True Crime - Part 1

The last time he was Mayor, in 2012, Mark Tettemer was going around mis-leading everyone about the crime rate in Lake Forest. He was claiming that Lake Forest was “one of the safest cities in the U.S.” when the truth was that Lake Forest had the highest crime rate of any of the cities in South Orange County patrolled by the OC Sheriff’s Department (OCSD). We were #9 out of 9 according to data provided by OCSD and shown above. Our crime rate was 15.15 per 1,000 residents and that was more than twice as high as RSM (7.08%) and well above the average of 12 per 1,000. We were never "one of the safest cities in the U.S."

In his defense Tettemer was just parroting what he was told by the City Manager who was using a statistical artefact to promote the city. It turns out the study Tettemer was using was a study of the 400 cities with populations of 75,000 or more, and at that time, Lake Forest had just about 75,000 people. That means we were one of the smallest cities in the study. It also turns out that there is a high positive correlation between crime rate and city size – the bigger the city, the bigger the crime rate.

Had the study been done with the 19,000 cities who had populations from 50 to 75,000, Lake Forest would have had one of the highest crime rates in the study because at 75,000 people it would be among the largest.

If you want proof of this just look at the 2012 data from OCSD. The cities with the larger populations (Lake Forest, Mission Viejo, San Clemente and Yorba Linda) had the higher crime rates and the cities with the smaller populations (Laguna Woods, RSM, and Aliso Viejo) had the lowest crime rates. The only exception to this was Villa Park. The averaged crime rate for the top 4 cities was 13.85 and for the smallest 4 cities it was 10.13.

Lies about our crime rate in Lake Forest re-surfaced recently at a City Council meeting when a Tettemer supporter, John Claycomb, claimed that Lake Forest “never” had the worst crime rate in South Orange County and, once more, parroted Tettemer’s claim that we have always been “one of the safest cities”. Claycomb said he got his information from an un-named “reliable source” but it sounded suspiciously like Tettemer’s old bromide.

The main responsibility of a city is public safety so it’s essential that we don’t mislead people about our crime rate, past and present. That’s why, a few years ago when I was on the Council, I got the Police to publish a page with the latest crime statistics. At the time we were one of the few cities to do this. Click here to take a look.

TOTAL CRIMES

Let’s take a brief look at the data. It shows 2018 without the 2019 data posted yet. Here are the totals for Part 1 Crimes –

• 2015 – 1019
• 2016 – 856
• 2017 – 890
• 2018 – 921

The prior year data isn’t up there, but going through my own archives I found

• 2013 - 919
• 2012 – 1199

CRIME RATE

Raw data doesn’t tell the whole story because our population keeps increasing. So here is the crime rate (number of crimes divided by population)

• 2010 – 13.60
• 2011 – 13.25
• 2012 – 15.15
• 2013 – 11.58
• 2014 – 9.86
• 2015 - 12.75
• 2016 – 10.14
• 2017 – 10.48

If you assume that the 921 crimes in 2018 are calculated using the city’s estimated 85,000 people, our rate would be 10.9.

In the past 4 years we’ve averaged about 10 crimes per 1,000 people. That’s a big improvement over prior years when our crime rate averaged more than 14 crimes per 1,000.

RANK ORDER

Here is our rank order compared to other South OC cities patrolled by OCSD, as reported by OCSD. Note that from year to year OCSD doesn't necessarily report the crime rate for every city so that the numbers vary.–

• 2012 – 7 out of 7
• 2013 – 6 out of 8
• 2014 – 6 out of 8
• 2015 - 6 out of 10
• 2016 – 3 out of 10
• 2017 – 5 out of 10

BOTTOM LINE

• No matter what Mayor Tettemer or his supporters tell you, we are not “one of the safest cities in the U.S.”
• OTOH we do have a low crime rate, largely because we live in a part of the world where there is less crime, largely because of our size and demographics. But many of our neighbors have even lower crime rates.
• On a comparative basis we have been doing much better recently. We used to have one of the highest crime rates in South Orange County and now we have clearly improved.
• On a per capita basis we are doing better. Our crime rate in the city is more than 30% less than it was only a few years ago.
• Even though we are doing better, crime is still an important issue and people should do everything they can to protect themselves and their property.

Next time we’ll cover some of the things you can do to help prevent crime and keep you and your family safe.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dr. Jim Gardner was on the Lake Forest City Council from 2014 to 2018 and Mayor in 2018. Under his leadership the City became the first debt free city in the U.S. with a population over 25,000 people and the first city to live broadcast City Council meetings that allowed residents to participate online (Click Here). Dr. Gardner is one of the organizing members of Lake Forest Community Action Network. You can check him out on LinkedIn and/or Facebook and you can share your thoughts about the City at Lake Forest Town Square on Facebook.