The "citywide" numbers camouflage important parts of this story. The City accompanied the numbers with a release that also omits important information.

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• Murders: Up 56.5% (36 from 23)

• Aggravated Assaults (includes shootings, no separate breakout): Up 18.9%

• Auto Thefts: Up 37.1%

• Total Part 1 crime: Up 15.9%

• Violent Crime: Up 18.8%

• Property crime: Up 15.4%.

• 17 of LB's 36 murders in 2015 were gang-related

• Crime declined in four property crime categories: residential burglary: down 11%; garage burglary down 7.2%; commercial burglary down 12.1%; and arson down 8.2%.

For the "citywide" data Jan 1-Dec. 31, 2015 as released, click this link.

But "where" is part of a well reported news story...so where were these crimes? Since some parts of Long Beach had no murders or shootings, it follows that some neighborhoods bore the brunt of this. Where are those neighborhoods? In whose Council districts?

And while the "citywide" data show residential burglaries are "down," this is contrary to what residents in many parts of East Long Beach have experienced. Where were those ELB residential burglaries? In whose Council districts?

While claiming transparency and digital innovation, Long Beach City Hall remains less than transparent on this basic information that the public has a right to know. It may take us days and weeks to dig these data out and report them to you because the City continues to make the information needlessly difficult to access.

We'd like to report to you the numbers and types of crimes by Council district. Over ten years ago, the City routinely released this data...but it stopped doing this entering the 2004 election cycle.

Long Beach displays its crime stats in digitally-hostile form, on hard copy (pdf) pages using printed tables instead of digitally useful spread sheets. They list crime totals on over a dozen pages for geographically small crime reporting districts, each one requiring a map to correlate. None of the data display street locations. None of them show dates or times. This primitive information is what the City displays on its costly new website.

The City also uses a third party vendor that displays reported crimes in interactive form, but the data isn't numerically totaled, and as best we can tell it doesn't display for a more than thirty days per screen view and not for more than six months total.

Does the City's record on this seem transparent or innovative to you?

And there's no information on shootings. None. That's because Long Beach homogenizes shootings among all other aggravated assaults. That's the proper federal bureaucratic category, which may be fine for federal bureaucrats but doesn't disclose neighborhood impacting facts. LBREPORT.com does our best to report the information daily, but we likely miss some and we don't have the annual data...which the City does have and should transparently release.

City Hall accompanied its crime stats with a press release. It states in part that "the crime rate remains relatively low when compared to the overall historical crime statistics. The 2015 crime rate is similar to the 2011 crime rate, when Long Beach had historic lows." But if those claims are based on "citywide" crime data, they're near meaningless. Where's that "crime rate" measured? In Naples or Central LB?

As LBREPORT.com reported in October 2015, within a roughly thirty day period ending Oct. 19, LB's 1st and 6th Council districts combined had more hit shootings per capita than the city of Chicago. A few miles away, parts of LB's 3rd and 5th Council districts had no shootings.

As LBREPORT.com has repeatedly noted, Long Beach is a "tale of two cities." The mathematical truth is that "citywide" crime data inherently and unavoidably understate crime in some LB neighborhoods and overstate it in others. That's why relying on those figures alone conveys an inaccurate picture of real world conditions in a number of Long Beach neighborhoods and Council districts.

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City Hall's release quotes LBPD Chief Robert Luna in attributing the increases in part to Sacramento's "realignment" of state incarceration policies coupled with voter passage of Prop 47 which downgraded some felonies to misdemeanors. We're confident the Chief is correct in concluding those actions haven't helped, but they don't change the fact that budgets recommended by Mayors Garcia and Foster and approved by Council majorities erased roughly 200 sworn officers in the period from 2010 to the present. That's the largest removal of sworn officers within a six year period in the more than 100 year history of the City of Long Beach. We don't recall Chief Luna or his his predecessor, now-Sheriff Jim McDonnell, asking the Council to cut those officers.

The City's narrative notes that crime has also increased in L.A. and other cities. But that's not a defense. Other cities weathered the "great recession" without doing what Long Beach did. LB's Mayors and City Councilmembers have left LB taxpayers with a sworn officer level for citywide deployment roughly equivalent per capita to cutting LAPD's police level by roughly thirty percent.

Can you imagine what L.A. residents would do if L.A. Mayor Garcetti and L.A. Councilmembers advocated cutting their city's police level by roughly 30% so it could descend to the per capita level LB's Mayor and Council currently provide LB taxpayers?

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At an Aug. 18, 2015 budget hearing, Mayor Garcia boasted that there'd been no increase in Long Beach murders from last year to that point, acknowledging that while every murder is terrible, the number of murders was about the same as last year, perhaps give or take one or two, and noted that last year was a historic low. On that basis, Garcia told the Council: "From a murder point of view, we're still kind of facing a historic low number" while murder rates had jumped dramatically in a lot of urban areas.

We found the Mayor's statement disturbing at the time and said so. The "low number" of murders Mayor Garcia cited included Keshawn Brooks, the Cabrillo High student stabbed to death while walking home at midafternoon along busy Santa Fe Ave. We haven't forgotten his funeral. Prosecutors allege he was killed during a robbery committed in association with a criminal street gang. LBPD says 17 of LB's 36 LB murders in 2015 were gang related. The budgets recommended by Mayor Garcia and approved by the Council in 2014 and 2015 failed to fund LBPD's former field anti-gang unit.

Some of the same Councilmembers who considered the field anti-gang unit dispensable voted in Nov. 2013 to approve raises for city management; Garcia, Austin, Andrews and Lowenthal voted for this. And the Council voted without dissent in December 2015 to drain millions of dollars from their districts for new Taj Mahal City Hall and a shrunken library without seeking bids or inviting expert testimony independent from city management on how much the City could save by seismically retrofitting LB's less than 40 year old City Hall. The Council could have funded a City Hall seismic retrofit with a bond at a fixed annual cost approved with a vote of the people; instead, it voted to saddle LB taxpayers with annually escalating costs (CPI inflator) for 40+ years and evaded a vote of the people.

With this record, on Jan. 26, the Mayor and some Councilmembers are preparing to propose tax increases that will require a vote of the people. [LBREPORT.com coverage, click here.]

In LBREPORT.com's opinion, before demanding that LB taxpayers hand over more money that Councilmembers can spend in more wasteful ways, the Council should direct city management to release LB's 2015 crime stats by Council districts (including comparisons to 2014); to disclose the number of 2015 shootings with their dates and city-block locations, and to make these crime stats available in digitally useful form.

The Council should acknowledge that this City's current spending practices are the reason LB taxpayers have 200 fewer police and increased crime.

How is it that other cities -- including Los Angeles and Signal Hill -- can provide their taxpayers with per capita sworn police levels that Long Beach doesn't? And fire stations with fire engines. And better sidewalks and streets.

The way LB Councilmembers are currently spending our tax dollars has left our City in the condition it's in now...including crime. Blaming taxpayers for this is blaming the victims. What's needed are real reforms...and Councilmembers willing to implement them.

Opinions expressed by LBREPORT.com, our contributors and/or our readers are not necessary those of our advertisers. We welcome our readers' comments/opinions 24/7 via Disqus, Facebook and moderate length letters and longer-form op-ed pieces submitted to us at mail@LBReport.com.

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