By Keegan Kyle
As police push for more funding, Police Chief Bill Lansdowne and other officials have tried to bolster their case with some alarming statistics about violent crime in San Diego.
Violent crime is a category that law enforcement authorities use to track the total number of murders, rapes, robberies and aggravated assaults. Last year, San Diego police reported about 5,100 of these crimes alone.
But during in a recent interview with KPBS, Lansdowne drilled deeper into the violent crime statistics and specifically described a rise in gang-related murders.
“There’s a 130 percent increase in the number of gang homicides in the city of San Diego just in the first six months of this year,” Lansdowne said. “And those are disturbing numbers for us to deal with.”
To help understand Lansdowne’s claim and additional context, I’ve illustrated the number of gang-related murders and all murders since 2007 in the graphic below. This information comes from the Police Department’s homicide unit and crime reports posted online by Sandag.
Lansdowne’s specific comparison was accurate. Police reported 14 gang-related murders during the first half of this year and six during the same period last year. The difference between those numbers is 133 percent — close to the figure Lansdowne cited.
The graphic also shows why the spike in murders this year is unusual. Police reported more between January and June than the same period in each of the past five years. The six-month total this year exceeds the annual total in each of the past three years, too.