Crime in California is at some of its lowest levels in decades. So what explains what people are still seeing on the street every day? In this episode, Siyamak sits down with Magnus Lofstrom, senior fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California, to look at what the data actually shows and where it stops being able to answer that question.
00:00 - Intro 02:57 - Violent Crime Trends and Pandemic Impact 07:08 - Underreporting of Crime and Its Implications 10:20 - Proposition 47 and Its Impact on Shoplifting 15:22 - Public Perception vs. Crime Data 22:45 - Factors Contributing to Crime Trends 29:13 - Public Opinion and Criminal Justice Reform 34:29 - Homelessness and Substance Use on Public Safety 38:48 - Future Directions and Technological Advancements
New data is showing violent crime,
including murders, are going down in California.
Now, certain other types of crime are up.
Some people might argue that this data is not correct
because a lot of times people don't report the crime,
especially with retail theft and other kind of theft,
people have given up on getting any results
from the investigation so they don't report them.
But in cases of the murders, there's always bodies
and people tend to report them accurately.
Today, we sit down with Magnus Lofstrom, who's with PPIC,
who's been studying the crime data in California.
He's here to tell us what he's seeing in the data.
We don't want to get lost in the numbers.
Yes, I'm telling you that we see the lowest number
of homicides that we have in at least 40 years.
That's still almost 1,700 individuals who were killed.
Yes, the data broadly points towards improvements,
but there are examples in the data where,
yeah, we still have a way to go.
I'm Siamak, welcome to California Insider.
Magnus, it's great to have you on, welcome.
Thank you, it's great to be here.
You have been studying crime data in California
and for the last 15 years, you've been seeing the trends.
Can you tell us what you're seeing right now?
What's happening with crime?
It's good news.
When we look at the most recent data that we have
for the entire state of California, so that's 2024,
which seems a little bit old at this point,
but it takes us through 2024.
What we see there is,
through all the major crime offense categories,
we saw decreases.
We saw violent crime down by about 5%,
and we saw property crime go down by about 10%.
There's some preliminary data for 2025,
and it points towards that's a continued trend.
It keeps going down.
So if you put that into perspective,
how does that compare to where we've been in the past?
We take property crime and the property crime rate in 2024.
That's actually the lowest we have observed
going back to 1960, which is as far back as we can go.
So that's really fantastic.
And again, 2025, these preliminary numbers suggest
that it might actually be coming down a little bit more.
That's a broad measure, right?
That's property crime.
That includes a lot of different crime.
The categories that we capture with the property crime rate
is it's larceny, that's the biggest category,
and then it's auto theft and burglary as well.
And even within those categories,
we can break those down.
So even larceny, we can break down into shoplifting.
Shoplifting is an example of a crime that's up.
It has been going up for the last few years.
So we have those kind of examples.
Auto theft is also up, and theft of car accessories.
That's something that has been trending up
since the pandemic, and that's up.
So that means that there are some property crime
that is going up at the same time.
So that's always something important to keep in mind.
I mentioned a 5% decrease in the violent crime rate.
Violent constitutes of homicides,
aggravated assaults, rape, and robbery,
which is theft when you either use threat
or you use violence.
So it came down by 5%, but we're still 10%
above what we were before the pandemic.
And looking at those preliminary numbers,
we might be back there to where we were before the pandemic.
And where we were before the pandemic was low numbers.
The violent crime rate,
especially if we look at homicide, for example,
in 2019 was one of the lowest we've seen
going back at least 40 years.
But then we saw something very interesting
and troubling as well during the pandemic.
We saw a surge in crime in 2020,
and it continued in 2021.
And the surge, if we look at homicides,
is the one that's the most troubling,
and it's the one that stands out most.
In 2020, we saw the biggest increase in number
of homicides that we have on record.
That increase continued, like I said, a little bit in 2021.
It has been coming down in the last few years.
And in fact, in 2024, we observed the lowest number
of homicides in California that we have
going back at least 40 years.
Even lower than 2019?
Even lower than 2019.
So here's the interesting part.
If I were quoting you the homicide rate,
I would say that it's slightly up in 2024 compared to 2019.
