Santa Clarita Valley Sheriff’s Station Capt. Justin Diez was happy to report Tuesday that, reflecting a countywide trend, local crime numbers are trending down for the SCV.
Throughout the SCV, the total number of Part-I crimes — which includes murder, rape, robbery and aggravated assault in the violent crimes category, and burglary, larceny theft, grand theft auto and arson in the property crimes category — was down 0.66%, for the first 11 months of this year compared to the same time last year, Diez said.
The downward trend is more notable in context of the recent crime trends in Los Angeles County and in the SCV, he added during the quarterly afternoon meeting of the Santa Clarita City Council’s Public Safety Committee.
In January, the year-end numbers for 2023 indicated the SCV saw a nearly 10% increase over 2022. As late as this summer, it appeared the city could see another nearly double-digit gain, until the numbers started to drop.
“We’re doing much better than we have at the beginning of the year — finally, the crime rate has finally leveled off to what it was last year. We’re actually below where we were last year, which is good,” Diez said. “This is actually the first time that we’ve leveled off or gone below where we were last year, which is good.”
Countywide, Part-I crimes are down 0.44%, with a 1.64% reduction in violent crimes and a 0.13% decrease in property crimes, according to the numbers available online from the Sheriff’s Department.
The percentages given are based on the data from the LASD Sheriff’s Transparency website, which is updated with figures through the end of October. Diez shared the numbers of incidents for each month, which were current as of Tuesday.
The SCV’s slight reduction was the statistical median for the other stations in the SCV’s North County region, which includes Palmdale and Lancaster, which saw gains of 11.12% and 5.51% respectively, and West Hollywood and Malibu/Lost Hills, which saw reductions of 15.29% and 13.03%.
Diez did not share any hypotheses on what might have precipitated the drop, but he did share some commonalities and patterns that crime analysts reported from the recent numbers.
For sexual assaults, there were 32 reported last year and 24 reported this year.
In all but one of the incidents the victim had “some sort of dating relationship or acquaintance” with the attacker, he said.
Both relationship violence and violence in multigenerational households were trending up, Diez said, based on the calls at the local station.
The next violent crime category, robberies, also showed a significant drop.
“We’re down on robberies 31 over last year: We were at 114 and this year we’re at 83, so that’s great,” he said.
Tracking the total number of robberies with great precision has become more difficult in recent years, Diez told the committee, because some national chain stores have much more lenient loss-prevention policies, while others remain proactive, and nearly all cooperate quickly with video surveillance.
However, if a store decides to increase its reaction in response to a rise in incidents, for example, then the loss-prevention officer’s attempt to stop a thief can turn a shoplifting larceny into a felony robbery. That’s referred to as an Estes robbery, Diez said, which also could be charged as a misdemeanor.
“So sometimes, when those robberies skyrocket up and you really dig down into it, you can see how many of those are your Estes robberies, it’s not so much the violent robberies,” he said, which is traditionally what people think of in a violent crime. “It’s the people that are trying to get, you know, get away with free stuff and loss prevention stopping them.”
Aggravated assaults are one violent crime area that rose, incidents that are largely tied to domestic violence, according to the captain.
“Our aggravated assaults are up eight over this time last year,” he said, noting it went from 211 to 219, about five incidents per week.
“Historically, the overwhelming majority of your aggravated assaults are involved domestic violence, or at least a large number of them are domestic violence,” he said, referring to past media coverage around the issue, which has noted a rise, particularly since the pandemic.
The lion’s share of Part-I crimes in Santa Clarita remain property crimes, and while those did report a drop, Diez also mentioned a difficulty in tracking these numbers because it’s hard to quantify larceny incidents accurately. That category includes everything from porch pirates to shoplifters whose thefts aren’t always reported.
“Our larceny thefts are our biggest number, our biggest Achilles heel, I mean historically throughout the state, even before COVID,” he said, adding for the year, they’re down 56.
“They started to level up at the beginning of the year, then they went up a lot, quite a bit, and now they levelled off,” he said.
Grand theft autos are another major area of concern in the property crime category, where deputies have seen a major spike in recent years.
In the SCV, there were 39 more stolen cars this year compared to the same time last year, and that figure is up 200 for the year since 2019, the last full year before COVID.
