Cities’ homicides fall to historic lows

Police, criminology experts credit gun unit, outreach and street teams

San Francisco police credit a new gun unit. Oakland officials point to community outreach. In Fairfield, police say it’s reinforced street teams.

After an uptick in homicides a few years ago, the Bay Area’s biggest cities started again recording historically low killings in 2018, as many turned to new technologies and trusted policing techniques to curb the most serious of crimes. The decline follows a national trend over the past few years, though federal numbers for 2018 are not yet available.

Nearly every city that responded to The Chronicle’s request for end-of-year homicide data reported a drop, some of them to numbers not seen in decades. Homicide counts fell in 12 of the Bay Area’s 15 largest cities from 2017 to 2018, and declined in the 15 cities from 234 to 196.

Those that bucked the trend rose only slightly, with homicides in Daly City climbing from none to three over the past year, killings in Richmond from 15 to 18, and those in Fremont from two to three.

Declines were stark in some of the area’s most populous cities, with combined homicides in San Jose, Oakland and San Francisco sinking by 26 percent over the past two years,

from 190 in 2016 to 161 in 2017 to 141 in 2018.

Crime statistics rarely remain fixed year-overyear, and it’s difficult to pin peaks and valleys on any single law or police policy. But experts say law enforcement’s focus on gangs, illegal firearms and the worst criminal offenders has helped drive down crime overall, and has likely put a dent in homicides, too.

“I’m always reluctant to draw any conclusions from a one-year change, but I’m willing to believe that some of the drop in Oakland is really to the credit of the Police Department,” said Stanford Criminal Justice Center Faculty Co-Director Robert Weisberg, noting the city’s violence-reduction program called Ceasefire.

The initiative zeroes in on individuals most likely to be shooters or victims of gunfire, offering them mentorship and community resources to guide them away from violence. The program, which started in Oakland in 2013, is credited with helping the city mark the sixth consecutive year of declines in homicides and injury shootings combined.

The city counted 68 homicides in 2018, the lowest figure recorded since 1999 when 60 people were slain within the city’s borders.

“It’s actually a relatively common practice in various cities — a focus on gang violence more than just gangs,” Weisberg said.

San Jose killings also fell dramatically, from 47 in 2016 to 34 in 2017 to 27 in 2018, marking the lowest figure since the city recorded 20 in 2010.

San Francisco was just shy of recording the lowest number of homicides in several decades, but at the end of the year saw two more killings, making the total 46. There were 45 in 2009.

San Francisco officials attribute the drop in part to the Crime Gun Investigations Center, a new unit started in November 2017. Investigators collect guns, spent shell casings and bullets, and enter them into a network that shares evidence across jurisdictions. The unit tests the casings even when there’s not a victim, which could connect a gun to unsolved homicides.

Fairfield police recently refilled positions left empty after the economic downturn, and police say the increased patrol presence could be a factor in their recent successes. The city recorded 11 homicides in 2017 and five in 2018.

“We beefed up our street team and our special operations team, and they specifically target gun crimes,” said Lt. Jausiah Jacobsen. “They’ve taken a lot of guns off the street … and if guns are getting removed from the street, that could be a direct correlation as to why the homicides are down.”

Bay Area killings in 2018 continued to mirror national figures, which plummeted since the bloodshed in the early 1990s but saw an uptick in 2015 and 2016. Data available for 2018 so far suggest that the spike was an anomaly rather than a continuing path, said Richard Rosenfeld, a criminology professor with the University of Missouri, St. Louis.

Rosenfeld, who was tapped by the U.S. Department of Justice to research the 2015 upswing, said preliminary 2018 data show that big cities are back on the decline. Rosenfeld said his research comports with a recent New York Times report, which found that 2018 was poised to record the biggest one-year drop in five years.

This research, however, is only based on data from large cities, and may not reflect nationwide statistics. Complete data, compiled by the FBI, is typically not available until fall of the following year.

One theory for the 2015-16 jump is what’s known as the “Ferguson effect:” The idea that the 2014 police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., inflamed relations between police and minority communities, as well as more crime.

“Although tensions do remain, I don’t think they are currently at the level that we saw them in 2015 and 2016,” Rosenfeld said. “That does not mean that big cities are back to where they were before that big rise began — they’re not back to where they were in 2013, 2012 — but they’re heading in the right direction.”

In California, the homicide rate is viewed as something of a case study on the effects of criminal justice reform. The state has led the nation in passing measures to shrink prison populations, including Proposition 47, which lowered some low-level felonies to misdemeanors, and Proposition 57, which created more chances of parole for nonviolent offenders.

Some have criticized these policies, however, arguing that they’re pushing more lawbreakers on the streets. The Public Policy Institute found that Prop. 47 may be linked to increases in some types of crime like auto thefts but did not spike overall crime rates.

“This, at the very least, confirms that there is no evidence that homicides go up as a result of these decarceration efforts,” said Weisberg, the Stanford