Today’s Times-Standard alerts us to the fact that the latest edition of California Department of Justice’s crime statistics for the year 2009 have just been released. That, plus a similar release from the FBI, tells us that it’s time to update the chart we published back at the beginning of May, in response to one of incumbent District Attorney Paul Gallegos’ campaign planks — that the crime rate has fallen to new lows under his watch, and that he and his office deserve the credit for the drop.
The evidence for the claim was pretty thin back then, but given the customary level of hurlyburly and hype in any political campaign, we judged this particular piece of hokum in bounds. Today’s news, though, is egg on the face. Following a dramatic uptick last year, the violent crime rate in Humboldt County as of 2009 was higher than when Gallegos took office. The rates in California and the nation at large, meanwhile, continued to fall.
So you can expect this particular plank to vanish from Gallegos campaign literature as we move into the November runoff. Again, all’s fair in love and politics.
What doesn’t seem quite so seemly is Gallegos sloughing off last year’s big bump to the Times-Standard‘s Matt Drange.
”Humboldt County got hit hard last year — there was a lot of stress,” said Gallegos, who added that the economy was a key issue. “You tend to see that stress reflected in the courts.”
Yellow flag! You don’t get to claim sole credit for lowering crime rates if, when they rise, you say that it’s all someone or something else’s fault. You do the crime, you do the time (as it were).
This article appears in Thunder in the Redwoods.
Those who live by the sword, etc … crime has gone up and is higher today than when he first took office despite national and statewide trends to the contrary.
We need a new DA, plain and simple.
Yes, Chris, because we all know that it’s DAs office that is the cause of crime.
/sarcasm
At what point do you finally face the truth?
This man lies to you. He lies as easily as he breathes. He relies on you to think it is just “hurlyburly and hype.”
Plagiarism got excused. “He’s just a lawyer, and lawyers copy/paste all the time.” It’s a never ending stream of excuses. Everything gets excused. Oh Poor Misunderstood Paul. The people around him lie to cover for him. They sneak around anonymously on blogs and the Times Standard smearing his critics and opponents. It’s way more than “hurlyburly and hype.” Why do people keep pretending it doesn’t matter? Why do people keep brushing it off as unimportant?
I am tired of it.
From his website: “Crime is Down under Paul Gallegos – Violent Crime has gone down 13% in Paul’s tenure because we prioritize removing the violent elements from society.”
Yet, on his grant applications, Gallegos routinely states: “…The communities of Humboldt County suffer from severe socio-economic problems, Historically, the northwest has sustained on primarily timber, commercial fishing and cattle ranching as its main sources of income. In the last two decades, these once abundant industries have been all but eliminated. The results of this economic decline have been a slightly higher than state average unemployment rate (11.4%) and a high level of substance abuse. Because of the overwhelming amount of substance abuse there is an increase in crime such as: drug trafficking, rape, robbery, murder, child abuse, spousal abuse and child pornography….”
May 13: It was Allison Jackson who called him out on this back in May.
http://www.northcoastjournal.com/news/2010/05…
“…During the KHUM/North Coast Journal debate last week, Gallegos demonstrated that he takes these numbers very seriously indeed. Both Allison Jackson and Paul Hagen called him on this in different ways. Jackson asserted that the violent crime rate has in fact gone up, not down, during his tenure. Hagen wryly quizzed Gallegos about what exactly he had done to bring the crime rate down….”
From Gallegos’ own website:
http://votepaul.org/issues/what-truth-about-v…
“What is the truth about violent crime?
By prioritizing which people to remove from society, we have made the community safer. We all want a safe place to live our lives and raise our families, and by working together with health and human services, and the probation office, our team, which includes law enforcement, Health and Human Services, and CAST, has effectively reduced crimes in Humboldt County.”
You’re right, he’ll be scrubbing his site tomorrow.
On to the next lie. ‘Cause the truth is right there in plain sight.
It wasn’t a lie at the time. The crime rate was lower in 2008 than it was in 2002. The hurlyburly and hype was taking credit for that drop. That was exceedingly dubious, as we noted in some detail, but it was not a lie.