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So there are fewer crimes by fewer people.
So there are fewer homicides.
The rate is, I would call it basically the same.
It's up by 0.1 compared to that.
And it's very likely based on the numbers
that we've seen for 2025,
keeping in mind that they're preliminary,
but still it's a lot of evidence
that it continued to go down.
So even the homicide numbers are down?
It's, yes, yes.
And this is, we're not unique
when it comes to that homicide trend.
The surge that we saw in 2020
and where there was an increase that continued in 2021
is what we've seen throughout the country.
Magnus, a lot of the experts,
insiders in the criminal justice system
have told us that homicide numbers
truly represent the crime data
because when there's a body,
you have to call the police.
Sometimes people don't report the other types of crimes.
Exactly.
What are your thoughts on the reports and data?
How accurate are they?
Homicide, as you point out,
is one where we're pretty close to complete reporting.
The circumstances when we don't know about the homicide,
if there's no body found, for example.
So those are rare circumstances.
For all other types of crime, it varies quite a bit.
Reporting a lot of crime is notably underreported.
Sexual assault is one that we know
when we make comparisons of the numbers of rapes,
for example, that have been reported
to law enforcement agencies to victim surveys.
There's a big discrepancy there.
So that's one where it's far from complete reporting.
Some theft doesn't get reported either.
And when it comes to theft, I think part of that is,
well, what's the point?
It's time and energy that goes into reporting
a crime as well.
So there, it's known to be underreported as well.
The exception there is auto theft.
And auto theft, we believe,
is quite completely recorded and reported.
And that's because insurance.
If your car is stolen, what do you have to do?
If you wanna get insurance to pay out,
you have to report it to law enforcement.
So is the auto theft going down?
You mentioned it's going down, right?
So auto theft did come down in 2024,
but it's still above what it was before the pandemic.
This is one of the other striking increases
during the pandemic.
Auto theft, it went up very notably
in the first couple of years during the pandemic.
It is coming down, and I'm guessing that
when we have the official 2025 numbers,
we're probably gonna be pretty close
to what it was before the pandemic.
That's interesting.
And when you look at it, car accessory thefts,
remember catalytic converters?
You probably, most of us know of someone
who's had their catalytic converter stolen.
So yeah, those were increases
that we experienced for a number of years.
And that is also not quite down to where it was before.
And part of that was the precious metals
that are in catalytic converters.
They surged during the pandemic.
They were dealing with the supply chain and shortages.
So the precious metals that were part of that
became tremendously more valuable.
And also used cars became more valuable during the pandemic
because there was difficulty producing new cars.
So that contributed to some of those trends, I think.
And then there are other factors as well.
One was basically sharing information on social media,
how to steal certain cars and taking them for joyrides.
Kia and Hyundai were hit very badly
with those kinds of videos
where you had basically instructions
of how you could steal one of those cars.
And that created a lot of problems.
Based on what you're saying,
the trustable data is really the murders and the auto theft
to actually judge the data.
And based on both of these,
you're seeing kind of the numbers
going back down to the pandemic.
I think so.
I think that's right.
I think the other thing that we want to keep in mind is,
yes, if we take something like car break-ins
or shoplifting for that matter,
what is clear is that far from all of those incidents
get reported to law enforcement.
What is important when we're tracking these changes
and the trends, what we have to ask ourself,
yeah, we know that they're underreported,
but is the reporting changing as well?
Is underreporting increasing or decreasing?
And I think that's typically a lot of times
we feel like that's probably pretty stable
that the underreporting may stay relatively stable.
There might be some changes,
but as long as that stays stable,
then we still have information from these crimes
that are underreported when we see a decrease, for example.
As long as it's not that people are changing the reporting,
then we can attribute it to a real decrease.
But it certainly is a caveat
that we have to keep in mind
when we're talking about these changes.
And shoplifting is actually a really good example
of when we might've had some changes
in the reporting as well.
Because people were not reporting them,
they'd just given up on them.
I think that there was,
we can go back and we can look at 2014
when California passed Proposition 47.
