In his trip from debate to debate around Humboldt County this election season, District Attorney Paul Gallegos has taken credit for reducing violent crime during his eight years as the county’s chief prosecutor.
To state it up front: I believe that the case the counselor is advancing here is a piece of minor campaign flummery — a political infraction or maybe a misdemeanor, far short of a felony. It’s hard to imagine any thinking person taking it too seriously. Crime tends to wave up and down like housing prices — the whole nation more or less in sync — and, as the Washington Post editorialized a few months ago, no one seems to know exactly why.
So Gallegos taking credit for a reduction in the violent crime rate is something like an incumbent President taking credit for a boom economy: Most everyone agrees that he might have had some sort of hand in the matter, even if no one can pinpoint exactly what it was. So it’s pretty much allowed, and only the most churlish of commentators will throw even a yellow flag.
As recently as last night, though, Gallegos himself demonstrated that he takes the 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, ready with that yellow flag, wryly quizzed Gallegos about what exactly he had done to bring the crime rate down.
During that debate, I promised a complete blog post on the subject today. Here it is. In short: Gallegos’ central claim is true, barely. However: He should immediately fire whatever genius inspired him to take sole credit for the Humboldt County crime rate and make it part of his campaign pitch. The news on that front is far from good.
The chart above shows the per-capita violent crime rate in Humboldt County from 2001 to 2008, the last year for which the state Department of Justice has complete statistics. Gallegos took office at the beginning of 2003. The vertical scale on the chart indicates the number of violent crimes — homicide, rape, robbery, aggravated assault — per 100,000 residents. A simple glance shows that Gallegos is indeed correct. The crime rate is lower in 2008 than it was in 2002, the last year of Terry Farmer’s regime.
Drill down, though — what does this chart really show? If you accept the Gallegos narrative — again, we don’t, he does — then in his first year in office the new District Attorney cleaned up the county something fierce. With a new head prosecutor in town, the thugs were on the run: The 2003 violent crime rate was 21.8 percent lower than the year previous.
After that? Not so good. Somewhere in the third season of The Wire, someone — Daniels? Colvin? Burrell? — shared his maxim of police work: You never take credit for crime going down, because then you gotta take the blame when it goes up. If Gallegos single-handedly brought crooks to bay in 2003, what did he do to screw the pooch so badly in 2007? Violent crime shot up 18.1 percent in that year, and the next year didn’t offer much relief.
This is especially egregious when you consider that national and especially state trends continued in the opposite direction:
In other words, if you accept the Gallegos narrative — he does, we don’t — the question should be: What happened to that unstoppable crimebuster who singlehandedly pulled us out of Mad Max-style chaos and cleaned up the streets in his first year in office? The other 57 District Attorneys in the state of California continue to push the crime rate into freefall; ours, contrarily, now lets the hoodlums have their way with us.
That is, if you accept the great man theory of crime-fighting. We don’t. Gallegos does.
Sources:
Humboldt County: California Department of Justice.
California: California Department of Justice.
USA: Federal Bureau of Investigation.
This article appears in Three for Fourth.
What Paul “no, really” Gallegos claims is soooo true. I was contemplating committing of a string of felonies recently, but my fear of being prosecuted prevented me from taking action. Now I just watch the clock, waiting for a less ambitious DA to be elected.
Does animal abuse resulting in the animal’s death fall under violent crime in these statistics? If not, how does it get classified?
AJ: No. “Violent crimes” comprise only those four mentioned above. I don’t know where animal abuse is tracked, or if it is tracked.
Buzz: To be fair, Gallegos did advance a plausible rationale in the KHUM debate, in response to Hagen’s cross examination: he says that his office has sent the hard cases to jail, thereby taking them off the streets. If that’s so, though, then apart from his very first year in office his record has been decidedly poor. And it just occured to me that Gallegos’ team in his first year was Terry Farmer’s old team. The purges didn’t come until later.
Again, I don’t believe that Gallegos should be blamed for crime rates creeping upwards between 2004 and now, contrary to state and national trends. It’s Gallegos who would appear to believe it, paradoxically enough.
Hank:
By focusing on Paul Gallegos’ statement, and reluctantly finding it more or less borne out by the facts, you are also rejecting the wild claims of his opponents who claim crime has gone up on his watch. Had the crime rate truly gone up, who do you think would be blamed?
