Long Beach has lowest homicide rate since 1971

Long Beach Police Department officials announced a significant reduction in crime in 2010, with the city's homicide rate falling to its lowest level since 1971.

Chief Jim McDonnell credited gang injunctions, better communication with the community and various online resources, such as Nixle.com, in combating crime and taking "more criminals off the streets." Last year, law enforcement in the city seized 887 weapons.

"We believe that our response time to emergency calls for service has played a significant role in crime reduction," McDonnell told reporters. "Our average response time for Priority 1 emergency calls for service for 2010 is 4.1 minutes, which is among the best in the country.”

Overall, homicides in 2010 were down by about 25% from 2009, with a steeper reduction in killings considered to be gang-related, down about 54% from the previous year. Additionally, total violent crime, which includes murder, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault, was down 13.5%, McDonnell said.

Long Beach had 33 homicides in 2010, 44 in 2009 and 47 in 2008, according to a Times analysis of coroner's records. [The coroner's definition of homicide differs in some cases from those reported as criminal homicides by law enforcement. For example, officer-involved killings are counted as homicides by the coroner because they meet the coroner's definition of "death at the hand of another."]

The Times recently reported that the city of Los Angeles was on track to have fewer than 300 homicides in 2010, a number that had been surpassed yearly for more than four decades. When final figures are reported, Los Angeles is likely to have recorded its fewest number of killings since 1967, when the population was almost 30% smaller.

L.A. homicides have dropped by about one-third since 2007, according to coroner's records. Throughout the rest of Los Angeles County, which is patrolled by the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department and individual cities' police departments, homicides during the same period fell by nearly 40%.

-- Sarah Ardalani

Credit: Long Beach Police Department