In addition, “The crime rate in Ventura County dropped tremendously in the 1990s — a 46.7 percent decrease between 1991 and 1999 — and leveled off a bit starting around 2000. It continued to drop slowly through 2013, even during the recession. In 2013, Ventura County’s crime rate was 21.5 serious crimes per 1,000 residents. That was up slightly from the year before, but down 8 percent in the six years since 2007.”
The battle against crime is “one of the great success stories in the recent history of American public policy. Ventura County, like the United States in general, is safer today than it has been in the past half century. Crime rates peaked in the 1980s and early 1990s, when they were many times higher than they are now. The drop in crime since then has been huge, sustained and consistent. It continued even through the Great Recession, though the crime rates in most cities aren’t dropping as fast as they did in the 1990s.”
The report notes that economists, sociologists and statisticians have “devoted their careers to figuring out why this happened, with no definitive answer,” and their theories include more cops on the street, better policing methods, tougher sentencing, demographics, changing cultural norms and “even reductions in children’s exposure to lead.”
Santa Paula also had a very low rate of reported domestic violence, the second lowest in Ventura County.
Overall, the report noted 6,808 calls reporting domestic violence countywide in 2012 with a spread that the report noted is “generally consistent with the patterns of all types of crime, with higher rates in the West County than the East, but in this case, the difference is much more pronounced.”
And, there “are also places where the relationship does not hold — for example, in 2012, Fillmore was one of the safest cities in the county, however it had the third highest rate of domestic violence calls.”
And Santa Paula, with a higher crime rate than Fillmore, had a much lower rate of domestic violence calls.
The City of Ventura had an average rate of 15.30 domestic violence calls per 1,000 residents, Fillmore had 11.44 calls per 1,000 residents and Santa Paula had 4.08 calls per 1,000 residents; the only city lower was Simi Valley with 3.57 calls per 1,000 residents; countywide the average was 9.17 calls per 1,000 residents.