Source: Eureka Police Department.

Crime in Eureka has been on the decline, believe it or not — at least that’s what the latest stats from the Eureka Police Department say.

As you can see from the graph above, property crime in particular has dropped quite a bit in recent months. There were 116 property crimes in the city last month, which is barely more than half the peak of 224 property crimes last November.

That’s good news since, as previously reported, Eureka has had the highest property crime rate in the state among cities with at least 20,000 people. 

The downward trend in Eureka’s violent crime rate is even stronger, despite two murders in the city last month alone (those of 18-year-old Dax Brown in Hammond Park and homeless man Terry Lee Thomas outside Courthouse Market).

Source: Eureka Police Department.

There’s considerable variation in those numbers, in part because they’re relatively small. There were only five violent crimes in Eureka in June and seven in July, but August saw a spike with 21 violent crimes, a dozen of which were aggravated assaults. Last month it dropped back down to 10 violent crimes.

You can pore over the raw numbers here and explain your unified theory of Eureka criminality in the comments below.