Long the bane of San Francisco leaders and the city’s tourists industry, property crime has declined by 34% compared to the first six months of last year, according to new police statistics. The drop is part of a continued downward trend of reported major crimes in the city—one that has in most cases seen them fall below or near pre-pandemic levels.
“The property-crime drop is really driving the majority of our reduction in crime,” San Francisco Police Chief Bill Scott said at Wednesday’s police commission. “Car break-ins, and larceny in general, is down significantly.”
While the media narrative in certain quarters has been slow to shift, the same can’t be said for the underlying reality.
Larceny thefts, which includes hot-button issues like car break-ins and retail thefts, dropped 40% to 10,522 so far this year, compared to last year’s 17,648 reported larcenies through six months—which was down from the 18,433 thefts reported in the first six months of 2019.
Scott attributed the trend to the department’s focus “on the right people”—meaning organized crews that operate across the Bay Area, including one that specialized in stealing high-end watches. The department used bait cars and other tactics to target criminals in highly trafficked areas, which Scott said helped SFPD make more than 400 retail-theft arrests this year.
Overall, robberies were down 17%, totaling only 1,139 so far this year, compared to 1,378 in the first half of 2023. These numbers continue a downward trend from the first half of 2019, when there were 1,364 robberies.
The City also saw year-to-date declines in homicides (39%), rape (9%) and burglary (19%).
SFPD officials and Mayor London Breed have taken credit for the decline and attribute the improvement to their campaign to increase police patrols with the help of state and federal law enforcement.
While acknowledging the drop at last week’s mayoral debate, most candidates redoubled promises to fill the depleted ranks of the police department, continuing to emphasize a law-and-order answer to public worries about crime.
Criminologists, however, say there are many reasons for the safer streets, and those factors are not always attributable to police—especially considering crime rates are dropping nationwide as life returns to normal after the pandemic.
Sam DeWitt, a senior researcher with the Arlington-based American Institutes of Research, said that police work undoubtedly has an impact on crime, but cautioned against attributing changes to targeted enforcement of certain offenses when, in fact, all crimes are declining across the nation.
“There are dozens of other explanations for why crime goes up and down,” said DeWitt. “Crime is not just down in San Francisco, it’s down across the United States.”
Those explanations are complex, he said, and include factors like economic shifts and the fact that young people today are less likely to commit crimes than previous generations.
According to the Council on Criminal Justice’s 2023 report, “overall, crime rates are largely returning to pre-Covid levels as the nation distances itself from the height of the pandemic, but there are notable exceptions” like car theft, which is on the rise nationally. But San Francisco defied its rep as a criminal cesspool here, too, seeing an 18% drop in car thefts in the first six months of this year compared to 2023.