“There’s a 130 percent increase in the number of gang homicides in the city of San Diego just in the first six months of this year,” San Diego Police Chief Bill Lansdowne said. “And those are disturbing numbers for us to deal with.”
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As police push for more funding, Lansdowne and other officials have tried to bolster their case with some alarming statistics about violent crime in San Diego.
Violent crime is a category that law enforcement authorities use to track the total number of murders, rapes, robberies and aggravated assaults. Last year, San Diego police reported about 5,100 of these crimes alone.
But during in a recent interview with KPBS, Lansdowne drilled deeper into the violent crime statistics and specifically described a rise in gang-related murders.
“There’s a 130 percent increase in the number of gang homicides in the city of San Diego just in the first six months of this year,” Lansdowne said. “And those are disturbing numbers for us to deal with.”
We decided to Fact Check whether the Police Department’s own numbers support the 130 percent jump. Lansdowne cited the spike to support the need for additional funding and it certainly sounded like a troubling trend.
Just to be clear, the purpose of this Fact Check is not to determine whether the murders were actually gang-related or whether the deaths were even murders. Our narrow focus is figuring out whether Lansdowne accurately described the number of deaths that his officers believed were gang-related murders at the time of the KPBS interview. It’s possible the number could change depending on the results of ongoing investigations.
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