Crime & Safety

Violent Crime Drops Countywide, Local Results Are Mixed

According to the FBI, Orange County's largest cities saw a drop in crime. This year homicides are down in Los Alamitos and up in Seal Beach.

Violent crime in Orange County's biggest cities was mostly down in the first six months of this year, compared with the same period in 2010, according to FBI statistics released today.

Small cities such as Seal Beach and Los Alamitos aren’t included in the FBI’s calculations. However, Los Alamitos has had no homicides so far in 2011 down from one in 2010 when actor Daniel Patrick Wozniak allegedly murdered and dismembered a man in the Liberty Theater on the Los Alamitos Joint Forces Training Base. Wozniak is expected to go to trial next year.

Seal Beach suffered its worst year in terms of homicides due the October shooting deaths of eight people at Salon Meritage, the worst mass murder in county history. Scott Evans Dekraai of Huntington Beach awaits a death penalty trial for the alleged murders of eight people.

Find out what's happening in Los Alamitos-Seal Beachwith free, real-time updates from Patch.

In each of the prior two years, Seal Beach had one homicide. In December of 2010, 88-year-old Roy Charles Laird allegedly shot his wife of 69 years as she battled severe Alzheimer’s in a nursing home in Seal Beach. In December of 2009, Linda Wilborn allegedly beat to death her 22-month-old daughter. Both Laird and Wilborn await trials.

Irvine police boasted the best crime statistics among cities with populations greater than 100,000 in Orange County, but other cities such as Fullerton and Santa Ana, which deal with more gang crimes; saw big declines in major categories.

Find out what's happening in Los Alamitos-Seal Beachwith free, real-time updates from Patch.

Violent crimes -- which include murder, forcible rape, robbery and aggravated assault -- in Santa Ana totaled 687 in the first half of this year, down from 763 in the first six months of 2010. Murders were down from 11 to 8, vehicle thefts dropped from 811 to 595 and arsons fell from 80 to 50.

Santa Ana police Cpl. Anthony Bertagna said it hasn't been easy to fight crime with the department shedding about 70 police officers from the cash- strapped city's payroll, but teaming up with other area law enforcement agencies has helped.

``We've had to work more and more with other agencies because everyone's
downsizing,'' Bertagna said.

Crime fell in Fullerton, where police came up with a strategy to focus on high-crime areas, according to Sgt. Andrew Goodrich.

``We began concentrating our resources in high-crime areas in a very methodical way,'' Goodrich said. ``We did a lot of statistical analysis ... and
we really saw where we had an extreme concentration of most of our crime
activity in a relatively small part of the city.''

About 16 percent of the city accounted for just under half of the calls for service, Goodrich said. Most of the crime was around Orangethorpe Avenue from the Buena Park border to Raymond Avenue, the apartments near Cal State Fullerton, and Placentia Avenue and Yorba Linda Boulevard, Goodrich said.

When Fullerton investigators saw that one suspect was hitting multiple liquor stores in one of the high-crime zones, they dedicated extra officers to
do surveillance until they caught the robber, Goodrich said.

In Fullerton, violent crimes totaled 167 in the first half of the year, down from 217 in the comparable year-ago period, while the number of robberies fell to 63, from 82, and aggravated assaults totaled 90, down from 118.Fullerton also saw across-the-board drops in property crimes such as larceny and theft, which went from 1,445 to 1,181; vehicle thefts, 193 to 176; and arsons 16 to eight.

Garden Grove's violent crimes dropped to 216 from 264; and Huntington
Beach's to 197 from 204.

Irvine is among the safest cities in the country with violent crimes dropping from 64 in the first half of last year to 58 in the comparable period of 2011. The biggest decline was the number of rapes, which went from 14 to four.
Property crimes picked up in Irvine, however, increasing from 1,282 to 1,602. The biggest increase in that category was larceny and theft, which rose from 980 to 1,277.

-City News Service Contributed to this report.


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