“California murder, violent crime rates hit 50-year low.”

California  so often seems like a model of every ugly facet of the dysfunctional criminal justice system.
The state’s criminal laws and sentencing structures have been subject to very little well-planned policy-making in part because of the passage of many competing voter initiatives and elected officials often unable to champion sound reforms because of various cross-cutting political concerns.

“California murder, violent crime rates hit 50-year low.”

The state’s corrections system has been beset with more constitutional issues and practical problems than one can name.

And yet, California must be doing something right: as this local article reports in its headline, in 2013 “California murder, violent crime rates hit 50-year low.”  Here are the details, which prompts the “fill-in-the-blank” game appearing in the title of this post:

Californians today are less likely to be murdered or fall victim to violent crime than during any other time since the 1960s, according to new figures from the California Department of Justice.

The murder rate last year was 4.6 killings per 100,000 California residents, an 8 percent decline from 2012 and a 64 percent decline from 1993, when cities throughout the state struggled to stop gang killings.  The violent crime rate last year was 397 per 100,000 Californians, down 7 percent from 2012 and a 64 percent decline from 1992.

Experts have a variety of explanations for the decline, which is a long-term, nationwide trend.  Top theories include better policing methods that utilize data to pinpoint crime hotspots, harsher criminal sentences for repeat crime offenders and a sharp drop in gang warfare.

But the trend has also confounded many predictions. Some anticipated that California prison realignment would increase violent crime.  It hasn’t.  Others decried the rise of violent video games and music, but those forms of entertainment have been around for decades now and crime continues to fall.  Others believed desperation from the Great Recession would increase crime.  It didn’t.