One of the things that Prop 47 did
was it reclassified a number of drug and property offenses
from felonies or wobblers.
A wobbler means that the prosecutor
can charge it as a felony or misdemeanors.
They were now misdemeanors.
So less serious, the maximum jail time
you can receive for one of those is a year, right?
So reclassify them.
And that included theft offenses
and shoplifting was created as a category
that prosecutors could only charge as a misdemeanor.
And what we saw when we looked at the data,
largely, as I mentioned, includes shoplifting.
In the immediate wake of Prop 47,
we saw a decrease that indicated that,
an increase that indicated an increase in shoplifting
from this change in the classification.
But after about a year,
the numbers came back to what they were before Prop 47.
So it made it really difficult to determine then,
is that decrease in the number
because shop owners are not reporting them anymore?
And that's possible.
We certainly heard anecdotal evidence from shop owners
saying, yeah, there's no point doing that.
So that might've contributed to what we saw
in terms of the shoplifting numbers.
Reverse that now, come back and we had Prop 36 in 2024
and what Prop 36 was doing
was reversing some of their Prop 47 reform changes.
And for one, it included opportunities for prosecutors
to charge individuals for circumstances
when the theft value was even below the felony threshold
because they can aggregate these things.
It targeted repeat offenders of these types of crimes.
And there was a lot of discussion.
We all remember like hearing about retail theft.
We've covered it on the show.
I'm sure, right?
I mean, especially in 23, 24.
Because people were walking out with things
without any consequences.
Exactly, exactly.
I mean, we saw the videos and Prop 36 passed,
but even before that,
keep in mind that it got a lot of attention.
And there was, I think also conversations
about trying to tell retailers,
please report all of these incidents
because that will help law enforcement
to figure out what to target
in order to reduce this problem.
And then we had the election itself.
So that brought more attention to this.
So we're seeing increases as I'm mentioning here.
We see it continuing through 2024.
What we don't know now is,
is that a continued increase in actual retail theft
or is it that the retailers
are actually following these directives
and reporting these incidents?
So that's an example of where we really have to think
about the underreporting.
And you can think of possible kind of situations
where the underreporting will change.
And that makes it difficult for someone who studies
crime trend to say whether it went up or down.
From what we are hearing from average Californians,
most people are really concerned that crime is still there.
Even if we show the data,
and from what you're seeing,
we kind of know that murders and auto theft
based on the insurance, the data is accurate.
If we say to average Californians that crime
is back to 2019 level,
they may not believe that.
What are your thoughts on that?
Yeah, I mean, it's understandable.
And there are a lot of things that we need
to kind of keep in mind here as well.
And that is, we're talking about pretty broad trends here.
So even when I'm giving you like this great news
about property crime being at the lowest level
we've observed since at least 1960,
I can still point out some crime that actually
the data points towards some increases as well, right?
So there are some crime that's up.
And I think, again, coming back to retail theft
as a good example of how we're reminded
of challenges to public safety, right?
We went into, you go into a CVS store, a pharmacy,
a lot of stores.
What happened in and during that period of time
is a lot of these items were locked up now
that were not locked up before.
And then you wonder why would retailers lock things up?
It's a costly thing to do, right?
It's a headache to open up.
And then it's, yes, exactly.
So you don't do that lightheartedly as a shop owner, right?
So I think that that was kind of like convincing to people
that yeah, retail theft is up.
And the data did show that, yeah, it was.
It was pointing towards increases as well.
So I think part of the story is that, yeah,
we have seen increases in some crime.
Auto theft, I mentioned that as well.
If someone in our friend family group has a car stolen,
we all know about it.
And when that went up,
we knew of a lot of situations like that as well.
So there are some of those kind of things
that we need to keep in mind as well.
We have seen increases in some violent crime as well.
While homicide is down,
what we've seen is aggravated assaults increased
during the pandemic as well.
And it came down as well last year,
but still not at the level where we were before the pandemic.
So people wouldn't be wrong by pointing out,
yeah, there are some safety issues here.
And the other part is crime is local, that it differs.
Some of these areas that we see somewhere,
there's decreases.
