Who handles policing in Dana Point
Dana Point, which incorporated on January 1, 1989, has never had its own police department. The Orange County Sheriff's Department (OCSD) provides law enforcement under contract, and the deputies assigned to the city operate as Dana Point Police Services. According to the sheriff's Dana Point patrol area page, the unit is led by a sheriff's captain serving as chief of police services and is staffed by 25 full-time deputies, six sergeants and six parking control officers, one of them funded by the Dana Point Harbor Department. The sheriff says deputies answer more than 17,000 calls for service a year in the city and patrol the beaches on ATVs during the summer.
Two numbers are worth saving. Non-emergency dispatch, for calls for service and non-injury collisions, is 714-647-7000 or 949-770-6011 around the clock. The Dana Point Police Services office, for general questions, is 949-248-3531 on weekdays from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. The water side is different: the sheriff's separate Harbor Patrol Bureau covers the county's three major harbors, including Dana Point Harbor, along with 48 miles of coastline. Fire and paramedic response comes from the Orange County Fire Authority.
Dana Point crime by year: the California DOJ counts
Every law enforcement agency in California reports its crimes to the state each year. The DOJ publishes them on OpenJustice in the Crimes and Clearances file, released in July 2026 with calendar years 1985 to 2025. Dana Point has its own line in that file, separate from the sheriff's unincorporated areas, so these counts cover the city limits only.
| Year | Violent crimes | Property crimes | Burglaries | Vehicle thefts | Larceny-thefts |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2015 | 57 | 589 | 120 | 52 | 417 |
| 2016 | 64 | 559 | 121 | 38 | 400 |
| 2017 | 64 | 515 | 85 | 31 | 399 |
| 2018 | 69 | 504 | 73 | 36 | 395 |
| 2019 | 52 | 399 | 61 | 27 | 311 |
| 2020 | 32 | 450 | 33 | 34 | 383 |
| 2021 | 26 | 368 | 42 | 56 | 270 |
| 2022 | 55 | 404 | 66 | 77 | 261 |
| 2023 | 40 | 313 | 39 | 51 | 223 |
| 2024 | 61 | 283 | 31 | 57 | 195 |
| 2025 | 54 | 276 | 37 | 48 | 191 |
The property side of the table has a clear direction. Property crime fell from 589 in 2015 to 276 in 2025, a drop of about 53%, and 2025 was the lowest year in the table. Thefts from vehicles, the biggest single category for most of those years, went from 206 in 2015 to 53 in 2025. Burglaries fell from 120 to 37 over the same period.
Violent crime moves around a small base. It ranged from 26 in 2021 to 69 in 2018, and 2025's 54 was down from 61 in 2024, the highest count since 2018. Aggravated assaults made up 43 of the 54, with 8 robberies, 3 rapes and no homicides. The city recorded one homicide in 2022 and one in 2023 and none in any other year shown. Between 2019 and 2025 Dana Point's violent count rose 4% and its property count fell 31%. Across all of Orange County in those six years, violent crime rose about 23% and property crime fell about 29%; statewide the changes were down about 2% and down about 23%.
Dana Point's crime rate beside nearby South County cities
Raw counts make small cities look calmer than large ones, so the table below converts each city's 2025 DOJ counts into crimes per 1,000 residents, using population from the Census Bureau's American Community Survey (ACS) for 2020-2024. Every city listed borders Dana Point or sits one city away, and all except Laguna Beach appear on the sheriff's list of contract patrol areas.
| City (2025) | Population (ACS 2020-2024) | Violent crimes | Violent per 1,000 | Property crimes | Property per 1,000 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dana Point | 32,790 | 54 | 1.6 | 276 | 8.4 |
| Laguna Niguel | 64,139 | 72 | 1.1 | 410 | 6.4 |
| Aliso Viejo | 51,113 | 60 | 1.2 | 308 | 6.0 |
| Laguna Beach | 22,710 | 42 | 1.8 | 240 | 10.6 |
| San Juan Capistrano | 35,095 | 59 | 1.7 | 252 | 7.2 |
| San Clemente | 63,273 | 103 | 1.6 | 537 | 8.5 |
On this measure Dana Point sat in the middle of the six: third-highest for property crime, just below San Clemente, and third-highest for violent crime, where the spread is narrow, from 1.1 to 1.8 per 1,000. With 54 offenses, a change of ten incidents moves Dana Point's rate by about 0.3. Using the same population for 2024 gives about 1.9 violent and 8.6 property crimes per 1,000, a violent rate above every city in the 2025 table. Read several years together before drawing a conclusion.
A per-resident rate also has a built-in bias for a coastal city. Dana Point Harbor, Doheny State Beach, Capistrano Beach Park, the Monarch Beach Golf Links and the Catalina Express terminal bring in visitors who do not count as residents, but crimes involving them are counted against the city. The Census also shows that 2,624 of the city's 16,484 homes, about 16%, were not occupied as anyone's usual residence when surveyed, a group that includes seasonal homes.
