Nothing has dominated San Francisco discourse since 2020 quite like the intersection of crime, public safety, and justice — and Mayor London Breed has repeatedly touted some shiny statistics as proof her administration is turning things around.
In January, she championed a 7% decrease in overall crime across 2023 compared to the prior year, as well as the fact that property crime has dropped to its 2nd-lowest level of the last decade (2020 being the outlier).
And last week, Breed again pumped up her purported wins, pointing to a 32% drop in property crime and a 14% drop in violent incidents in the first quarter of 2024, compared to the same period in 2023. Her press release claimed it “reflects the work of law enforcement” and District Attorney Brooke Jenkins “aggressively” prosecuted cases.
But experts suggest again and again that understanding drops in crime requires more time and more nuance than a mayor’s press conference can convey. They also warn that taking credit for statistical shifts by pointing to recent policy changes remains problematic. It’s also the most common way for politicians and police chiefs to sway the storyline in their favor.
“That’s always the tension with elected officials, prosecutors and sometimes police chiefs, too: They feel under such political pressure to get quick results,” says Michael Scott, a former police chief and current director of the Center for Problem-Oriented Policing at Arizona State University. “Most people, even a lot of police officials and certainly most politicians, are not very precise about cause and effect.”
What do the crime statistics, taken at face value, say about life in San Francisco in 2024? Mostly that things are getting better. Violent crime did go up by 3% last year, but it’s still well below pre-pandemic levels; the overall crime figure went down, largely because of a massive drop in recorded property crimes (especially shoplifting, per a study by the Council on Criminal Justice). Assaults also declined for the first time since the pandemic — by 5% in 2023.
And the first quarter of 2024 looks even better: There have been major reductions in car break-ins (51%), burglary (17%), robbery (18%) and homicide (27%), according to city data.
Could the numbers be wrong? Scott notes that certain forms of crime are frequently underreported, but adds that this has been a consistent issue over decades. Moreover, he suggests that some numbers can be deceptive — a percentage shift could be chalked up to simple statistical variance or small sample size.
Breed and Jenkins suggest that the improved crime stats are explicitly due to changes to policing and punishment. Yet a deeper dive into the results of some of their recent stated highlights leave much to be desired.
In July 2023, Jenkins championed a 46% increase in felony narcotics convictions just a year into her tenure. Look beyond the percentage, however, and the numbers are less impressive: Of 819 felony narcotics cases her office filed, only 38 cases led to a conviction. That was an increase of just 12 convictions over the same period in 2021-2022.
Similarly, the mayor’s announcement last week noted other enforcement wins as being key to the crime decrease, even if the gains seem minute at best. A March operation to shut down a drug market in the Tenderloin led to 54 arrests — but only eight people were suspected drug dealers, with the rest facing minor charges for possessing drugs or potential stolen goods. (SF broke its overdose fatality record in 2023.) Breed also pumped up a March conviction in an organized retail theft case that, in reality, is just the jailing of a single 25-year-old woman on a two-year sentence, much of which comes as a punishment for assaulting someone while fleeing.
These are just individual examples in a tapestry of police and prosecutorial actions, but it demonstrates how much elected officials can use anecdotes and carefully curated data to portray incremental change as a transformation in governance.
Meanwhile, people who study crime and causation for a living say that correlating crime shifts to concrete, recent policy changes is not a reliable narrative, no matter how common it is across the country.
“I think in order to talk about this correctly, you need to talk about the great big crime drop we experienced in the ‘90s. To this day, we haven't pinpointed any one thing that led to that big crime drop,” says Jesenia Pizarro-Terrill, a professor at Arizona State University with a speciality in analyzing homicide and violent crime.
The problem: Big declarations of “reducing crime” over short-term periods fail to unpack deeper-seated problems within an unjust economy, argues Jody David Armour, a professor of law at the University of Southern California who has written extensively about race, crime, and public perception. As an example, he notes that crime, especially property theft, strongly correlates with wealth inequality.
