SACRAMENTO, Calif. — The City of Sacramento is significantly less violent this year compared to last year.
According to data announced this week by the Sacramento Police Department, overall violent crime in the city has dropped 18.2%, when comparing the first nine months of 2023 to the same period in 2022.
Homicides are down 40%. Aggravated assaults are down 21.1%. Rape cases are down 40.1%, and robberies are down 6.1%.
This is following a spike in crime during the pandemic seen in cities across the U.S., including Sacramento.
“Today is a happy day to be mayor,” Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg said at a news conference Wednesday. “Something is going right here in the city of Sacramento."
He and Sacramento Police Chief Kathy Lester shared details of the data, surrounded by other city leaders and community-based organizations.
“Our public safety is really a collective and a shared responsibility,” Lester said. “I stood before you in June of last year – that was right here in this council chamber - and we proposed a plan that was really one not like any other.”
Chief Lester’s Violent Crime Reduction Strategy saw her department teaming up with community-based organizations. They focused resources on the city’s highest-crime neighborhoods, including Del Paso Heights, Oak Mark, Meadowview and Valley Hi.
Merv Brookins, of mentoring program Brother 2 Brother, said he was skeptical at first. But the program started working.
“(Chief Lester) talked about it being a data-driven approach,” he said. “We were able to go out and build relationships. We were able to go out and help people help themselves. And in doing so, that meant we had to develop a relationship with law enforcement, which continues today.”
ABC10 asked Chief Lester how the first nine months of 2023 compare to the city’s violent crime rate before the spike in crime seen during the pandemic – and whether this good news simply reflects a return to pre-COVID levels.
Lester acknowledged “You can talk about statistics in any way,” and added, “What we're most proud of is that we're seeing these drastic reductions. But you're absolutely right, we are now trending down towards pre-pandemic levels. And so I think that's very important.”
She said she likes comparing Sacramento to similar urban areas across the U.S., “and you're seeing a very mixed result with crime and violent crime across the United States. Some major cities and urban centers are seeing increases, some are seeing decreases. What I can tell you is when we compare ourselves this year to what we're seeing nationally, we are significantly trending down. But that does put us back, you know, close to pre-pandemic levels. And so it's nice to quantify that.”
Daniel Savala is executive director of the Del Paso Boulevard Partnership, which represents property owners and businesses along the Del Paso Boulevard corridor. He’s happy to hear violent crime is going down.
“I'm a lifelong Sacramentan,” he said. “I live in North Sacramento. I feel safe here.”
However, he said his community is hurting from non-violent crimes.
“What we do struggle with are petty theft, vandalism, drinking in public - these low-level, these nuisance things that really, in fact, impact our day-to-day quality of life,” Savala said. “Without a doubt, there's no risk of being robbed at gunpoint walking on Del Paso Boulevard and we're grateful for that, but there's just some day-to-day struggles that we deal with.”
These lower-level crimes leave many property and business owners frustrated and fatigued, Savala said, to the point where they don’t even bother filing police reports anymore - like when a store window gets smashed yet again.
“A fatigue has kind of set in, where they don't think anything's going to be done about it, so they just do the best they can to board their own window up, clean the mess up and move on,” Savala said. “There's just a history of incidents happening - someone coming in with a metal object to a store, breaking a window. And if we don't report it to the police, we just kind of suck it up and move on.”
He said he appreciates the work of Sacramento police and knows they’re stretched thin as they and departments across the U.S. face staffing shortages. But he’d like to see non-violent crimes dramatically reduced as well.
“While we're certainly coming out with great numbers now, like the mayor said, that doesn't mean the work is done,” Lester said. “That doesn't mean that we're taking a pause; we're still moving forward and hope to see continued reductions through this partnership.”
Savala asked whether the police department believes any part of this drop in numbers is due to under-reporting. ABC10 took his question to a spokesperson for the police department, Sgt. Carlos Martinez. He said while questions of under-reporting always come up when looking at crime data, in this case, the drops in crime categories are so steep that even with any potential under-reporting, there would still be a strong downward trend.
The city is paying for all this through two sources of funding. One is a three-year grant awarded by the U.S. Department of Justice, which is used to help the department improve its violence reduction strategies. However, most of the money comes from the city’s sales tax-funded Measure U.
$3.2 million has been allocated this year to fund the community-based organizations doing work like gang violence prevention and intervention and youth empowerment. That can be renewed for another two years — up to $9.6 million.
Steinberg said reducing crime and serving at-risk youth, not only keeping them out of trouble but giving them a pathway to become thriving adults has to be a priority.
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