What Dana Point's reported crime is made of
The DOJ file breaks each category down further, which tells you more than the headline totals.
Thefts from cars in Dana Point
Of 191 larceny-thefts in 2025, 60 were shoplifting, 53 were thefts from motor vehicles and another 24 were thefts of vehicle parts and accessories. Thefts from buildings accounted for 19, bicycles for 7, and the remaining 28 were pickpocketing and other thefts. The 77 car-related thefts fit the sheriff's Hide It, Lock It or Lose It campaign, which the patrol area page lists among the city's crime prevention programs. Parking at trailheads, beach lots and the harbor with nothing in view is the practical takeaway.
Home burglary in Dana Point
Of 37 burglaries in 2025, 28 were residential and 9 hit businesses or other buildings. Residential burglary has ranged from 74 in 2015 down to 14 in 2020, and 2025's 28 was up from 18 in 2024 but well below the 2015 level. For an individual homeowner, burglary is the number that matters most, and it is a small share of the total.
Vehicle theft in Dana Point
Stolen vehicles do not follow the property trend. The count was 27 in 2019, peaked at 77 in 2022 and was 48 in 2025, still higher than any year from 2016 to 2019.
Clearance rates in Dana Point
A clearance means a case closed by arrest or by exceptional means. In 2025 deputies cleared 51 of 54 violent crimes in the city, about 94%, and 35 of 276 property crimes, about 13%. Statewide that year, about 46% of violent and 11% of property crimes were cleared. In plain terms, most thefts in Dana Point go unsolved, which is why cameras, locked cars and a home inventory matter more than any ranking.
How to check crime near a Dana Point address
No official dataset publishes Dana Point crime by neighborhood, so we do not say which parts of town are safest. These are the tools that let you look at a specific street, whether it is in Lantern Village, Capistrano Beach, Monarch Beach or Niguel Shores.
OpenJustice for Dana Point year by year
Pick Dana Point as the agency on OpenJustice to see crimes, clearances, arrests and arson going back to 1985. It is the steadiest long series, but it only covers the whole city by calendar year.
CrimeMapping.com for Dana Point streets
The sheriff publishes reported incidents for its contract cities on CrimeMapping. The sheriff's own description says you can search 15 crime types by address, landmark or ZIP code, set up email alerts, and that the data is preliminary and updated every 24 hours. Look at several months rather than a week.
FBI Crime Data Explorer for Dana Point
The FBI's Crime Data Explorer carries what agencies report to the national program. The sheriff notes on its patrol areas page that it now reports through the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS), which counts every offense in an incident, so a federal figure can differ from the state file for the same year. Compare like with like.
Megan's Law search for a Dana Point address
The DOJ's Megan's Law site lets you search registered sex offenders around an address. California purchase contracts already point buyers to it, but run the search yourself early.
Coastal hazards, fire and insurance in Dana Point
For many Dana Point buyers the bigger costs come from the coastline and the hills, not crime. The city sits on bluffs above the ocean, and Wikipedia's city article notes that Niguel Shores sits above eroding bluffs along the Strand, citing Orange County Register coverage of a 2021 landslide there. Treat slope stability as an item to investigate on any bluff-top or hillside lot.
Tsunami and flood zones in Dana Point
The California Geological Survey publishes tsunami hazard area maps for Orange County that you can zoom to a single block; check homes near the harbor, Doheny, Capistrano Beach and Beach Road. Cal OES MyHazards shows tsunami, flood, fire and earthquake hazards for an address, and FEMA's Flood Map Service Center gives the official flood zone that lenders use.
Fire zones and insurance for a Dana Point home
Homes next to open space or canyons can fall in a fire hazard severity zone, so check CAL FIRE's map for the exact parcel. Our California wildfire zones guide explains the zones, and every hazard shows up on the Natural Hazard Disclosure statement covered in our California seller disclosure guide. Get quotes early with the California homeowners insurance guide and the earthquake insurance guide.
Safety checks before you buy or rent in Dana Point
- Read at least five years of Dana Point's DOJ counts, not just 2025.
- Confirm on the tax bill that the address is inside Dana Point and not in Laguna Niguel, San Juan Capistrano or San Clemente, which report separately.
- Scan CrimeMapping for the surrounding blocks over several months, and visit on a summer weekend as well as a winter weekday, when beach and harbor traffic is very different.
- Run the address on the Megan's Law site.
- Check the tsunami map, the FEMA flood zone, the fire hazard zone and any landslide or bluff history in the disclosures and geology reports.
- Get homeowners insurance quotes before you remove contingencies.
- In a gated community, such as the Strands at Headlands, ask the HOA what it pays for in security and what incidents it has logged; see our California HOA laws guide.
For the rest of the picture, see is Dana Point a good place to live, the Dana Point ZIP codes guide and the Dana Point city guide. Our safest places to live in California guide compares cities statewide using the same DOJ source.