Is Laguna Beach Festering With Violent Crime? County Report Says So

A new report released this week by the Orange County Health Care Agency has some revealing numbers about the well-being of Laguna Beach residents—even if one particular set of statistics is in need of an asterisk.

Those would be the figures regarding the number of violent crimes in the city. In the report, titled “Healthy Places, Healthy People” (you can peruse and print the entire report by clicking the PDF file in the box on the right), Laguna Beach is tabulated as having 358 violent crimes per 100,000 people.

The measured year used in the report was 2009, with violent crimes defined as murder, rape, robbery and aggravated assault.

Taken on the surface, those numbers seem to mean that Laguna Beach is as violence-prone as Stanton, La Habra, Fullerton and Anaheim, cities whose violent crime numbers in 2009 ranged from 338 to 397, also per 100,000.

But don’t get all freaked out. While the 86 violent crime incidents for Laguna Beach in 2009 are true—65 cases of aggravated assault, 11 rapes, nine robberies and one murder—the report doesn’t break down the number of violent crimes committed by non-residents in a city which draws up to 3 million tourists a year.

“I don’t think this type of statistical analysis is an accurate portrayal of criminal activity in smaller communities,” Lt. Jason Kravetz of the Laguna Beach Police Department tells Patch in an email. “The fact that our residential population had to be quadrupled in order to come up with a hypothetical statistic doesn’t present an accurate picture. If you take our population in 2009 (24,017), and divide it by the number of violent crimes (86), you end up with a statistic showing that there were .004 violent crimes per person.”

For their part, Amy Buch, Division Manager of the Health Promotion Division for the County of Orange, which compiled the “Healthy Places, Healthy People” report, admits to Patch that it “doesn’t include any kind of multivaried analysis , nor does it make any kind of attributions.”

And that lack of context can be misleading .

“Laguna Beach is a tourism-driven community which has exponentially more night time activities than some of the surrounding bedroom communities," Kravetz says. "There are large resorts, restaurants, bars and other nightlife" where such violent crime incidents are more likely to occur than in other cities.

In other words, don’t use the report as an excuse to buy a shotgun in anticipation of marauding thugs bursting through your front door.

Elsewhere in "Healthy Places, Healthy People," and on a different topic, figures show that the may have some solid bearing behind it.

According to the report, the Laguna Beach Unified School District ranks first in Orange County in the category of ninth-graders who have tried alcohol (54 percent), based on the 2007-2008 school year. The district tied with Santa Ana Unified for the top spot.

Laguna Beach Unified also has the most ninth-graders in OC who have tried smoking at (30 percent), far above second-ranked Santa Ana Unified (23 percent), again based on the 2007-2008 school year.

Other noteworthy rankings of Laguna Beach in relation to Orange County in the “Healthy Places, Healthy People” report:

• #1 in the number of alcohol outlets available per 1,000 people (4.5)
• #1 in acres of parks (69)
• #1 in percentage of children under 18 with health insurance (99%)
• #1 in percentage exclusively feeding breastmilk in the hospital (61.6%)
• #1 in pedestrian injuries (70 per 100,000)
• #2 in average age of life expectancy (84.9)