Riverside County Sheriff’s Department releases 2015 crime trends

The Riverside County Sheriff’s Department has released preliminary crime trends for the first half of 2015. The following crime trends were reported to the FBI and include the first 11 months of the past year. Authorities said the sheriff’s department will update the 2015 crime data with December’s results in February.

FBI Part I crime statistics for the first 11 months of 2015 for the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department indicate a 6% increase in FBI Part I violent crimes, largely due to increases in robberies and aggravated assaults, authorities said in the release.

Property crimes increased nearly 7%, with an overall FBI Part I crime increase of 6.9% in the first 11 months of 2015 over the very same period in 2014.

During the first 11 months of 2015, there was a 32% reduction in homicides and a 22.6% drop in burglaries reported to the sheriff in the combined unincorporated areas of Riverside County and its contracted partner cities, authorities said.

According to the sheriff’s release, the department serves as the contract policing agency partner with 17 of Riverside County’s 28 cities and also serves the unincorporated areas of Riverside County for criminal investigations. Altogether, the Sheriff is responsible for policing nearly 1.4 million residents of the County’s population of over 2.3 million.

But within just the unincorporated Riverside County areas alone, reported FBI Part I violent crimes have increased by 17.7%, property crimes have increased 13.9%, and overall FBI Part I crime increased 14.3% in 2015 over the very same period in 2014 (first 11 months). Homicides in the unincorporated areas of the county declined by 47%, reported rapes declined by 29%, and burglaries declined 5.6%, over 2014. However, robberies increased by over 17%, aggravated
assaults increased by almost 25%, larceny thefts increased by over 16%, and auto thefts in the county’s unincorporated areas rose by over 16%, authorities reported.

Prop 47 Impacts

The Riverside County jail system saw a 30% decrease in the number of drug arrests by all law enforcement agencies that were booked into county jail for the first 11 months of 2015 compared to the same period in 2014. There has also been over 16% fewer bookings by all of the county’s law enforcement agencies into the county’s jail system for “property crimes”in 2015 over that same period in the previous year. These percentages have remained nearly constant month-by-month throughout 2015, officials said in the report.

Administration began to see data underscoring a large increase in violent crime in the unincorporated areas outside of the cities of Hemet and San Jacinto served by the Hemet Sheriff’s Station, and because of funding levels in unincorporated areas, Sheriff Stan Sniff he’s directed additional visible patrols to be added to the Hemet Sheriff Station.

According to sheriff’s officials, dispatchers process some 1.6 million phone calls from the public and dispatch sheriff’s personnel to nearly 900,000 calls for service (CFS). Riverside County is the 4th most populous of California’s 58 counties, and the 10th most populous county in the United States.

News Channel 3 and CBS Local 2 will provide the updated stats as soon as the results from December 2015 are made available.