Nearly 100 residents attended the meeting at Fire Station 14.

LBPD East Division Commander Patrick O'Dowd. delivered a Power Point presentation that cited LBPD crime stats for Part 1 (serious) crimes against persons and property "citywide" and in LBPD's East Division.

[Scroll down for further.]

Commander O'Dowd stated in pertinent part:

Commander O'Dowd: ...So these are the official numbers...Violent crime, Part 1 crimes in the city overall, down 16.5% from last year, that's pretty significant. And the property crimes of course, [down] 6.4 [%] so that's for the city as a whole. And then we narrow it down to East Division and it gets even better. So violent crimes are down 22.4% compared to last year and property crimes down 6.7 [%]. So that's pretty good...[T]hat's pretty significant and it's nice to be able to report that...Part 1 violent crimes are the most serious violent crimes so there are some violent crimes that aren't included in Part 1 but these are the aggravated assaults, robberies, rape, murder: everything's down. And then we have our property crimes for East Division: again, everything's down but significantly the residential burglaries and the auto burglaries actually ticked up [column showing increase is blank] and I didn't not put a number because it was a positive number, it's just, it wasn't even 1%...

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When Commander O'Dowd said crime is "down," we saw some people in the audience quietly shaking their heads "no." After the meeting, some of them told us they don't believe what they heard. LBREPORT.com decided to compare what residents heard with what LBPD's detailed neighborhood-level crime stats show.

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LBPD's East Division encompasses LB's 3rd, 4th and 5th Council districts, a fact Commander O'Dowd acknowledged by displaying a map in his presentation. (It also means that the crime stats presented at the meeting pertain to a wide area roughly 2/3 of which is outside the Third Council district.)

LBREPORT.com cites below publicly available crime stats from LBPD neighborhood-size crime reporting districts. LBPD makes these figures available on its webpages but does so in hard-copy-scanned pdf form instead of a more user-friendly spread-sheet format, which makes the figures time consuming for residents (and reporters) to break down in detail.

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We chose at random a portion of the 3d district bordered on the west by Ximeno Ave, on the north by Colorado St., on the east by PCH, and on the south by the Pacific Ocean. For further detail, we used 2nd St. (and Sorrento Dr. on the north side of Naples) as a north-south dividing line. The area south of 2nd St,/Sorrento encompasses Belmont Shore-Naples-the Peninsula (LBPD dists. 571, 572, 610, 622, 623.) The area north of 2nd St./Sorrento basically covers adjacent neighborhoods northward and eastward (LBPD dists.581, 582, 583, 584, 621). We provide an orienting map below.

LBREPORT.com reports below what LBPD's Jan 1-Dec. 31, 2018 publicly released crime stats show for the areas.indicated. Part 1 crimes (totaled and abbreviated below as "P1") are murder, manslaughter, rape, robbery, aggravated assaults, burglaries (residential, comm'l, auto), larceny thefts (grand, petty, auto, bike) and arson. Part 2 crimes (totaled and abbreviated below as "P2") are all other crimes that aren't Part 1 crimes. Part 2 crimes include those that Councilwoman Price has called "quality of life" crimes (acknowledging their impacts on neighborhood residents.) LBREPORT.com is unable to report specific types of Part 2 crimes because LBPD crime stats don't itemize them; they simply display a totaled number of all Part 2 crimes within specific geographic areas.

Increases are in red font; decreases are in green. LBREPORT.com invites our readers to compare what was said at Councilwoman Price's community meeting with what LBPD detailed crime stats for these areas show. They speak for themselves.

The numbers above may or may not reflect conditions elsewhere in the Third Council district or in LBPD's broader East Division. LBREPORT.com has repeatedly noted that crime stats covering large areas like East Division or "citywide" (the latter quoted by Mayor Garcia in his recent "State of the City" message) may be numerically accurate for those broad areas but may not reflect conditions experienced by residents in their neighborhoods.

Commander O'Dowd also discussed LBPD staffing. LBREPORT.com will analyze that portion of his presentation in a separate article. Further to follow.

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