Crime Is Up in California. Sort of. Don’t Panic.

The LA Times reports that crime is up in California and people are worried. Let’s take a look:

I used FBI data through 2014 and the same Open Portal data used by the LA Times data for 2015-17. The Times appears to have mis-transcribed its own number for violent crime in 2017, so I fixed that (the real number is higher than the one used in the Times chart). The result is what you see above: the immense crime surge that’s prompted some people to say we should roll back the modest criminal justice reforms we’ve made over the past few years. This is nuts. It’s especially nuts because California enacted a couple of those reforms in 2011 and 2014, and crime rates surged in 2012 and 2015. Cause and effect! Of course, crime rates then dropped back to their previous levels in 2013 and 2016, suggesting that the tiny surges were either (a) nothing, or (b) temporary tiny changes while law enforcement got used to the new rules.

There’s literally nothing here unless you think that every tiny blip in the crime rate is cause for panic. It’s not. Crime rates are down about 50 percent over the past few decades, but there are going to be minor blips here and there if you look at periods of just a few years. Everybody needs to settle down here.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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