a bit starting around 2000. It continued to drop slowly through 2013, even during the recession. In 2013, Ventura County’s crime rate was 21.5 serious crimes per 1,000 residents. That was up slightly from the year before, but down 8 percent in the six years since 2007.”

The battle against crime is “one of the great success stories in the recent history of American public policy. Ventura County, like the United States in general, is safer today than it has been in the past half century. Crime rates peaked in the 1980s and early 1990s, when they were many times higher than they are now. The drop in crime since then has been huge, sustained and consistent. It continued even through the Great Recession, though the crime rates in most cities aren’t dropping as fast as they did in the 1990s.”

The report notes that economists, sociologists and statisticians have “devoted their careers to figuring out why this happened, with no definitive answer,” and their theories include more cops on the street, better policing methods, tougher sentencing, demographics, changing cultural norms and “even reductions in children’s exposure to lead.”

Santa Paula also had a very low rate of reported domestic violence, the second lowest in Ventura County.

Overall, the report noted 6,808 calls reporting domestic violence countywide in 2012 with a spread that the report noted is “generally consistent with the patterns of all types of crime, with higher rates in the West County than the East, but in this case, the difference is much more pronounced.”

And, there “are also places where the relationship does not hold — for example, in 2012, Fillmore was one of the safest cities in the county, however it had the third highest rate of domestic violence calls.”

And Santa Paula, with a higher crime rate than Fillmore, had a much lower rate of domestic violence calls.

The City of Ventura had an average rate of 15.30 domestic violence calls per 1,000 residents, Fillmore had 11.44 calls per 1,000 residents and Santa Paula had 4.08 calls per 1,000 residents; the only city lower was Simi Valley with 3.57 calls per 1,000 residents; countywide the average was 9.17 calls per 1,000 residents.





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