Mayor Sylvester Turner had just wrapped up his annual “State of the City” address in May when, two floors down at the Marriott Marquis hotel, mayoral candidate Tony Buzbee launched into his own speech deriding the mayor’s record on crime.

“I know what’s going on in this city,” Buzbee said. “Don’t tell me crime is going down when everybody across the country knows that Houston is one of the most dangerous cities in the United States.”

Bill King, another prominent mayoral contender, has decried a “growing randomness and violence to crime that alarms people.”

While experts say such arguments aren’t unusual for political challengers, the numbers largely say otherwise. Like the rest of the country, crime in Houston has plummeted over the last 30 years, as has residents’ fear of crime being the city’s most pressing problem. FBI data show that most categories of crime in Houston have fallen or remained stagnant during Turner’s term, which began in January 2016. Criminologists also scoff at the claim that Houston is among the country’s most dangerous cities.

Overall, violent crime in Houston is up about 4 percent since 2015, the year before Turner took office, despite a sharp decline from 2017 to 2018. Non-violent crime has dropped about 6 percent since 2015.

From 2015 to 2018, murders dropped and robberies fell; burglaries decreased; thefts fell; and fewer vehicles were stolen. The exceptions were aggravated assaults and rapes, which rose in 2017 before declining again in 2018.

King said he is skeptical of the large crime decrease seen in preliminary FBI data for 2018, adding that the numbers are “extremely stale.” He further argued that the recent explosion of home video surveillance has increased awareness of crime across the city.

“When you actually see a crime being committed on your computer screen, especially if it involves violence, it obviously (has) a much greater impact than reading dry crime statistics,” he said.

And while as much as 70 percent of Houstonians listed crime as the city’s biggest problem during the 1990s, just 15 percent of residents cited it as the most pressing issue in this year’s Kinder Houston Area Survey.

Buzbee took a dim view of those numbers, however.

“Have you had a break-in?” he said, in response to questions about his statements. “Have you had your car window smashed in? Most of the time, the police do not respond to these types of crimes, and they rarely get solved.”

The state of crime

Both Buzbee and King say Houston is getting more dangerous. Buzbee notably has said that Houston has more crime than “95 percent” of American cities, pointing to its overall crime rate, or the combination of violent and property crimes. He also says on his campaign website: “All types of crimes are on the rise.” The mayor’s other opponents — Kendall Baker, Dwight Boykins, Derrick Broze, Naoufal Houjami, Sue Lovell, Victoria Romero, Demetria Smith, Johnny “J.T.” Taylor, Roy J. Vasquez — have not raised the issue to the same extent as Buzbee and King.

But despite Buzbee’s assertions of growing crime, data show the city’s murder rate and overall crime rate — which considers both violent and property crimes — have each fallen substantially over the last three decades and dipped slightly under Turner.

“We are at the bottom of a 30-year decline, more or less, in the crime rate,” said Scott Henson, of Just Liberty, a criminal justice reform nonprofit.

In Turner’s first year in office, for example, criminals murdered 301 Houstonians. The city saw 279 murders in 2018, a slight uptick from 269 in 2017.

The city’s murder rate is four times that of New York, the safest large city in the United States, and a sixth of St. Louis, the nation’s most deadly. A survey of the crime rates of the nation's 298 largest cities shows Houston's ranked 75th for murder, and 22nd for violent crime.

“When we talk about the murder capitals of the country, the violent crime capitals of the country, Houston is not one of the cities people put on that list,” said Jeff Asher, a New Orleans-based criminologist. “At least anyone familiar with the data.”

Ames Grawert, senior counsel for the Justice Program at the Brennan Center for Justice in New York, said it is misleading to compare the crime rate of a city with 2.3 million people to those of small towns, which frequently have much lower crime rates.

A more accurate measure, he said, would be to look at other large cities across the country.

Among the nation’s 30 largest cities, Houston’s murder rate “is thoroughly middle of the road,” Grawert said. “I don’t see Houston as being one of the more ‘violent’ places in the country.”

And while criminologists acknowledge the city’s overall crime rate is indeed higher than 95 percent of other American cities, towns, and villages, they say such comparisons overinflate the importance of more common but less serious crimes like thefts.

“As a major American city, Houston has some crime,” said Asher. “That’s the same as me saying Houston has more trash cans than 95 percent of cities ... Houston is one of the largest cities in the country. Of course it does.”

Experts say it is not useful to measure crime on a year-to-year basis because one-year outliers do not accurately reflect trends or significant changes in crime patterns.

Since 1985, the annual number of murders has risen as high as 608 in 1991 and as low as 198 in 2011. Overall, the city’s murder rate has trended downward from about 26.5 per 100,000 to 11.5 per 100,000 in 2018.

“Houston is safer than has been for a really long time, honestly, is the truth of it,” said Henson.

Political challengers often make crime a key issue when trying to unseat incumbents, said Renée Cross, senior director of the Hobby School of Public Affairs, University of Houston.

“When you’re in a political campaign, crime resonates. People understand crime,” she said. “They’re not necessarily going to understand the ins and outs of pension reform.”

Whether that strategy will work remains unclear, Cross said, noting just 15 percent of Houstonians interviewed in the Kinder Institute’s Houston Area Survey listed the issue as their top concern.

