On the issue of crime in California, there is good news and bad news.

First the good news: The crime rate in California has fallen over the last few years. Major crimes in California's largest cities fell 8.5 percent in 1995, following more modest declines in 1993 and 1994.

The bad news is that California's crime rate is still unacceptably high. Figure 1 shows that even with the decline in the crime rate of the past few years, California's crime rate is still more than three times as high as it was 40 years ago, and twice as high as it was 30 years ago. California has the fourth highest crime rate in the nation; Figure 2, using the more inclusive FBI Crime Index,*2* shows that California's crime rate is about 10 percent higher than the national crime rate. There were over 1.9 million serious crimes committed in California in 1994; the social cost of this crime, according to some estimates, could be over $45 billion.

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