This week, Buena Park residents got a rare public glimpse of the amount of crimes that occurred in their city this year so far – like theft, burglary and stolen vehicles.
Police officials shared information openly with city council members and residents about the crime trends in the city – a report that is rarely given publicly in cities across the county despite local officials allocating large portions of cities’ budgets to their police departments.
On Tuesday, Buena Park Interim Police Chief Bradley Geyer said that crime for the most part has been on a downward trend – mirroring statewide statistics.
“Overall, crime has been trending down, and that’s throughout the region, not just Buena Park. But not every crime is going down, but most crimes are on the downward trend, roughly 15 to 20% down year to year,” he said at the city council meeting.
According to Geyer’s report, there have been 637 reported larceny thefts, 88 reported stolen vehicles, 48 burglaries, 39 aggravated assaults, 34 robberies and 14 rapes between January and the end of June of this year.
Between January and the end of June 2025, there were 623 reported larceny thefts, 125 stolen vehicles, 83 burglaries, 57 aggravated assaults, 20 robberies and 8 rapes, according to the report.
Councilwoman Joyce Ahn, who requested the crime report, called on the police chief to continue to give public updates on crime in the city regularly at public meetings.
“As long as we have some reports available to the public during the council meeting and share and discuss some of the happenings out there, especially with follow-ups on closing some robbery cases or any difficult cases in the future, I’m sure we can share more stories with the public on how well we’re doing and how the Measure R (sales tax) money is spent,” she said at the July 14 meeting.
“I just want to make sure that we’re looking at the numbers constantly and that we are planning and taking some actions to prevent or to respond to these types of new crimes that are happening.”
Ahn’s request comes about two years after voters approved Measure R – a 1% sales tax hike to generate $20 million to be used in part to hire more police officers and address property crime.
[Read: Boosted by Sales Tax Hike, Buena Park Looks to Hire More Police Officers]
According to the city’s adopted budget, about 42% of the over $100 million general fund is going to the city’s police department for 2026-27 fiscal year. The general fund is a city’s most flexible pool of money and pays for most direct services for residents – police, fire, libraries, parks, recreation and a host of other services.
Councilman Carlos Franco said while elected leaders regularly get updates on crime, it is also important that residents are able to view and understand the crime trends, asking whether the data could be published online as opposed to having regular updates at city council meetings.
“I’m curious, Mr. City Manager, if there’s an opportunity to explore maybe even publicizing some of these stats – whatever can be publicized not to its full extent – so that maybe residents could go on a website and view these things, as opposed to having Chief come out and give these reports on a regular basis,” he asked.
Police post crime statistics for Part 1 Crimes – violent and property crimes – on their website, but as of Wednesday morning the website was only showing crime stats for the first three months of 2026.
The website also links a crime map allowing residents to look up reported crimes in their neighborhoods.
Police officers are expected to give a comprehensive report on crime to council members in October.
Crime Rates & Response Times
This year so far, Geyer said the city has a Part 1 crime rate of about 10 incidents per 1,000 residents.
Part 1 Crimes include aggravated assault, rape, homicide, larceny-theft, motor vehicle theft, robbery and burglary.
“Buena Park is kind of like middle of the road average. A little bit higher nationwide with property crimes, a little bit lower with violent crime, but overall we kind of fall in the middle as far as where we stand with the rest of the country with crime,” Geyer said.
He added that by the end of the year the rate would probably increase to about 20 incidents per 1,000 residents.
According to Geyer’s presentation, Part 1 crimes have occurred most frequently this year so far in District 3 of the city – which encompasses Knott’s Berry Farm and a chunk of Beach Blvd and is represented by Councilwoman Susan Sonne – with 240 incidents.
Geyer said the average response time for priority one calls that require officers to turn on their lights and sirens is down by 20 seconds this year so far compared to the same time period last year dropping from three minutes 42 seconds to three minutes 20 seconds.
Tackling The Trends
Ahn questioned how officers would address the high number of car thefts in the city.
Geyer said stealing cars is one of the easiest crimes to commit.
“It’s very difficult to catch those in progress. So a lot of the time we have to rely on DNA collection, fingerprints, and you know, a lot of times people will leave their property in the car and make it easy. So sometimes they don’t even lock the car,” he said.
“If there’s a certain area where we’re having a problem, we can dedicate more resources to do surveillance. We have a fantastic auto theft detective who’s constantly out there working these cases and recovering cars. We actually recover most of the cars that get stolen, whether they’re occupied or not.”
Sonne raised concerns about the number of reported rapes going up in the city – with 16 total last year and 14 so far this year – and call for more information how violent crimes are handled by the police department and how rape reports are handled.
“With something like rape, I would want to know – do you see like a specific location where something may be happening more often? Do we need better lighting in a particular area or do we need more patrols in a particular area?” she said.
“I’d like to see some analysis of where you see we can be more proactive in preventing these kinds of things from occurring.”
Hosam Elattar is a Voice of OC reporter. Contact him at helattar@voiceofoc.org.