In others, we're seeing increases
or that the decreases are not quite as great
as they are in other area.
And one example of that is Alameda, for example.
Alameda County, Oakland has had very challenging times
where we saw increases in violent crime
and crime in general in 2023.
And even though that there are efforts in place
and it's coming down notably,
it is still, even by 2024,
if we look at overall numbers in 2024 for violent crime,
it was still well above what it was before the pandemic.
We look at 2025 numbers,
they point towards continued decreases,
but it's still, it's elevated compared
to where it was before.
And then you have, of course, within any particular city,
there's some areas where you see more crime
than other areas as well.
So, you have all of these other things that are going on.
And we are, of course, reminded of crime
in media and social media as well.
So I think that there is, yes,
the data broadly points towards improvements,
but there are examples in the data where, yeah,
we still have a way to go.
And then there are areas where we also can point to,
geographic areas where we can point towards,
yeah, they're still, you know,
elevated compared to what they were before.
There are videos, we see street takeovers,
and then sometimes these people that are taking the streets,
they go to a gas station or 7-Eleven and ransack and take.
We've also seen jewelry stores getting robbed
by people with guns.
And also other examples where in the middle of the daylight,
people get approached in nice shopping centers,
or even Beverly Hills, there's videos of that.
Do you think that crime has become more brazen,
or do you think these are just examples
because we see the video,
something like that existed before?
I think that's hard to tell
if it's more brazen today than before.
But certainly when you look at these videos,
it appears that yes, it is in some instances, very brazen.
I think that the challenge is that we didn't have
that information 15 years ago.
We didn't know how these various robberies happened broadly.
Of course, the victims know exactly what happened
during these robberies, for example.
But yeah, I think the information becomes more shared,
and we're all aware of these situations,
and we see the brazenness as well.
And of course, it's what makes headlines as well.
So it's attractive from a media perspective
to show these instances, and they did happen.
And again, though, we can go to the data,
if we looked at robberies, for example.
Robberies also, we saw increases
during the pandemic as well.
So there was some of that going on.
And then some of these circumstances,
we're not sure if law enforcement
would report it as a robbery.
So there's a difference then if it's a robbery,
if there was use of force or threat of force, right?
In some of these videos that we've seen,
it's a number of people who just storm in.
They might smash some windows,
some displays just to grab things.
That might or might not be reported
and charged as a robbery.
That could be reported more as a retail theft,
either commercial burglary,
depending on the magnitude of the value
that was stolen of those items,
or a shoplifting situation as well.
But I do think, yeah, there is some indication.
We're certainly, that is being shared among us
that there's a brazenness there.
No doubt about that.
But overall things are getting better.
I think so, yeah.
I think so.
If we had this conversation a few years ago,
I wouldn't be as optimistic
because I would have been reminded
of those increases at that time.
And I would have shared that with you.
And I've written about this and I pointed out
that there are some troubling things
that we saw in the data that we should pay attention to.
But when I look at it today,
I would say that, yeah, it's mostly encouraging news.
But for any of these crimes,
there's a victim as well that's experienced this incident,
this whole thing.
And it can be very traumatic.
Just a robbery can be obviously very traumatic.
We can think of other types of crimes as well,
that there's not just the individual who's there,
but how it affects the family and the communities as well.
So there are those victims as well.
So we don't wanna get lost in the numbers.
Like, yes, I'm telling you that we see the lowest number
of homicides that we have in at least 40 years.
That's still almost 1,700 individuals who were killed.
That's a lot of victims.
So we don't wanna lose that perspective either.
There's room for further improvement too, I think.
Why do you think this is happening?
This has been, at times,
we hear about the great crime decline, right?
And that's kind of like,
you could see where that's coming from what I'm telling you.
And I think that, yeah, we are.
I mean, the data is pointing towards these things,
but we also need to keep in mind,
it's returning to where things were before the pandemic.
So when we go back and we look at 2020 and 2021,
that's when we see these increases.
We see it across California.
When you look at homicide, for example,
that was across the state we saw these increases,
but it wasn't just California.
We saw it across the country.
