San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Reported S.F. crimes plunging, data shows
Decrease continuing after pandemic surge
Reported crimes fell in San Francisco over the first quarter of 2024 across all categories, with some offenses dipping to levels last seen before the pandemic — welcome news in a city that has seen its image battered over concerns about public safety.
The trends, documented in city police data, continue the downward trajectory San Francisco saw in 2023, when cities nationwide experienced falling crime.
The figures include doubledigit percentage drops in both violent and property crimes, with homicides falling from 11 to 8, rapes by 23%, and burglaries by 15% over the same time last year. Larceny — a type of theft that includes San Francisco’s notoriously high level of car burglaries — fell the most over the previous year, plunging by 35% from 8,389 reported incidents to 5,402, the city’s statistics showed.
From January through March, San Francisco saw decreases in every major crime category tracked by the FBI for its Uniform Crime Reporting Program, which includes homicide, rape, aggravated assault, robbery, burglary, arson, larceny-theft and motor vehicle theft.
As with all crime fluctuations, criminologists caution against assigning too much credit or blame to any single policy or police action.
But San Francisco leaders said a coordinated crackdown by local, state and federal law enforcement has chipped away at some of the city’s most persistent public safety problems, including its infamously high rate of property crimes.
Jeff Cretan, a spokesperson for Mayor London Breed, said that for many years public safety agencies in San Francisco were relatively siloed. The local U.S. Attorney’s Office and Drug Enforcement Administration didn’t reliably communicate with local law enforcement, and the two previous district attorneys, George Gascón and Chesa Boudin, were often philosophically at
odds with police, Cretan said.
“It’s always been kind of complicated,” Cretan said. “But now, everyone is coordinated and working together.”
Utilizing state and federal law enforcement officials to combat San Francisco’s street-level drug markets has helped to free city police to tackle other crimes, officials said.
In June, the city opened a new unified command center to coordinate public health and law enforcement agencies to tackle the drug epidemic. And after pleas by Breed and others for more federal and state assistance with the drug scourge, Gov. Gavin Newsom deployed state police and California National Guard. In August, U.S. Attorney Ismail Ramsey launched a new crackdown on street dealers and Speaker Emerita Nancy
Pelosi announced more federal funding to tackle fentanyl dealing.
While these initiatives center on drug trafficking — which is not a crime tracked as a major category — city officials said the work has complemented and supplemented other crime-fighting efforts. Officers are seizing guns from the streets and arresting people with outstanding warrants. And it’s freed up more resources to tackle fencing operations, car burglaries and retail thefts — crimes producing proceeds that help fuel the drug trade.
“It’s all related,” Cretan said. “There are a number of factors that go into this, but it cannot be overstated how important that coordination has been.”
Jeff Asher, an analyst who tracks national crime trends, said he’d be skeptical drawing any firm conclusions about what’s driving down crime in San Francisco and across the country.
As Asher noted in a recent post, preliminary FBI data indicates widespread dips in crime categories across the board, in both big and small cities throughout the U.S.
“So far, the overall trends are very positive,” he said, adding that “it’s something we’ll have to see how it plays out over the rest of the year … to better understand what are the main drivers of the trend.”
Concerns about public safety have become a focal point of the mayor’s race this year, with Breed facing serious challenges to her reelection bid. Breed may look to highlight encouraging drops in crime as she attempts to fend off challengers who have attacked her leadership by characterizing safety in the city at crisis levels.
San Francisco Police Commissioner Kevin Benedicto said the persistent disconnect between the city’s crime numbers and perceptions of public safety reflects an important limitation in the persuasiveness of crime statistics.
“I think that sometimes policymakers can over-rely on data and sort of discount perception that is inconsistent with data,” Benedicto said. “And I think that’s a mistake that gets made, because no one who’s ever had their car broken into is comforted by learning that crime is on the mend.”
But that perception seems to be softening, too, he said, crediting both police and the widespread deployment of community ambassadors.
“Ultimately, people need to be safe and they need to feel safe,” Benedicto said. “I do hope that that perception is catching up.”
Officials point to the sharp drop-off of car break-ins as a clear payoff of the city’s labor. Just a few months after District Attorney Brooke Jenkins and Police Chief Bill Scott announced a new operation in August involving bait cars, plainclothes officers and vigorous prosecutions, the city’s reported smash-and-grabs had been cut in half, and the figures continued to shrink.
From January 2018 to August 2023, San Francisco averaged about 1,880 car burglaries a month, compared with 1,027 on average from September to March of this year.
The month-over-month consistency has made officials optimistic that the trend could be sustainable. The 783 reported car breakins in March was the lowest number in San Francisco in over five years aside from April 2020, when COVID-19 lockdowns brought ordinary life to a standstill.
San Francisco police spokesperson Evan Sernoffsky said the recent arrests have felled some of the city’s most prolific car burglars, which has had an outsize impact on the number of cases reported in recent months.
“When they’re not out breaking into cars, the numbers go down significantly,” he said.
Other types of statistics, such as the lower rates of violent crimes, are more difficult to credit to local law enforcement tactics.
San Francisco, a city with consistently low rates of homicides compared with other big cities, saw another dip in the first quarter of this year, from 11 to eight. There were 56 recorded homicides in 2022, compared with 53 in 2023.
San Francisco’s number of reported shootings has fallen as well. There were 31 victims of gun violence by April 7 of this year, compared with 51 during the same time last year, 53 in 2022 and 69 in 2021.
Asher, the crime analyst, noted that data collected nationally by the Gun Violence Archive points to similar falling rates of gun crimes throughout the U.S. The trend lines, he said, may point to a return to normalcy after a countrywide surge of gun crimes that coincided with the first two years of the pandemic.
Some of the economic stressors that may have contributed to the violence have settled, and the anticrime government programs and similar efforts by philanthropies and nonprofits that ground to a halt during lockdowns are up and running again, Asher said.
“All of these ideas that help to interrupt the cycle of violence are back in play in a way that they weren’t years ago,” he said. “And so the result is, essentially, what we’re seeing.”