Cesar Aguirre, 32, of Perris, was arrested last month following a Riverside Police Department investigation into the deaths of 54-year-old Richard Hinds and 57-year-old Corrina Segovia.

Along with the murder counts, Aguirre is charged with special circumstance allegations of targeting multiple people in a deadly crime and lying in wait, as well as sentence-enhancing allegations of using a deadly weapon in the commission of a felony.

The defendant was arraigned Thursday before Riverside County Superior Court Judge Jay Kiel, who scheduled a felony settlement conference for Aug. 18 at the Riverside Hall of Justice.

Aguirre is being held without bail at the Byrd Detention Center.

According to Riverside police Detective Steven Espinosa, sometime after midnight on March 11, Aguirre boarded an RTA bus near his Perris home and rode it into Riverside, where he began walking downtown streets.

Shortly after 2 a.m., he encountered Hinds in the area of 12th and Main streets. Espinosa alleged the defendant pulled a knife and stabbed the victim several times, then walked away, leaving the homeless man bleeding to death.

Moments later, at the intersection of 12th and Orange streets, Aguirre attacked Segovia, inflicting mortal knife wounds and then walking away, the police spokesman alleged.

“These were local homeless individuals known to frequent the downtown area,” he said. “Investigators later determined Aguirre’s attacks were unprovoked.”

The victims were discovered a short time later by passers-by, who called 911. Both died where they fell.

Aguirre was identified based on undisclosed evidence that Riverside police Chief Larry Gonzalez said the detective squad worked “around the clock” to procure. The defendant was tracked to his residence on Spectacular Boulevard, where he was taken into custody without incident on March 13.

Aguirre’s prior convictions were not listed by the court.

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The operation, which is similar to what the governor’s office called “successful operations” in Oakland, Bakersfield and San Francisco, will see the San Bernardino Police Department working with CHP’s Inland Operation Team. Additional officers will be placed in the city, in order to help local law enforcement cut down on crime that includes gun violence and property theft. 

“We are sending additional CHP support to help local law enforcement aggressively suppress criminal activity and provide this community with a new level of safety and accountability,” Newsom said in a statement. “Whether in the Bay Area, the Central Valley, or Southern California — we are monitoring and stand ready to step in and support local law enforcement to protect communities and keep Californians safe.”

According to recent data provided by the governor’s statement, violent crime in San Bernardino is almost double the statewide average, and the homicide rate is more than three times the average across California. Additionally, vehicle theft rates are amongst the highest in the state.

CHP will assist with units both on the ground and in the air, many of which will be dedicated to targeting street takeovers and stolen vehicles, the release said. Additionally, additional investigators will be provided to help SBPD in order to disrupt street gangs, organized crime and to get illegal guns off the street. 

“We are grateful to Governor Newsom for providing additional support from the California Highway Patrol to the City of San Bernardino,” said San Bernardino Mayor Helen Tran in the statement. “This year, out City Police Department’s efforts have led to a 13% reduction in violent crime, and the extra support will strengthen public safety in our community. With this new state and local collaboration in San Bernardino, we can continue to impact criminal enterprises targeting our neighborhoods and businesses.”

This is the latest in a series of similar operations going on throughout California, with similar work being conducted in the Bay Area. So far, the operations have netted more than 3,200 arrests, recovered nearly 3,000 stolen vehicles and officers have seized more than 170 illegal firearms and illegal drugs. 

Since 2019, California has invested more than $1 billion to fund resources and law enforcement personnel to fight crime, the statement said. 

Governor Newsom has made efforts to aid local law enforcement with a number of historic investments aimed at stopped organized retail theft. Just last year, 55 local law enforcement agencies received over $267 from the state to help prosecute organized retail theft perpetrators, of which more than 10,000 people were arrested. 

On top of those arrests, the CHP’s Organized Retail Theft Task Fore arrested more than 3,200 people and recovered more than 880,000 stolen items worth more than $46 million. 

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The rate of stolen guns from cars climbed nearly every year and spiked during the coronavirus pandemic along with a major surge in weapons purchases in the U.S., according to the report, which analyzes FBI data from 337 cities in 44 states and was provided to the Associated Press.

