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Did you hear Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton squabble over crime rates during their debate last week? Trump charged that rising crime was the result of the Obama presidency generally, and the end of stop-and-frisk policies in New York City particularly. Clinton said that Trump was wrong. Trump said nuh-uh. Clinton said yes-huh. Etc. 

Well, Trump was pretty much wrong, because he relied on 2015 data released the morning of the debate by the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting program. The NYPD itself releases new statistics every week, and those numbers show that violent crime is once again dropping in New York, after a bump in 2015.

So New Yorkers have up-to-the-moment data available to them. But for much of the country — including Humboldt County — the Uniform Crime Reporting data is the best data available on which way crime is trending. 

So it’s time, once again, to take a look at what the numbers collated by the FBI tell us about crime in Humboldt County.

Let’s take violent crime first — murder or non-negligent homicide, rape, robbery and assault. The following graph shows the number of violent crimes per 100,000 population for each of the four major local police agencies in the county — the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office, the Eureka Police Department, the Arcata Police Department and the Fortuna Police Department — between 2000 and 2015, plotted against the national and state averages:

City, state and national populations from Uniform Crime Reports. Unincorporated area of Humboldt County from California Department of Finance.

Arcata, Eureka and Fortuna have each bounced up and down over the last few years, but violent crime in the unincorporated area of the county — the area patrolled by the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office — is two and a half times what it was in 2012, exceeding the national average for the first time in 15 years.

Why should this be? We suspected that it might have something do to with the dissolution of the Hoopa Valley Tribal Police Department during the last couple of years, with the Sheriff’s Office assuming responsibility for crimes that used to be booked by the HVTP. But Undersheriff William Honsal yesterday assured us that this was not the case — the Sheriff’s Office, under its cross-deputization agreement with tribal police, always booked incidents of violence under its own stats. 

Honsal theorized that the rise in violent crime in the unincorporated had to do with two things: Changes in the way California punishes petty crime, such as 2014’s Proposition 47, and the continuing rise of the black-market marijuana economy in the county’s backwoods.

The fact that people rarely do time for simple drug possession means that more people are getting addicted to hard drugs, Honsal thought — more people addicted means more people willing to go to extremes to get their fix. Meanwhile, he held that the marijuana economy contributes more than its fair share to violent crime.

“What used to happen, out in rural Humboldt County, is you’d see ranchers and people who want to be left alone out there,” Honsal said. “But now you see people behind locked gates doing illegal things, and there’s violent crime associated with that. It has its effect.”

Property crime — burglary, larceny, motor vehicle theft and arson — fell almost everywhere in the county, including in Eureka, where it had been on a steady and sometimes rapid climb since 2008. The one exception is Fortuna, where reported property crimes increased by about 33 percent between 2013 and 2015:

You can hover over these charts and get specific numbers for each agency, for each year. If they look like garbage on your phone, rotate into landscape mode and refresh the page.

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