Crime rates in San Diego went down 18% in 2008, following a decades-long trend of crime rate reductions in the city. Mayor Jerry Sanders said residents are “less likely to be victims of crime now than any time since 1963.”
For every 1,000 people, there were only 28.2 crimes. In 2008, the rate was 34.56 crimes per 1,000 people.
While most cities nationwide have seen crime rate reductions in the last year, San Diego is fortunate to experience such drastic rates and for so many years in a row. Homicides in the city are the lowest they have been since 1972. Dallas, a comparably sized city, had nearly four times as many homicides this year, Phoenix had three times as many.
San Diego Police Chief William Lansdowne said the crime rate reduction was a result of a number of factors including better intelligence-based policing, improved technology and more efficient use of resources. He said that as more people have cell phones, crime rates should continue to go down because the devices allow people to report crimes without a time delay.
Not all statistics are down though, suicides, domestic violence and mental health-related crimes have all gone up. San Diego criminal attorneys say this is a result of the city’s reduction of mental health services and difficult economic times that have caused hardships in many relationships.
To read more about the crime reductions, see the article in Del Mar Times. Image via banspy [Flickr].
