Chapter 2. Changing Crime and Changing Demographics

University of California, Irvine, School of Social Ecology Irvine at 50: A Tale of Continuity and Change • November 1 2021

Chapter 2

Changing Crime and Changing Demographics

In this Chapter we describe the pattern of demographic changes that have occurred in the city of Irvine over its history, as well as changes in crime levels during this time period. We begin by showing changes in violent and property crime over the history of the city. Although Irvine was incorporated in 1971, the earliest year for which crime data are available is 1975. We therefore plot levels of crime since that time point expressed as crime rates per 10,000 population. 2

Figure 2.1 shows trends in violent crime rates from 1975 to 2019, the most recent year for which crime data are available (data for 2020 are not publicly available). It also compares Irvine’s violent crime rate to the average violent crime rate of all cities in the U.S. with a population greater than 25,000. The green line in this figure plots the violent crime rate for Irvine, and the blue line plots the average violent crime rate for other U.S. cities. As the Figure reveals, after having a more modest violent crime rate in the first two years (1975-76), Irvine’s violent crime rate was much higher in 1977-78. But since then the violent crime rate has generally shown a long, steady decline. From 1979 to 2001, the violent crime rate remained quite low (with only a couple of small spikes in 1989 and 1996). And since 1996, violent crime in Irvine has fallen to particularly low levels. In the 2010s, the violent crime rate of 50 incidents per 10,000 population is one half to one third the rate of the 1980s and 1990s, and one fifth the rate of the late 1970s.

2 The data in this section come from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) program data, which provides crime data for all cities that reported their information to the FBI.