Now that Los Angeles has acquired the Rams, its interest in a second NFL team has apparently plummeted. The city's mayor, Eric Garcetti, has already wished the San Diego Chargers well in their pursuit of a new home, and he's said he hopes they end up staying where they are, for rivalry's sake.
As for the Oakland Raiders? Well, as he explained to ESPN's Capitol Games podcast, the Raiders -- and their fans -- bring some baggage.
"Crime has gone down every single year since the Raiders left L.A. [after 1994]," Garcetti said.
He later said he was "half-joking," which, of course, means he was also half-serious.
A quick dive into the numbers suggests his statement was half-true. Los Angeles has, indeed, enjoyed a nice decline in crime in the time since the Raiders left. The Los Angeles Times reports that before a crime spike at the start of 2015, the city had seen crime rates decline every year for a 12-year span.
That 12-year run, however, started nearly a decade after the Raiders left town. Even if it coincided perfectly with the franchise's move to the Bay Area, the connection would be purely coincidental. But it's even more of a stretch to connect the team's departure in the mid-1990s to lower crime rates in the mid-2000s.
At the same time, it's easy to pick on Raiders fans for being a bunch of crime-riddled pirates and ne'er-do-wells. So let's go ahead and do that.
