San Francisco is getting safer. At least that's the line coming out of City Hall, repeated enough times that it starts to sound like fact instead of framing.
And yes, the numbers are down.
Robberies have dropped 30 percent. Assaults are down 10 percent. Property crime is falling across the board. Burglaries, car theft, larceny, all down roughly a third. Car break ins, the thing that defined the city’s reputation for years, are collapsing. Half of what they were last year. Down about 85 percent from 2023.
But here’s the part they don’t say out loud.
They were going down during former Mayor London Breed’s time in office, too. This didn’t suddenly happen because of some brilliant shift at the top.
The decline in property crime started in 2023, before the current round of political messaging, driven by targeted enforcement changes inside the department and a broader shift in behavior. People adapted. The offenders moved. Patterns changed. The city didn’t wake up one day and decide to fix itself because the mayor gave a speech.
Still, if you’re Mayor Daniel Lurie, you take the win. You stand next to the data and imply authorship. That’s how politics works. Improvement becomes ownership.
But numbers can go down while something more serious goes up.
That’s a 250% increase. That’s not a minor fluctuation. That’s a rupture in the story the city is trying to tell about itself.
And the explanation is almost worse than a simple spike.
Fourteen people have been murdered in San Francisco this year, at this same point last year, the city was at just 4. If this continues, the city will eclipse 50 homicides by the end of the year.
Nine of the fourteen killings involved firearms. The rest fall into the category officials keep emphasizing. Not random. Targeted. As if that distinction makes it easier to process.
This is where the narrative falls apart.
Last year, San Francisco recorded its lowest homicide total since 1954. Oakland saw a similar drop, hitting levels not seen since the 1960s. It looked like a turning point, something structural.
Now, just a few months into the year, that progress feels a lot less stable.
And that’s the tension the city is sitting in.
There’s contradiction around every corner. How is San Francisco on the rise when its murder rate climbs along with its so-called progress? City Hall has gutted services when the median price for a single family home is the highest in the city’s history.
And while it seems homelessness is going down, it only appears that way if you stick downtown. Neighborhoods like the Mission, Bayview-Hunters Point and other residential parts of the city, mostly situated around the southeastern side of the city, appear to have seen increases in its unhoused community and worsening street conditions.
All of this is supposed to make the city safer, but the idea falls flat if you take a look at the data.
Murder is up, right alongside city-backed austerity measures and the inequality that comes with it.