“I think in the long run it’s not going to resonate,” she said. “It might get people’s attention, but I’m not sure if it will go much beyond that.”

King and Buzbee also have criticized the police department’s ability to solve crimes, pointing to a falling clearance rate under Turner’s administration. King told the Chronicle he was “disappointed” Acevedo has not improved the department’s clearance rates. Meanwhile, Buzbee has griped, “If someone breaks into your home, there is a less than 5 percent chance that crime will be solved.”

“That’s interesting,” Acevedo said, “because his home was broken into and we have 10 suspects arrested in relation to his own burglary.”

Under Acevedo, the police department has put “a disproportionate effort into combating violent crime,” the chief said, amid what he characterized as a changing national attitude toward criminal justice.

The city’s crime trends generally mirror recent changes in national rates: the nationwide property crime rate dipped 3.6 percent from 2016 to 2017, the 15th straight annual drop in non-violent offenses, according to the FBI. Overall, the national rate of violent crime has fallen by about a third since its peak in the mid 1990s, though it increased from 2015 to 2016 — in line with a corresponding but sharper increase in Houston.

Police staffing and strategies

Buzbee and King have criticized the Houston Police Department’s crime-fighting strategies and say the city does not have enough cops. They also have alleged that Turner is not doing enough to put more officers on the street.

The department had a headcount of 5,147 police officers and 1,348 civilian employees as of December 31, 2015, the day before Turner took office, for a total of 6,495. As of June 30 this year, the department had 5,228 police officers and 1,090 civilian officers and cadets, for a total of 6,284.

Since Turner took office, the department also has lost a higher rate of officers through attrition than under Annise Parker, including a spike in the 2017 fiscal year, during which the Legislature passed Turner’s pension reform package.

All told, the police department has gained a net of about 80 police officers.

Each candidate also has called for more police officers, echoing Turner’s pledge in early 2018 to grow HPD’s ranks by 500 officers. At a recent candidate forum, King and Turner both said the city needs about 600 more officers.

King contended HPD’s increase in sworn officers under Turner is “window dressing,” because the officers have to perform the functions of the declining civilian employees. Soon after taking office, Turner vowed he would never lay off any police officers.

Acevedo said he believes the city should still be able to reach its goal.

“We’re confident absent some budget catastrophe, we will be able to achieve that growth,” he said.

Buzbee, meanwhile, has pledged to hire 500 more officers a year over his first four years, a move that would require spiking the police department’s $900 million budget. An addition of 2,000 officers would represent almost a 40 percent increase in the department’s police officers.

“How do you pay for it? By prioritizing public safety and cutting wasteful spending at City Hall,” Buzbee said, without providing any details. In an email, Buzbee later clarified he intends to add that number over eight years.

He said that if elected, he would order a third-party budget audit and enact zero-based budgeting — a process that King also supports — where every city department’s function is analyzed and each dollar spent must be justified, rather than adding new spending to existing budgets. Both candidates say the process would root out inefficient spending.

Still, adding 2,000 police officers so quickly isn’t realistic, City Hall veterans said.

“In order to free up tens of millions for more police officers, we’re going to have to cut tens of million in spending somewhere else, which will involve laying people off and cutting services,” former Mayor Annise Parker said. “What services are we going to sacrifice?”

Houston Police Officers’ Union President Joe Gamaldi questioned whether the department would even have enough cars, uniforms and equipment to handle the increased headcount.

“We would love to see that type of growth,” Gamaldi said. “But realistically, we’ve never hired more than 375 people in a fiscal year, so we would really need to look to see if HPD’s infrastructure can even handle that.”

To make the department more efficient, King said he would make greater use of civilian officers — who earn less than classified police — by having them perform any jobs that do not require certification, though it’s not clear if that’s a feasible proposal. King also proposed to have retired police officers and interns help with investigations, use smaller and more efficient vehicles and reduce specialty units such as the mayor’s security detail.

Aside from an increase in police, King and Buzbee say Acevedo should put more officers on patrol and fewer on desk assignments or specialized units. Currently, the city has about 2,300 officers assigned to patrol.

Gamaldi — whose union has endorsed Turner — called the suggestion “a popular talking point” but said the department already has made several attempts to redeploy cops to patrol.

“The chief has gone through this exercise several times and made sure to identify as many people as we possibly can to be back out onto the streets,” Gamaldi said.

Both candidates have criticized HPD’s headcount by comparing it to other cities with larger departments: Houston currently has about 2.2 officers per 1,000 residents, about half as many as New York, which has 4.4 officers per 1,000 residents.

But policing experts note that staffing departments based on per capita comparisons fails to take into account the realities of different cities; the amount of money cities can afford to spend on public safety; and individual departments’ specific workloads.

“Every staffing decision has to be based on what’s going on in that particular community or police department,” said Leonard Matarese, a former Florida-based police chief, public safety director and city manager who now works at the Center for Public Safety Management.

Parker, meanwhile, said such comparisons don’t account for Houston’s vast size or take into account fiscal constraints imposed by a voter-approved property tax revenue cap.

“The police department in Houston is never going to look like one in Boston or Chicago or New York,” she said. “We’re a whole lot less dense, and it’s about moving over a much broader territory.”

jasper.scherer@chron.com