LATimes | “They’re trying to move us backward,” said Melina Abdullah, co-founder of Black Lives Matter Los Angeles. “We don’t want to move backward; we want to move forward.”
Abdullah called Avant’s killing “horrific and appalling” and said Black Lives Matter mourns with her family. But she said officials must not be allowed to use Avant’s death or recent property crime to push for more policing, cash bail or other tough-on-crime measures that she said have been proved not to work.
“We need to think about what kind of economic desperation actually creates property crime and how do we get people out of that state,” Abdullah said. “How do we create livable wage jobs? How do we create affordable housing?”
Abdullah also warned against accepting claims about crime that may not have a basis in reality — which, as it happens, is something police have warned against in recent days, as concern over crime trends has escalated.
Jacqueline Avant 🕊🙏🏾 pic.twitter.com/fMyCmmmgj9
— Oprah Winfrey (@Oprah) December 2, 2021
For example, while the “follow-home” and “smash-and-grab” trends in L.A., including upticks in robberies in corridors like Melrose Avenue, have caused concern, they are not indicative of a citywide surge in property crime.
According to LAPD data through Nov. 27, property crime this year is up 2.6% over the same period last year but is down 6.6% from 2019. Robbery is up 3.9% over last year but down 13.6% from 2019. Burglaries are down 8.4% from last year and down 7.7% from 2019. Car thefts are a notable outlier, up nearly 53% from 2019.
More concerning is violent crime. Homicides are up 46.7% compared with 2019, while shooting victims are up 51.4%, according to police data. As of the end of November, there had been 359 homicides in L.A. in 2021, compared with 355 in all of 2020. There have not been more homicides in one year since 2008, which ended with 384.
In Beverly Hills, police stress that crime is rare — and killings like Avant’s even more so. Police Chief Mark Stainbrook said that despite recent incidents, Beverly Hills remains one of the safest cities in the nation.
Crime across Beverly Hills this year was down 2% as of the end of October. Violent crime in the past two years is up 23% compared with the two years prior, but the total number of such crimes remains tiny: There were just five robberies in the city in October, and homicides are rare.
It’s not clear what reforms the concerns about crime in the Los Angeles area will lead to — if any.
A crime spike in the 1990s led California to adopt policies that toughened sentences and increased incarceration. The reform movement was an acknowledgment that those policies went too far and caused their own injustices. A poll of L.A. voters released this week showed that public safety is perceived as less of a pressing problem than homelessness, housing affordability, traffic, climate change and air quality.
Jonathan Simon, a criminal justice professor at UC Berkeley’s law school and author of “Governing through Crime: How the War on Crime Transformed American Democracy and Created a Culture of Fear,” said it is unlikely that crime concerns will completely derail the progressive criminal justice reform movement that began with Floyd’s killing.
However, such concern could slow those reforms, he said — showing once more “how potent the political value of crime is” and how quickly politicians and others can revert to a “crackdown” mentality.
“It’s a powerful trope now for 40 years,” Simon said.
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