The California Attorney General today released the annual report of state crime statistics, Crime in California, 2018. The violent crime index has returned to its 2016 level after a bump last year. Homicide is back to its 2014 level, tying the lowest rate since the 1960s.
Over the past four years, California's violent crime rates have risen more than the national rates, as described in this post last September and illustrated in this graph. We will have to wait a few months for the national report to see the comparison for 2018.
Property crime has been on a long downward trend, steadily for the country as a whole and with ups and downs along the way for California, as discussed in the same post and illustrated in this graph. Yesterday's report indicates a modern-history low in property index crimes reported to the police. How that relates to property crimes committed presents a difficult data problem. Victims of property crime are less likely to report the crime to the police if they believe the police won't do anything, and inaction is more likely now than previously for the large number of property crimes reclassified from felony to misdemeanor by Proposition 47.
I am highly skeptical of the claim that people are not reporting crime. It assumes that people have a sufficiently fine understanding of the law that they know what is and is not a felony under current law. I have seen no evidence to support this but it appears to be a last, desperate gasp at undermining criminal justice reform, which this data suggests has not had a negative impact on public safety. (I'm also skeptical that, particularly in big cities, police were ever making minor property crimes a priority.)
As demonstrated in the earlier post, California has done substantially worse than the country as a whole since the wave of softening measures began. As noted in that post, that is not proof because correlation alone does not prove causation. However, I have not yet seen anyone, including the softening advocates, put forward an alternative hypothesis to explain this. Correlation plus the absence of a plausible non-causal explanation is significant evidence.
We know from the National Crime Victimization Survey that reporting rates for theft are low, only one-third in this report from 2006-2010 data. A belief that the police would not help was the most commonly stated reason.
A "fine understanding" is not required for the reduction from felonies to misdemeanors to have an effect on reporting rates. All that is needed is a general awareness that the police won't do anything for thefts in the sub-kilobuck range. That is true in California today, and word gets around.
I presume there is no real dispute on the homicide accounting, and the historically low number is remarkable in the wake of the concerns expressed by the Plata dissenters. Someone should also make sure Alex Berenson sees this data, as he argues marijuana legalization leads to more violent crime. I would be tempted to credit the 2016 death penalty vote, but that seems practically to have not moved the needle (bad pun intended). What an interesting and unpredictable state.
California's homicide numbers of tracked the national numbers over the last several years. We will have to wait and see if that holds true for the current year.
Given the nature of the softening measures to date, we would expect the least impact on homicide, so that is consistent with expectations.
I would not have predicted any deterrent effect from the enactment of Proposition 66 alone. I would have expected a deterrent effect from the resumption of executions facilitated by Prop. 66. That might have happened this year had Gov. Newsom not misused the reprieve power in violation of his pre-election promise.