And when we're talking about now the decreases,
we're seeing it across California as well.
But it's the whole country too.
It's the whole country as well.
So we're talking about broad changes
that we have observed over the five, six years
that we're talking about here.
And I think then,
so if you're gonna be explaining why it's coming down,
you need to understand why did it go up in the first place?
And there were so many things
that happened during the pandemic.
So it's going to be very difficult
to pinpoint any one factor.
But I think that there's starting to be a consensus
at least about some plausible factors.
And I think from my perspective,
the starting place is to recognize
there were disruptions everywhere
that happened with the pandemic.
And it happened very quickly.
And if you start with the criminal justice system,
you see that across the board, there were impacts.
You take law enforcement,
pretty quickly there were local directives
to our police officers
to reduce and minimize arrests and bookings.
Because they didn't want to put people in jail
because they didn't want them to get there.
Exactly, exactly.
Yeah, you want to stop that flow of people
coming in and out of jail.
Jails are to start with a very difficult kind of environment
to prevent the spread of this deadly COVID virus as well.
And then you have the interactions
with community members as well that you have to remember,
we're walking around with masks or homemade masks
and all of those things.
If you're engaged in making stops and possible arrests,
that's out the door.
So that presents a public health challenge
to both the individuals who are engaging with the officer
and vice versa, right?
So we had all of that.
We had the zero bail orders
that the judicial council issued as well,
basically saying you can't hold people on bail
for most misdemeanors and a number of felonies as well.
Again, trying to reduce that flow of people
in and out of jail as well.
But that presented challenges for law enforcement
to do job the way that they did before, right?
And all of that was trying to prevent the spread of COVID.
So we had that happening.
And we're just talking about law enforcement now.
Other thing that happened in 2020
was the murder of George Floyd.
And there were protests across the state
and across the nation.
And there was the call for defund the police.
There was basically an increased mistrust in policing.
That makes policing more difficult to do as well, right?
If your community doesn't trust you,
it's gonna be very difficult to be effective police
in that area.
And then it affected law enforcement
from the perspective of recruitment and retention.
We lost police officers.
They either retired or the recruitment
to try and get new officer in there
was very difficult as well.
So just looking at policing,
we see big changes that made policing difficult.
We mentioned jail,
very difficult environment to prevent the spread of COVID.
Prisons are no different.
These are crowded environments.
So both jails and prisons released inmates as well.
The courts, emergency measures
that slow down the courts as well.
So the entire,
you can take any part of the criminal justice system.
It was affected and prevented them
from operating the way that they were before the pandemic.
Equally, maybe more importantly,
we had the social big disruptions.
What we were doing,
we were sheltering in place, right?
So we were not out in our communities as much.
To some extent, business is closed for example.
Some extent that will like drive down crime.
Like when stores are closed,
can't really steal from them.
But on the other hand,
for some types of crimes,
when there are fewer people around,
there are fewer witnesses.
We're wearing masks.
Those are things that makes it difficult to solve crimes.
We had school closures.
That means a lot of young people
are not in schools as well.
So we had all of these things.
We had the economic uncertainty on top of it.
I mean, in the first few months,
unemployment was very high.
So we had a lot of these factors
that can contribute to some type of crime as well.
But there were also,
these led to disruptions of local governments
and community-based organizations,
ability to provide services and programming,
anything from behavioral health
to violence prevention programs.
These are a number of factors
that can contribute to the increases that we did see.
Fast forward a few years,
what we've seen is slowly we're returning
to where we were before the pandemic,
allowing the various agencies,
whether it's within the criminal justice system,
behavioral health, community-based organization
to provide the kind of services and programming
that they were doing before the pandemic.
And I think that that's kind of the narrative
that describes what we've seen over the last five, six years.
There has been another element to this also
that the public opinion changed
from the criminal justice system reform
to actually we need to watch crime.
And we went from Prop 47 to Prop 36.
At the same time,
some district attorneys were more relaxed.
They didn't wanna enforce certain kind of crime,
but then those district attorneys are gone
and new ones are elected in some areas
like LA and San Francisco.
Do you think that also has an element in this?
