Crime is the lowest it’s been in more than a decade in one West Valley city.
Cupertino had 741 reported criminal incidents in 2024, the lowest number in 12 years, according to the city’s crime dashboard. The most common crime category was identity theft, forgery and fraud with 169 instances, followed by grand theft and car burglaries with 111 and 106 instances, respectively. The other more than 300 crimes include 79 commercial and 71 home robberies, 54 instances of vandalism and 29 stolen cars, among others.
The Santa Clara County Sheriff’s Office took six minutes on average to respond to high-priority emergency calls, higher than its goal of five minutes, which officials attribute to multiple calls at once. The sheriff’s office serves Cupertino, which doesn’t have its own police department.
Crime in Cupertino between 2012 and 2024 peaked in 2019 when the city had 1,112 reported incidents, including 464 car thefts, 121 home robberies and 102 cases of identity theft, forgery and fraud. Car burglaries have been the city’s top-ranking crime over the years at 2,835 incidents, according to the dashboard. Identity theft, forgery and fraud cases have increased, going from 102 in 2019 to 169 last year.
Sgt. Russell Davis, spokesperson for the sheriff’s office, credits the overall downward trend to programs the office runs, including dozens of neighborhood watch groups it supports. The sheriff’s office also analyzes trends and hotspots to determine areas deputies should prioritize.
Davis said the department encourages residents to report incidents even if they’re unsure if a crime is occurring because it could be a lifesaving decision.
“We always tell (people), if the hairs on your neck feel like they’re standing up, give us a call,” he told San José Spotlight. “It doesn’t hurt.”
Although crime citywide has decreased, it played a significant role in last year’s Cupertino City Council elections. Winning candidates Vice Mayor Kitty Moore and Councilmember R “Ray” Wang ran part of their campaigns on increasing public safety.
Wang said residents told him public safety was a top priority. He met with crime victims including people robbed at an ATM. He supports Proposition 36, which creates harsher punishments for some drug and theft crimes. It was approved by 68.4% of voters statewide.
Wang said the city needs to improve its neighborhood watch programs to assuage residents’ concerns about public safety.
“It’s good to see that stats are going down, but there’s also a belief that there’s a lot of crimes that are unreported, and that’s what worries people,” he told San José Spotlight.
Cupertino resident Orrin Mahoney, who’s lived in the city for about 56 years, is a block leader of his neighborhood. He said he hasn’t seen a significant difference in crime over the years, and that the sheriff does a good job keeping crime low.
“(Public safety) is also definitely as much a citizen thing (as a police thing),” he told San José Spotlight. “People here expect crime to be low and therefore I think expectations breed results, as far as support for the police department, obviously, and reporting crimes right away.”
Neighboring cities are tracking their reported crimes too, including San Jose. The San Jose Police Department last year launched a dashboard breaking down crime statistics by council district.
Davis said the goal of the sheriff’s office is to improve service across the whole region.
“Although we’re at the 10-year low, it doesn’t stop us from doing the proactive work by keeping the community safe and keeping those light stats even lower than they were before,” he said.
Contact Annalise Freimarck at [email protected] or follow @annalise_ellen on X, formerly known as Twitter.
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