Sacramento reports big drop in violent crime. City leaders credit police-community partnership
A year and a half after implementing a plan to turn back a rising surge in violence in Sacramento, Police Chief Kathy Lester announced this week that the city has experienced an 18% drop in the overall number of violent crimes.
From January through September this year, the city has recorded a 40% drop in homicides, 40% fewer rape cases, a 21% decline in aggravated assaults and robberies are down 6.1%, all in comparison to the first nine months of 2022.
“It’s not a surprise to anyone that we saw a rising violent crime through the pandemic,” Lester said during a news conference Wednesday at City Hall. “But what I can tell you is that we worked very hard to come up with a strategy that we thought would work for Sacramento.”
Mayor Darrell Steinberg credited the crime reduction to the partnership built between the Police Department and community groups serving residents directly when they need help the most.
“You see it every single time we have a tragedy or troubled times in Sacramento,” Steinberg told reporters. “We gather here like this in the bad times and in the difficult times, and people support one another.”
Lester became Sacramento’s new police chief in January 2022, heading into the job knowing violent crime was a growing problem in the city.
Homicides were on an upward trend, from 36 in 2018 to 58 in 2021, according to statistics Lester presented to the Sacramento City Council on Tuesday night. The number of homicides in 2021 was the most the city had seen since 2006.
Reported rapes also were climbing, from 102 in 2018 to 159 in 2021. Aggravated assaults were up from 2,139 in 2018 to 2,893 in 2021, then climbed even further to 3,196 in 2022.
There were 1,052 robberies in 2018, a figure that dipped in the following three years but then rose to 1,245 in 2022.
“And those are numbers that no chief wants to have to reckon with,” Lester said about her task when taking the job.
The police chief and her department also had to respond to the April 3, 2022, mass shooting at 10th and K streets in downtown Sacramento, where rival gang members opened fire as people left nightclubs and bars. Six people were killed that night and 12 others wounded, some of them innocent bystanders caught in the crossfire.
Even before the mass shooting, Lester and her department had been developing a strategy to reduce gun violence. She unveiled her plan publicly at a June 2022 City Council meeting, saying her department would use policing strategies driven by intelligence gathering. Her strategy also included working closely with community groups targeting root causes of crime, such as poverty and drug and alcohol abuse, with intervention and prevention services.
Chief points out ‘hot spots’ of Sacramento violence
Her department identified that most violent crime occurs in a 7-square-mile area of the city. She said these crimes are mostly concentrated in three geographic areas: Del Paso Heights; Oak Park; and Meadowview and Valley Hi / North Laguna, a pair of adjacent neighborhoods in the southern portion of the city.
The average number of assaults in Sacramento is about 29 per square mile, Lester has said. But that number jumps to 105 per square mile, or 260%, more in the areas she identified as “hot spots.” Lester said the average number of homicides in the city is 0.5 per square mile, but it’s two per square mile — about 300% higher — in those neighborhoods.
Lester wanted to focus investigative and crime prevention efforts on the neighborhoods most affected. She didn’t want to flood neighborhoods with broad enforcement; she said she wanted to focus efforts on “a small group of people” responsible for these crimes.
Community groups partner with city, police
The Police Department’s strategy appears to be working, and the City Council on Tuesday approved $3.2 million in funding for community groups focused on violence prevention, such as Brother 2 Brother.
Brother 2 Brother founder Mervin Brookins said he and many others didn’t know what Lester meant when she spoke about a data-driven approach to policing. At Wednesday’s news conference, Brookins jokingly said that Lester’s plan at first, to him, “sounded kind of sketchy.”
But he later learned it meant community groups and police had to work together to achieve success. He said he knows that both sides “took flak” for that partnership. But they endured that criticism, he said, and now the violent crime rate is going down.
Brookins said officers today will see a troubled youth and call a community intervention group to help, instead of immediately hauling the youth to juvenile hall or jail if they’re older.
“When we talk about collaboration, she gave us the resources to serve the people in those specific areas,“ Brookins said. “And we were able to go out and build relationships. We were able to go out and help people help themselves.”
When the police chief announced her strategy last year, City Manager Howard Chan moved the Office of Violence Prevention and the community-based organizations it funds under the oversight of the Lester and her department.
That decision was met with criticism from some on the City Council and community groups not selected that year to receive funding. The police chief said they chose groups that “have a history of success and experience building partnerships” and also have “a proven track record to do this type of work.”
The community groups selected this year to receive violence prevention funding stood Wednesday alongside the police chief, the mayor and Office of Violence Prevention Manager Dr. Nicole Clavo to discuss the significant reduction in violent crime.
“Some of these individuals are called in the middle of the night to come out to these communities that may have had shootings, there may have been car accidents, whatever that critical incident may be,” Clavo told reporters. “These individuals that you see here are tasked with working through those incidents, with those individuals, those families, and being there firsthand to deal with this trauma.”
