Violent Crime Drops 1% Countywide

Major crimes increased significantly statewide during the first six months of the year, but the increases were smaller or nonexistent in Orange County, according to a state attorney general’s report released Thursday.

“We’re all very happy to hear that the trend is going in the right direction,” said Lt. Hayward Miller, a spokesman for the Orange County Sheriff’s Department.

Property crimes increased 9.8% statewide and violent crimes by 3.3% from January to June of this year compared with the same period last year, according to the report released by Atty. Gen. Bill Lockyer. At the same time, however, property crimes in Orange County rose only 3% and violent crimes decreased 1%.

“It’s got to be [due to] a cumulative effort by all of the county’s law enforcement agencies working to together to combat crime,” Miller said. “We always work the areas we are responsible for very aggressively, and I think that it’s certainly had an impact on the statistics reported.”

The report included numbers from law enforcement agencies in the county’s largest cities -- Anaheim, Costa Mesa, Fullerton, Garden Grove, Huntington Beach, Irvine, Orange and Santa Ana -- and from areas patrolled by the Sheriff’s Department.

One notable exception to the O.C. trend was Anaheim, where homicides increased 83.3%, from 6 to 11, in the first six months of 2002 compared with the same period last year.

An Anaheim police spokesman attributed the increase to a rise in gang and drug activities, and to the growing number of 14- to 23-year-olds, the age group that commits most crimes. Law enforcement officials are not surprised by the surge, Sgt. Rick Martinez said, because crime has been at an all-time low for the last 12 years.

“We’ve been working to keep it as low as we can but with economic conditions, social conditions, the emphasis on terrorism -- with so many things going on in today’s world, you have to stretch your resources to meet all of the safety needs,” he said.

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Times staff writer Mai Tran contributed to this report.