How some local law enforcement agencies are making headway in reducing violent crimes

Mirroring much of the nation, violent crimes generally ticked upward in Modesto and throughout Stanislaus County in 2016, according to data released Monday by the FBI.

Violent crimes saw a 4 percent increase in Modesto while Ceres saw a 52 percent increase from 2015 to 2016, according to the data. Stanislaus County saw a 19 percent increase in violent crimes, while Turlock remained relatively even.

However, the trend through the first half of 2017 is giving local law enforcement agency leaders reason to smile.

Stanislaus County has seen a 14 percent drop in 2017, while violent crime in Modesto has fallen 11 percent. Chief Scott Heller of the Oakdale Police Department has seen a 42 percent drop, including a 79 percent decrease in aggravated assault.

Violent crimes are considered to be murder, nonnegligent manslaughter, rape, robbery and aggravated assault.

“We placed more of a focus on some of the gang issues within the city,” said Heller, who became chief last October. “The focus has been on leveraging relationships within the community. More partnerships and more engagement. We brought back a stronger National Night Out.”

Stanislaus County Sheriff Adam Christianson credited an increase in staff – thanks to the Public Safety Restoration Plan – the Sheriff’s Regional Training Center Academy Program and the return of the STING team.

“The Sheriff's Team Investigating Narcotics and Gangs is doing some amazing work taking guns, drugs and gangsters off the street,” he said. “When you proactively go after those who commit violent crime, the positive net effect is a reduction in violent crime.”

Chief Galen Carroll of the Modesto Police Department said a focus on traffic and enforcement stops in high-crime areas have aided his 2017 numbers. It’s helped that he’s received funding to bolster his staff.

“We’re trying to use a crime analyst and preditive policing to put officers where they need to be,” he said. “For that to work, you have to have the officers to do that.”

Throughout Stanislaus County and the Northern San Joaquin Valley, property crimes from 2015 to 2016 dropped.

Stanislaus County had a 14 percent decrease while Modesto’s fell by 8 percent and Ceres 20 percent.

Christianson said he feels those numbers might be off some because the “decriminalization of drug-related crime, narcotics offenses and property crimes are under reported.”

But, as he was heading late Monday afternoon to a Neighborhood Watch meeting in Riverbank, he said, “early intervention, prevention and education, along with engaging the community by helping us through the Neighborhood Watch and other crime reduction efforts, will also have a positive net effect on property crime.”

Meanwhile, the nationwide numbers on violent crime in the United States rose in 2016 for the second straight year, driven by a spike in killings in some major cities, but remained near historically low levels.

The Trump administration immediately seized on the figures as proof that the nation is in the midst of a dangerous crime wave that warrants a return to tougher tactics like more arrests and harsher punishments for drug criminals. But criminologists cautioned the new numbers may not indicate the start of a long-term trend, noting that violent crime rates remain well below where they were a quarter-century ago.

Still, the FBI said it was the first time violent crime rose in consecutive years in more than a decade.

Violent crimes such as shootings and robberies rose 4.1 percent in 2016 from the year before, with homicides climbing 8.6 percent, according to the figures. Violence increased 3.9 percent in 2015, while killings jumped by more than 10 percent.

“This is a frightening trend that threatens to erode so much progress that had made our neighborhoods and communities safer — over 30 years declines in crime are being replaced by increases,” Attorney General Jeff Sessions said last week during a speech in Boston. “We cannot accept this as the new normal.”

Despite the increase, the violent crime rate in 2016 was still down significantly from several years ago. It dropped 18 percent from 2007, and the murder rate was 6 percent lower than it was the same year, according to the data. And it was far from the levels of the 1980s and 1990s, during the height of the drug war, when Sessions was a federal prosecutor in Mobile, Ala.

Some big cities saw increases in violence while others did not. Chicago, for example, singled out by the White House for its surge in shootings, saw a 60 percent jump in killings from 2015, accounting for more than 20 percent of the nation’s increase in murders, according to an analysis of the FBI data by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University. It found 11 major cities were responsible for driving up the national murder rate.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

This story was originally published September 25, 2017 at 6:46 PM with the headline "How some local law enforcement agencies are making headway in reducing violent crimes."