Violent Crime Drops 13.8 Percent In Los Angeles County
LOS ANGELES (CBS) — Violent crime dropped 13.8 percent in Los Angeles County last year, according to the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department.
The department, which plans to hold a press conference Wednesday, also reports that homicides are down 46 percent from five years ago.
Officials say the deputy reserve program is partly responsible for the new statistics.
"They play a major role in the department," Los Angles County Sheriff's Department spokesperson Nicole Mashida told CBS2. "We have 844 reserves as of last year. They put in 175,000 hours, and they're working for $1 a year. They have full-time jobs, a lot of them, and then they come out on top of their full-time jobs and they become part of the department."
The department will recognize individual stations, such as Lancaster, where, for the first time in a decade, there were no gang-related murders in 2011.