The stolen weapons have, in some cases, turned up at crime scenes. In July 2021, a gun taken from an unlocked car in Riverside, Fla., was used to kill a 27-year-old Coast Guard member as she tried to stop a car burglary in her neighborhood.

The alarming trend underscores the need for Americans to safely secure their firearms to prevent them from getting into the hands of dangerous people, said Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives Director Steve Dettelbach, whose agency has separately found links between stolen guns and violent crimes.

“People don’t go to a mall and steal a firearm from a locked car to go hunting. Those guns are going straight to the street,” said Dettelbach, whose agency was not involved in the report. “They’re going to violent people who can’t pass a background check. They’re going to gangs. They’re going to drug dealers, and they’re going to hurt and kill the people who live in the next town, the next county or the next state.”

Nearly 112,000 guns were reported stolen in 2022, and just over half of those were from cars — most often when they were parked in driveways or outside people’s homes, the Everytown report found. That’s up from about one-quarter of all thefts in 2013, when homes were the leading spot for firearm thefts, the report says.

Stolen guns have also been linked to tragic accidents, such as when a 14-year-old boy in St. Petersburg, Fla., killed his 11-year-old brother after finding in an alley a gun that had been stolen from an unlocked car a few days before.

At least one firearm was stolen from a car every nine minutes on average in 2022, the most recent year for which data was available. That’s almost certainly an undercount, though, since there’s no federal law requiring people to report stolen guns and only one-third of states require a report.

“Every gun stolen from a car increases the chances it’ll be used in a violent crime,” said Sarah Burd-Sharp, senior director of research at Everytown, which advocates for gun control policies. It’s unclear what’s driving the trend. The report found higher theft rates in states with looser gun laws, which also tend to have higher rates of gun ownership.

The report analyzed crime data from the FBI’s National Incident-Based Reporting System, which includes details about what was stolen and where it came from. Guns stolen from cars bucked car theft trends overall — the rate of other things stolen from cars has dropped 11% over the last 10 years, even as the rate of gun thefts from cars grew 200%, Everytown found in its analysis of FBI data.

In Savannah, Ga., city leaders last month passed an ordinance requiring people to secure firearms left inside cars after seeing more than 200 guns stolen from unlocked cars in a year. The measure is facing pushback from the state’s attorney general.

The ATF has separately said that theft is a significant source of guns that end up in the hands of criminals. More than 1 million guns were reported stolen between 2017 and 2021, the agency found in a sweeping report on crime guns released last year. And the vast majority of gun thefts are from individuals.

The agency is prohibited by law from publicly releasing detailed information about where stolen guns end up. The information can, however, be shared with police investigating a crime.

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WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden plans to lay out new steps to stem a rising national tide of violent crime, with a particular focus on gun violence, as administration officials brace for what they fear could be an especially turbulent summer.

The worry over crime is real: It has created economic hardship, displacement and anxiety. But there are also tricky politics at play. The spike in crime has become a Republican talking point and has been a frequent topic of conversation on conservative media.

White House aides believe that Biden, with his long legislative record on crime as a former senator, is not easy to paint as soft on the issue, and the president has been clear that he is opposed to the “defund the police” movement, which has been effectively used against other Democrats to paint them as anti-law enforcement. But Biden also is trying to boost progressives’ efforts to reform policing. And while combating crime and reforming the police don’t have to be at odds with each other, the two efforts are increasingly billed that way.

In a speech on Wednesday, Biden is to unveil a series of executive orders aimed at reducing violence, and he will renew his calls for Congress to pass gun legislation, aides said. Ahead of the speech, the Justice Department announced new strike forces aimed at tackling gun trafficking in five cities.

The White House also planned to convene a meeting Wednesday with Attorney General Merrick Garland; the Democratic mayors of Baltimore and Miami-Dade County and the Republican mayor of Rapid City, South Dakota; the Democratic attorney general of New Jersey; the police chief in Baton Rouge, Louisiana; and community activists. White House staff members have also been in touch with legislators and congressional staff.

