In one of Orange County’s safest cities, voters still think about crime. So do Republican campaigns.
In July, the Los Angeles Times published a “Crime of the Year” edition. After an extensive investigation, a jury took two weeks to deliver the verdict.
In its conclusion, the Los Angeles Times listed the following findings:
• One out of every four city residents is a victim of either aggravated robbery or rape. (This exceeds the national average.)
• The per capita murder rate in L.A. County is nearly four times the national average.
• The per capita robbery rate is the highest in the nation.
• The per capita property crime rate is the highest in California; in L.A. County, one in five residents has been the victim of a shoplifting, and one in 19 has been the victim of a robbery.
L.A. has the nation’s lowest murder rate, but the highest per capita rape and robbery rates.
Most of these findings are true, which is to say, they are not exactly correct. While the L.A. Times correctly noted that most of L.A.’s problems come from one source: the vast number of non-violent crimes — car jacking, burglary, shoplifting, drug dealing and assault — that dominate the city’s crime statistics.
That last point might seem obvious, but according to a report presented this week at the University of Southern California (USC) Keck Center on Crime and Society, the statistics reveal an important truth: When it comes to the crime rate, Los Angeles is a one-man crime wave.
This is not to say that every crime is committed by an angry, out-of-control, violent individual. But the fact that they are committed by someone, with or without a gun, doesn’t change the fact that L.A. has become one of the most dangerous cities in the United States.
If we only cared about violent crime,