Oh, I think so.
I think that what we have seen are some changes
in the perceptions and the willingness to implement
the kinds of reforms that we had been implementing before.
And Prop 47 is an example of something
that started before that
because California really embarked on this path
of criminal justice reforms.
Already around 2009, you can see some evidence
of some changes that were implemented
with this overall aim of reducing incarceration.
This country incarcerates more people
per 100,000 residents of any Western country
by a margin as well.
But what happened in California specifically
was the state prison system was sued
for not providing adequate services to the inmate population.
The services that we're talking about
are services that are protected by the Constitution
and that's adequate health and mental health care as well.
It was by the federal government.
Exactly, exactly.
They looked at the conditions,
they said it's not good conditions.
Exactly.
So there were all these lawsuits that led up
to three judge panel being appointed in 2007.
And in 2009, that three judge panel ruled
that the fundamental problem that prevents
the state of California to provide
these adequate health and mental health services
to its inmate population is overcrowding.
So it ruled that the state had
to reduce its prison population.
By the time it would have been a decrease
of about 40,000 inmates, that's 25% give or take,
that's a big, big change.
The state did make some changes
to reduce the prison population immediately,
but it also decided to take this to the Supreme Court.
But in 2011, the Supreme Court,
the U.S. Supreme Court ruled
that the federal court was correct in that.
So California, you have to actually
reduce its prison population.
So we had a big reform in 2011 called realignment, AB109,
and it shifted correctional responsibilities
from the state prison and the state parole systems
to county jails and county probation department.
It drove down the prison population
by about 27,000 in less than a year.
It pushed up the jail population somewhat,
but that wasn't what the Supreme Court ruling was about.
That still wasn't enough.
Like all the efforts that have taken,
that was still not enough to meet the federal mandate.
So when Prop 47 was being debated,
we were still above that.
And I think that that has put pressure on California
to move towards decreases in incarceration.
And there's been a number of other changes
that we've implemented during this period of time.
We've done research on impacts on Prop 47 on crime,
and we find no evidence that violent crime went up
as a result of Prop 47.
We found that there's some increases
in some property crime from Prop 47.
Larceny.
Property and drug.
Yeah, it was larceny and car break-ins.
And then in later work, it's pointing towards,
yeah, maybe retail theft as well went up
as a result of that.
But over that period of time that we're looking at here,
both violent and property crime was mostly trending down.
So it wasn't really until when we move into the pandemic,
when we're starting to see these increases in crime,
that I think that a lot of people question,
have we gone too far?
Should we reverse this to some extent?
And that led us to the conversations around Prop 47,
and maybe reverse some of those things.
I think, keep in mind that Prop 36 in 2024
overwhelmingly passed by voters,
suggesting that, yeah, it was very different
from Prop 47, the switch,
which also passed by a wide margin by voters.
But Prop 36, again, overwhelmingly passed.
And it's also one of those rare ballot initiatives
that passed in every single county in California
out of the 58.
Even with Prop 47, we did see an increase
in property crime in the year following that.
But then we came back again,
and we started to continue this downward path
that we've mostly been on since then.
In terms of other things that are visible
to people in California,
people being on drugs,
and the middle of daylight in the middle of the street,
and people with mental illness,
are they factors that you guys are studying
in terms of crime?
Because there's an element of crime
where it's not clear
whether you could get attacked by an individual,
what kind of reaction you might get.
We are studying this,
trying to better understand the trends
that we are observing when it comes to homelessness
and substance use and substance use treatment as well.
I think you're bringing up a really good point here
when it comes to coming back to this issue
of a sense that crime is on the rise.
The scenarios that you're describing
are kind of environments where we don't feel safe.
If we are in an environment where we're seeing drug use,
where we're seeing individuals being unhoused
or challenging with their behavioral health issues,
whether it's substance use or mental health,
it's obvious to us.
And I think that those things can then contribute to,
do we feel like crime is going up or down?
So when we look at that and we look at homelessness,
that is something that we've seen being on the increase
in California for the last decade.
So it's gone up by more than 60%.