“Yes, there need to be reforms of police systems across the country. The president is a firm believer in that,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Tuesday. “But there are also steps he can take as president of the United States to help address and hopefully reduce that crime. A big part of that, in his view, is putting in place gun safety measures … using the bully pulpit but also using levers at his disposal as president.”

In April, Biden announced a half-dozen executive actions on gun control, including cracking down on “ghost guns,” homemade firearms that lack serial numbers used to trace them and that are often purchased without a background check.

There is also new federal funding from the $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief package directed toward municipal governments, allowing them to keep more police officers on the street. Aides said Biden would also urge a swift confirmation of his choice to head the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

But Biden is limited in his power to act alone. The House passed two bills requiring background checks on all firearms sales and transfers and allowing an expanded 10-day review for gun purchases. But that legislation faces strong headwinds in the Senate, where some Republican support would be needed for passage.

Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco said Tuesday that she has seen double-digit increases in murder and violent crime nationwide.

“It is staggering. It is sobering,” she said at a violent-crime forum held by the Washington-based Police Executive Research Forum. “And it’s something that DOJ is committed to do all we can to reverse what are profoundly troubling trends.”

Monaco said the Justice Department would launch strike forces in Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Washington, D.C., to help reduce violent crime by addressing illegal gun trafficking, building on an initiative begun last month.

If the federal effort sounds familiar, it is. Federal operations have often been launched to help cities facing spiking crime. President Donald Trump announced something similar last year when he and then-Attorney General William Barr launched Operation Legend, named for a boy who was shot to death in Kansas City, Missouri. In that effort, hundreds of investigators were deployed to nine cities with rising crime, prioritizing the arrest of violent criminals.

Trump, though, laid blame for the spike in crime on protesters who demonstrated against police brutality following the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. He claimed that Democrats were allowing crime to run amok in their cities. But despite pockets of violence in both Democratic- and Republican-run cities, the protests were mostly peaceful. A Harvard Radcliffe Institute study found there were no injuries reported in 97% of the events. Still, Republican leaders continue to echo Trump’s claims.

And while crime is rising — homicides and shootings are up from the same period last year in Chicago; Los Angeles; Minneapolis; Portland, Oregon; Baltimore; Baton Rouge, Louisiana; and Houston — violent crime overall remains lower than it was a decade ago or even five years ago. And most violent crimes plummeted during the first six months of the pandemic, as people stayed indoors and away from others.

Crime started creeping up last summer, a trend criminologists say is hard to define and is likely due to a variety of factors such as historic unemployment, fear over the virus and mass anger over stay-at-home orders. Public mass shootings have also made an alarming return.

“Many of us — if not most of us — are seeing a rise in crime, while at the same time, we’re hearing calls for reform,” Baltimore Police Commissioner Michael Harrison said of cities in remarks at the police forum. “And some of those calls are to the extreme of dismantle and defund … while all of the same time we’re sworn to protect the people.”

Interest in guns, too, is on the rise. The number of people stopped from buying guns through the U.S. background check system hit an all-time high of more than 300,000 last year amid a surge of firearm sales. And several states have passed laws barring federal gun control laws from taking effect.

Louisville Metro Police Chief Erika Shields said lax gun laws and the presence of illegal guns on the streets are compounding the violence.

“When everyone can have a gun, they tend to,” she said. “And it just leads to more illegal guns on the street.”

The Justice Department recently announced a sweeping investigation into the Louisville police over the March 2020 death of Breonna Taylor, who was shot to death by police during a raid at her home. A similar investigation was launched into the Minneapolis police force.

The rise in violence comes against the backdrop of a national debate on policing and as a police reform bill is being crafted in Congress. Psaki on Tuesday dismissed suggestions that a presidential event focused on cracking down on crime would undermine that legislative effort.

As a senator, Biden wrote several major anti-crime packages, including a 1994 bill that contained provisions now viewed by some as an overreaction to the crime spikes in the 1980s and 1990s. Critics say those bills helped lead to mass incarceration of Black Americans, and Biden’s involvement became a flashpoint in his 2020 campaign.

Biden has expressed second thoughts about some aspects of the legislation, and he has acknowledged its harmful impact on many Black Americans. But he and his allies still hold out the law’s provisions to address domestic violence, ban assault weapons and finance community policing.

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