California Cities Just Saw Their Lowest Homicide Rates in Decades. It’s Not Clear Why

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For the second year in a row, Gov. Gavin Newsom is celebrating California’s declining homicide rate while using it as a cudgel against his political foes.

“Your state’s homicide rate is 117% higher than California’s,” he told a Missouri congressman who needled Newsom on social media last summer.

Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders caught his attention, too. “Your homicide rate is literally DOUBLE California’s,” he wrote on social media addressing her.

What’s been clear for the last three years is that homicides are down in Los Angeles and San Francisco — but also in Fresno, Oakland, Richmond and Lodi.

“California cities are seeing record-low homicide rates,” Newsom said in his state of the state speech earlier this month. “Oakland, the lowest since 1967; LA, the lowest since 1966; and San Francisco, the lowest since 1954.”

After a spike during the early days of the pandemic, homicides are in fact down nationwide.

The reason why is far less clear. To put it in the language of crime researchers, the answer is “multifactorial.”

Magnus Lofstrom, policy director of criminal justice at nonpartisan think tank the Public Policy Institute of California, said the spike of homicides during the pandemic may have been the result of disruptions in government activities: Schools were shut down, people were out of work, community-based programs for violence prevention and many basic public services were put on pause, Lofstrom said.

The 2020 numbers were a shock. After years of decline, the homicide rate in California surged by 31% in 2020 to 5.5 homicides per 100,000 people. In 2021, it rose again, to about 6 per 100,000 people.

But that trend began to turn in 2022, when the number of homicides dropped by 7%, then in 2023 by 14% and in 2024 by another 12%. By the end of 2024, the homicide rate in California was down to 4.3 per 100,000 people.

California’s population was about 20 million people the last time the state recorded such low homicide numbers, half of what it is today.

At the same time the homicide numbers were climbing, the percentage of cases cleared by police was falling. A police department’s “clearance rate” compares the number of crimes reported to the number of arrests made.

Lofstrom said that the homicide clearance rate statewide was 64.7% in 2019, and that it had dropped to 54.6% in 2021 – though the rates can vary dramatically among police departments.

“What we see now in the data up to 2024 is that we’re back up over 64% for homicide clearances,” Lofstrom said.

Half as many homicides in Oakland

Oakland Mayor Barbara Lee said homicides are down along with major gun crimes including robberies and assaults with firearms. Oakland’s 67 homicides in 2025 were its lowest since 1967. It had 134 homicides in 2021.

In Los Angeles, homicides dropped by more than 18% to 230 in 2025, according to a Los Angeles Times analysis of LAPD data.

The numbers documenting the recent decline in homicide rates, and the earlier spike, come with a major asterisk: The way crime data is collected is inconsistent. Law enforcement agencies self-report to the FBI, which each year publishes data under the Uniform Crime Reporting Program. The California Department of Justice then produces statewide reports from those numbers.

But not every department reports its statistics. And among those that do, some don’t report all their data — or report the information differently. For example, some jurisdictions only report crimes that lead to incarceration.

Homicide numbers in California are provided by the state Justice Department near the end of the fiscal year in June, so the most recent statistics are from 2024. The Justice Department declined to provide CalMatters with updated numbers through 2025.

The drop in homicide rates wasn’t as pronounced in Orange and Orange and Ventura counties, which never experienced a significant pandemic spike, and Kern County, where the homicide rate maintains a stubborn hold as the state’s highest.

Nationwide drop in crime

A long-range look at crime statistics, particularly homicide data, shows that the 2020-21 crime rate nationally and in California was still a fraction of its highs in the early 1990s. Simply counting the year-over-year changes belies a larger truth: Crime throughout the 2020s has been down significantly compared to the rate 20 or 30 years ago.

As with the long-term homicide rate declines, the recent tapering in California is part of a nationwide trend. A report published Thursday by the Council on Criminal Justice, a nonpartisan Washington, D.C., think tank found that among 35 major cities nationwide, homicides dropped by 21% between 2024 and 2025.

When the FBI publishes its crime statistics later this year, Council on Criminal Justice researchers said in the report that the national homicide rate could drop to 4 per 100,000 people, which would be the lowest homicide rate ever on record.

Shani Buggs, an associate professor at UC Davis and public health researcher, said in the report that cities with major decreases in their homicide rate tended to spend federal pandemic funds on violence prevention and have police departments that focused on people with repeated allegations of violent crimes, helping them quickly resume pre-pandemic clearance rates.

“We do not have reliable, multi-sector data or comparable contextual information available across jurisdictions to definitively identify — now or perhaps ever — what drove these declines,” Buggs said.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.