And we're reminded of that social problem
because we do observe unhoused individual struggle.
So I think that that contributes.
And when you look at drug use,
in terms of you can look at overdose deaths
or overdose hospitalization, but death in particular,
especially in the last five, six, seven years,
it's been coming up notably as well.
So there's like the data is pointing towards,
especially over the last few,
I'd say since the pandemic, increases in that as well.
And that's something that we might observe at times.
And that certainly has an impact
on how we view our own safety and public safety as well.
And some parents have told us that in urban areas,
they're concerned of having their kids being alone
or going to parks or walk around because of this,
because of what they could get exposed to.
Yeah, they're volatile, potentially volatile situations.
So, you think of the areas
of homeless and unhoused individuals,
these are volatile environments and dynamic
and they can change very quickly.
So it is, when you look at the unhoused population,
they might also be likely to be targets
of the volatility that's in their community.
Because there's another crime inside this area.
Yeah, I mean, this is like the most vulnerable people
in our communities, they're struggling.
They don't even have housing, so they're struggling clearly.
So yes, they become volatile and potentially,
they become potentially victims of crimes themselves.
So I think, when we think about,
I mentioned the aggravated assaults going up,
one of the things that we would like to know,
but the data unfortunately doesn't allow us to answer that,
is to what extent is this happening
in the homeless communities?
And because we have seen the homelessness increase,
that that's part of the story
that's contributing to the increase
that we saw over a decade in aggravated assaults as well.
It was not like these very sudden surges.
We did see aggravated assault increase
during the pandemic,
but before that, we saw it tick up as well.
But there's a possibility that that's capturing something
that is part of the homeless challenge
that we're dealing with in California.
That's another area
that probably crime hasn't been reported
because from what we have gathered,
people that we have had on the show,
there are gangs in certain areas
that control these homeless encampments.
And there's a lot of crime within that community.
And to be able to have a tent
or be able to have a space,
you have to follow what these gang leaders are doing.
Absolutely, and that comes back
to kind of where we started early on
here talking about the reporting.
Many of these incidents will not be reported.
Some will be reported,
but there's definitely under-reporting of those instances.
So Magnus, you have been studying this data
and you're close to it.
Do you have any thoughts for Californians
that are concerned because they have seen the videos,
they are seeing these takeovers, G takeovers?
It's encouraging what we see in the data.
It appears that we're heading in the right direction,
but I do think that there's still room
for more improvement, right?
It's encouraging that we're seeing these decreases.
It's encouraging that what it looks like
is that we're returning to the trends
that we saw before the pandemic,
and those were downward trends predominantly.
But we were reminded in these last few years
of how things can change quickly.
And we were reminded that yes,
crime can go up and crime did go up,
but it's pointing us in the direction of decreases.
And I think what we need to do moving forward
is try to understand a little bit better
of what are some of the efforts and strategies
that we've taken in the last few years
to bring us back to these low crime levels
so we can replicate that.
We should try to identify what doesn't work.
What is it that we keep doing that isn't really helping?
So efforts around those things.
And one of the things that has been happening
that's changing law enforcement and policing
in the last, in the criminal justice system
in the last few years is the use of technology as well,
and AI.
So we are seeing increased use of drones
and license plate readers, cameras, all of these things
that may be tools to reduce crime.
And so I think efforts to also understand
how it's being implemented,
is it having those impacts that law enforcement hopes
and believes that it does?
And then also we do wanna keep in mind,
are there some unintended consequences
when we are utilizing this new technology?
Having too much data on the citizens.
Do you have too much data?
It's all kinds of things.
We're having technology.
Where are we concentrating these efforts?
All of these kind of things are things
that we need to think about as we move forward.
But I do think, you know,
things are looking up for California.
Magnus Lofstrom with PPIC.
It was great to have you on California Insider.
Great, it was great being here.
So thank you for having me.
Tell us what you think about this conversation with Magnus.
What are your thoughts on the data and crime
in California and the trends?
You can always email us at ciamacacaliforniansider.com
or comment.
We read all of your emails and comments.
I'm Ciamak Korami, this is California Insider.
We'll see you next time.