Ah, but there are so many ways to look at statistics and one side or another in a campaign will choose to look at those numbers which prove their case. That’s natural and expected.
When Paul Gallegos states that “crime is down since I took office,” he is looking at the statistics that you find on the Attorney General’s website (http://stats.doj.ca.gov/cjsc_stats/prof08/12/2.htm).
Sure, one can look at individual years and say, “Gotcha, this year doesn’t fit the statement.” But to assess the sweeping claim that “crime is down” one has to be as sweeping in looking at the data over the entire time alluded to.
If you look deeper into the stats, you find that for Homicide, Forcible Rape and Burglary, the stats look very much more favorable to Paul’s claim. The drop in rates are greater than the drop in state rates even. But, of course, the actual crime rate is below the state level in all those years, Farmer or thereafter. We in Humboldt counterbalance the high crime rate portions of the state, principally the LA area.
One anomaly to the drop in crime rate is aggravated assault. In that category, you see that Humboldt under Gallegos has seen no drop in rate. His overall crime rate tenure would look much, much better if we were to hide that one. We don’t hide it. However, If you look at the different types of assault, the use of firearms, knives and “other weapons” has gone down while the use of “hands, fists, feet” has gone up dramatically. In fact, use of body parts in assault entirely accounts for the rise, while other types of assault have declined. In other words, all violent crime in Humboldt has seen dramatic decline under Paul’s tenure except for assaults by people using “hands, fists, feet.”
All in all, then, Paul is justified in claiming that crime is down. One can cherry pick particular years that belie that claim, but “rate” is defined as
rate 1 (r t)
n.
1. A quantity measured with respect to another measured quantity: a rate of speed of 60 miles an hour.
2. A measure of a part with respect to a whole; a proportion: the mortality rate; a tax rate.
3. The cost per unit of a commodity or service: postal rates.
4. A charge or payment calculated in relation to a particular sum or quantity: interest rates.
5. Level of quality.
6. Chiefly British A locally assessed property tax. Often used in the plural.
(continued)
In other words, to compare rates, one has to be clear what one is measuring against. The more one excludes uncomfortable statistics that do not work toward one’s bias, the more one is not telling “the whole truth and nothing but the whole truth” – not a bad standard to apply.
So, would a reasonable person feel safer if they knew that the rate of Homicide, Rape, Burglary, and Aggravated Assault by the use of weapons were declining while Aggravated Assault by the use of “hands, fists, feet” had increased? We think that is an inescapable conclusion.
Lastly, is there a connection between the performance of a district attorney and the crime rate? Can Paul Gallegos take some credit for the drop in crime?
Paul contends that with over 10,000 yearly cases in his files and only 5 courtrooms working half days that he can only try 250 cases per year. (Mr. Hagen affirms those numbers as well when talking about plea bargaining.) So the DA has to prioritize which people to take to the mat. Paul has said repeatedly that he makes a judgment call based on his number one priority: public safety. He has said that he seeks to remove from society (put them away in prison) those people whose presence on the streets could present a danger to public safety. He decides to prosecute those persons that are the most dangerous, feeling that by taking them off the streets, they will not be around to commit additional crimes. When the crime rate drops, he knows that the people he sent to prison were not around to commit crimes and, therefore, the rate reflects their absence.
If you have read thus far, you are a thoughtful person and appreciate that matters of consequence, like public safety, require more discussion than sound bites.
Lest anyone get the wrong idea, I will repeat yet again that I think this is all a side trip down the rabbit hole.
But Michael — if these numbers mean what you say they mean, then you have to take the rough with the smooth. Right? So why has Gallegos’ second term been such an abysmal failure according to the metrics advanced by your man’s campaign? An increase in violent crime to the tune of almost 20 percent, at a time when the statewide crime rate fell.
Budget cuts? No, because the entire state had to deal with the same cuts.
What, then?
“matters of consequence…require more discussion than sound bites.”
They also require more than abstract statistics. Vote for Jackson or Hagen, but Gallegos has squandered years of opportunity and he should be sent on his way.
You missed one part of what is in the above. Aggravated assault with hands, feet and fists account for the rise in total violent crime. All other categories show declines.
If you are in law enforcement, the only official report card you get is the crime stats. You try your best to bring them down, feel you are on the right track when they do stay down, re-double your efforts when they rise.
