Welcome!
Although most people look to their local law enforcement agency for protection, those of us who provide this service recognize that our responsibility is greater than merely responding to calls for service. If we are to recall the original premise behind policing, we will remember that the profession was built on the idea of preventing crime. However, at a service level, its seems that this principle has been forgotten as the expectation has grown into merely responding to reported past criminal conduct, identifying and arresting the person responsible for the crime, and later incarcerating those who are guilty. Furthermore, from a societal perspective, we tend to view crime trends in very simplistic terms, and believe that law enforcement is key to mitigating those trends.
As the commander of the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department – Perris Station, and as an academic, I would like to use this space over the next few months to address some of the forces in our communities that have a tendency to impact, both positively and negatively, patterns of crime and criminal behavior. In short, this note to you is the first part of a series to examine the various factors or variables that occur within the social environment that tend to correlate with crime. Over the next several issues, I will address demographics, access or availability of guns, drugs, incarceration of criminals, policing trends, and the economy. All of which, to some extent, add to or lessen the amount of crime in a given community.
As a snapshot, here is what we know about crime. Crime in general, and violent crime (murder, robbery, assault) specifically, began to increase throughout our nation in the early 1970s. We experienced peaks in the mid-1980s and again in the early 1990s. Since then crime has continued a general downward trend. In some cases, crime has fallen lower than rates not seen since the 1960s.
So what has caused these increases and decreases? Come back next month, and I will begin to unravel some of the mystery.
James P. McElvain
Chief of Police