Overall crimes reports in the Santa Clarita Valley increased less than 1 percent from 2008 to 2009, sheriff’s officials said.

However, reports of major crimes — including criminal homicide, forcible rape, robbery and burglary — saw more substantial increases. The biggest increase was in reported burglaries, while the most significant drop was in auto thefts.

Criminal homicides doubled from three to six over the period. Sheriff’s deputies attributed the increase, in part, to a pair of domestic-violence killings and a murder-suicide last year.

Meanwhile, the number of forcible rapes increased from 28 to 30 and burglaries jumped about 12 percent, from 999 to 1,121.

Grand theft auto incidents dropped from 598 to 447 – a decline of about 25 percent. Gang-related crimes dropped 39 percent in 2009 compared to 2008 and did not include any homicides, Santa Clarita Valley Sheriff’s Station Capt. Anthony La Berge said.

Assaults with firearms saw a 50 percent decline.

The numbers cover the entirety of the Santa Clarita Valley Sheriff’s Station’s patrol area, which includes the city and surrounding unincorporated areas.

Rising trends began to reveal themselves at the end of 2008, which alerted law enforcement to react and focus attention on increasing crimes trends, La Berge said Monday.

“With the troubled economy, we feared we might see property crimes and other crimes — because of heightened tensions both domestic in households and challenges people were facing,” La Berge said.

Efforts to curb those growing trends included check-ups on parolees, a gang suppression campaign and burglary suppression operations.

“Eventually we saw in the last quarter where our efforts we put in place were starting to pay off,” La Berge said.

However, domestic violence-related murders and murder-suicides posed a pattern that was difficult for law enforcement to tackle, La Berge said.

At least two of the six homicides in the 2008 to 2009 period were domestic-violence-related murder-suicides and a third murder-suicide could be characterized as domestic-related, said sheriff’s Lt. Brenda Cambra.

“Some of these houses we’d never been to before, so we had no inclination something was going on in that household,” La Berge said. “These were things people from the outside would never imagine people on the inside were going through these challenges.”

The prevalence of domestic violence-related homicides poses the need for coordination between the sheriff’s station and another local organization, city spokeswoman Gail Ortiz said.

“It’s a social issue, and for obvious reasons, we need to spend some time increasing the partnership between the sheriff’s station and the Domestic Violence Center,” said Ortiz, who sits on the center’s board.

Cambra’s role on the board of the Domestic Violence Center demonstrates the push for that partnership, Ortiz said.

The city experienced an overall reduction in crime of 1.1 percent while the unincorporated areas of the SCV saw a 3.4-percent increase.

By the end of 2009, sheriff’s officials said they were able to get a handle on some of the rising trends and hopefully curb them in 2010.

“Crimes such as assaults and burglaries were down in some areas of Santa Clarita in the fourth quarter of the year,” La Berge said.

A focused campaign joining the efforts of the Detective Bureau, COBRA unit, CIT, Probation Department and Immigration and Customs Enforcement was aimed at suppressing crimes committed by the six active gangs in the SCV, sheriff’s officials said.

The greatest challenge facing law enforcement this year will be the release of more than 300 state parolees, resulting from California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation budget cuts, La Berge said.

“We’re already putting things in place, personnel in place, operations in place to keep track of our parolees,” he said.