And, yes, as you suggest, it is harder to do this when your budget gets axed some 10-15% each year. But you don’t have the luxury of giving up.
Note: Sherrif’s Dept and Courts did not suffer budget cuts. That was reserved for the DA’s office because they seem to be doing so well (handling full case load, respectable conviction rate, increase in prison commitments).
How would you propose evaluating a DA’s performance?
How should we evaluate a DA’s performance? That’s a very useful question. The office is quite opaque to outsiders.
Michael: OK, I’ll check that out later. Seems a bit strange for you to simultaneously decry the picking and choosing of statistics to make a case and then also say, hey, recent rates of violence aren’t so bad if you leave out people beating the fuck out of each other with their fists. But I will check it out later.
I don’t think there’s any single quantitative measure of a DA’s performance, just as there is no such measure for a senator’s or a supervisor’s.
If you do, maybe you should write to the Washington Post and tell them that you’ve cracked the nut — crime has gone down nationwide because the nation elected better DAs in the Bush years. For me, though, it’s just about identical to the case that HELP and the like used to make a few years ago. Housing prices are soaring in Humboldt County! Obviously, we’re not building enough homes! Remember how that turned out?
Island mentality. You can understand why political pitchmen are attracted to it, but that doesn’t mean it has to be swallowed.
Everyone has an interest in knowing what is happening around them. With crime stats, it is, as you say, not very easy to evaluate what is happening. So, one is left with going through the data to see what is up and what is down and when. Compare it to other stats from the state or nation. We do this kind of evaluation all the time to assess situations.
There is no definitive answer in the crime stats and I don’t claim there is. You concluded that, yeah, crime is down. If the stats showed that crime in Humboldt was runnaway horrible, don’t you think there would be a hue and cry to replace the sheriff and all other law enforcement chiefs, like the DA? So if a bad report leads one to change leadership, why doesn’t a good report lead one to retain leadership?
If your position is that the stats don’t matter, I can accept that, providing that there is a recognition that the DA’s office seems to be keeping pace with trends and not falling down in the effort.
What I find incomprehensible is that much of the debate around whether to replace Gallegos is not founded in a preponderance of evidence. It appears to be taking a few cases and crying they are symptomatic of a major breakdown in effectiveness. But there is no breakdown; the same number of cases are filed, the conviction rate is fine, prison commitments are in line. The office is full of purposeful public servants going about the business of dealing with criminal prosecution.
Does a political campaign’s success, then, rest on rumor, charges/counter charges and innuendo? I am not cynical enough to accept that for my community. Your pages along with other mass media have the difficult job of sorting things out without prejudice. Passion has a role to play here, but so should reason.
Hank, by his own definition above, is the among the most churlish of commentators.
My desire to have Gallegos out is due to the accident where I stopped to help in which a woman, incapacitated by drugs, drove off the road, killing one of her children and injuring another. The Times reported the accident, then that she was negative for alchohol but drug testing was still pending. Then utter silence. As I was so bothered by the lack of information. I kept checking around and finally was told by what I consider to be a reliable source, the driver tested positive for drugs. Which was not a surprise as she did appear to be seriously impaired at the time of the accident.
But no public word, not prosecution as far as I can tell, nada. One of my neighbors keeps insisting that drugs did not play a part otherwise it would have been in the news. They continue to drive their children after using.
Now the DA is not responsible for the density of people who believe what they prefer to believe to be true. But the opportunity to point out the dangers to innocent people of engaging in this behavior is missed- this is also an obligation of the judicial system.
I believe that too many times Gallegos’s office makes the decision that behavior exacerbated by drugs is not a big deal.
That is wrong.
Yeah Right: Let me get this straight… You want to elect either an incompetent failure or a vengeful beast to replace Paul Gallegos because the MEDIA isn’t doing THEIR job?
It is not the duty of ANY DA’s office to force local media to cover what they do. And making a decision to replace an effective DA just because you’re not being spoon fed his deeds is ludicrous!
THAT, good sir, IS WRONG.
Sounds like Johnny just loves him some Gallegos. He should talk to some crime victims/survivors. They’d be happy to take their chances with Hagen or Jackson. So would I.
Talking about human violent crime and some dilwad just has to bring up animals. Run off and become a wild goat. You make me ill.