California violent crime up 10 percent, reversing long trend

A crime scene technician carries markers as police investigate a shooting on Lakeshore Avenue in Oakland, Calif., on Friday, June 19, 2015. Three people shot five blocks from the NBA championship celebration for the Golden State Warriors in Oakland are in stable condition. Police say they received a call shortly after noon and found three male victims with gunshot wounds. less A crime scene technician carries markers as police investigate a shooting on Lakeshore Avenue in Oakland, Calif., on Friday, June 19, 2015. Three people shot five blocks from the NBA championship celebration ... more Photo: JANE TYSKA, Associated Press Photo: JANE TYSKA, Associated Press Image 1 of / 1 Caption Close California violent crime up 10 percent, reversing long trend 1 / 1 Back to Gallery

Crime went up in California in 2015, with year-to-year jumps not only in murders, robberies and car thefts but also in hate crimes against Muslims and assaults against police officers, according to statistics released Friday by Attorney General Kamala Harris.

The increases were in many cases significant — killings across the state were up 10 percent, to 1,861, mirroring the rise in overall violent crime — but they represented a relatively modest uptick amid a long decline. In 1993, near the end of the crack cocaine epidemic, nearly 4,100 people were killed in California.

Still, it was a little riskier to walk down the street in California last year. An average citizen had a 1-in-21,000 chance of being slain, while in 2014 a Californian had a 1-in-23,000 chance of being slain.

Property crimes went up 8 percent when compared with 2014, driven by a 13 percent surge in car boosting. But the 2014 number had been the lowest recorded in at least 45 years.

Indeed, the numbers show the state as a whole is not experiencing San Francisco’s epidemic of smash-and-grab car burglaries, which were up 31 percent in 2015 and have nearly tripled since 2010.

The overall trend in California remains “overwhelmingly positive,” said Michael Romano, a civil rights lawyer and director of the Stanford Justice Advocacy Project.

“You never want to see crime go up,” Romano said, “but over the past five years, the trend has been very good.”

The annual statewide crunching of crime statistics — which is sure to be a factor in debates over such topics as sentencing reform, gun control and police funding — revealed just how tricky statistics can be.

The attorney general reported that, amid the crime increase, felony arrests fell by 29 percent last year. But that was because many lesser felonies were reclassified as misdemeanors following the passage of Proposition 47 in late 2014 — not because Californians suddenly changed their natures.

Last year’s homicide victims in California tended to be men ages 18 to 29. A homicide victim was twice as likely to be Latino as white, the attorney general’s office said. Guns were used in more than 70 percent of killings.

While hate crime increased 10 percent, religious hate crime went up 50 percent. The number of reported anti-Islamic incidents increased from 18 to 40, while the number of anti-Semitic crimes ticked up from 80 to 97.

For the seventh straight year, juvenile arrests were down. Last year there were 72,000 juvenile arrests, a decrease of 17 percent from 2014. Nearly 3 in 5 juvenile arrests were for misdemeanors.

Misdemeanor drunken driving arrests decreased for the fifth year in a row, though it wasn’t immediately clear how much of the fall was due to sober driving and how much was due to less policing.

Last year, 130 people were killed by police officers.

The Bay Area was not immune to the rise in violent crime. According to figures provided by local police, killings in San Francisco increased from 45 in 2014 to 52 last year, while killings in Oakland increased from 80 to 83.

The per capita murder rate in Oakland remained the highest in the Bay Area, with Richmond and Vallejo close behind.

The homicide rate increases in San Francisco and Oakland, however, were well behind those of Cleveland (90 percent), Nashville (83 percent), Milwaukee (73 percent) and Baltimore (59 percent).

Steve Rubenstein is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: srubenstein@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @SteveRubeSF