“Many politicians tend to turn social issues into problems of individual pathology and responsibility, rather than seeing a spike in crime as a symptom of some real social inequalities. They frame it as a moral issue,” Armour says. “Many refuse to approach these problems from a public health framework, which would be more humane and efficacious in a lot of ways.”
Pizarro-Terrill and Scott stressed to Gazetteer SF that, beyond enforcement or prosecution in SF, falling crime rates across American cities suggest a “regression to the mean” after the pandemic triggered a major spike in violent incidents and property crimes.
“If this was about local policy, you would see it focused in San Francisco. But it’s a nationwide decrease,” Pizarro-Terrill says.
These positive shifts, especially in violent crime, have happened even in places demonized for having “progressive prosecutors” such as Chicago and Philadelphia, despite various forms of research showing that being “progressive” tends to create similar results as a more “traditional” D.A.
This isn’t to say that certain “tough-on-crime” maneuvers can’t have an effect; for example, Scott’s research on open-air drug markets suggest that crackdowns by police that arrest a swath of sellers and users can “very quickly get a significant positive impact” in the immediate area. “But the downside is that it often is a short-lived success that lasts not much longer than the time of the crackdown itself,” Scott adds.
These strains of nuance contrast the stories that elected officials like to tell while on the campaign trail. Jenkins, for example, has portrayed herself as rebuilding the justice system after years of soft policy. But when it comes down to it, SFPD’s “clearance rates,” or the rate at which a suspect gets charged with a crime, haven’t changed much between her and recalled former D.A. Chesa Boudin’s time in office.
Clearance rates are useful because they reflect what percentage of reported crimes are being prosecuted. And the numbers for the most talked-about segments of crime in SF — robbery, assault, burglary, and theft — have only varied by 1 or 2 percentage points since 2021, per city data. (Not exactly a revolution in catching criminals.)
Many politicians tend to turn social issues into problems of individual pathology and responsibility, rather than seeing a spike in crime as a symptom of some real social inequalities."
Jody David Armour, professor of law at the University of Southern California
Due to all this complexity, the FBI literally discourages the general public from using crime statistics and city rankings as a way to judge the efficacy of their law enforcement policies. There is also some irony that major decreases in crime in SF over the last year happened while SFPD complained of rampant understaffing and the lingering effect of “soft-on-crime” policy.
“When crime goes up, oftentimes the police chief or some city council members will say this proves that we need more police officers. Yet, it only goes in that direction,” Scott says. “It almost never goes in the other direction, where crime is down and we ought to think about laying off some police officers.”
Yes, the crime numbers look great for Q1 in 2024. Is it because there’s more violence coming later, when the weather heats up? Because there are fewer tourists? Are vehicle thefts down because Kia and Hyundai have fixed up their janky systems to prevent easy break-ins, as demonstrated in viral videos online? Is it because SFPD is misreporting crime data, a rampant problem Scott says affects law enforcement agencies all across the country? (And something SFPD has struggled with in the past, too?)
Maybe it’s simply that the pandemic triggered a generational economic and social collapse that pushed all manner of vulnerable people to the brink, often in the form of lost incomes and lost homes.
“Economic stress is so important. For example, I study intimate partner homicides, which spiked in the pandemic. We know one of the biggest risk factors for a domestic violence incident to escalate into a homicide: It’s unemployment,” Pizarro-Terrill says. “And that’s a kind of economic stress we started seeing more in the pandemic.”
But even suggesting “it’s the pandemic, stupid” is no fix to the question of how SF can make people feel safe. Scott points out that disorderly conditions on the street, which often have nothing to do with actual crime, can push people to demand rapid solutions. And as Pizarro-Terrill notes, the most commonly requested fix is to lock more criminals up, even if decades of research show this could lead to long-term consequences for public safety.
Therein lies the problem with crime stats: They can say something important, but only if you sift through the noise.
