On today’s episode of Swamp Storiez
If you only learned about the Bay Area from the internet, you’d assume walking through Oakland was roughly equivalent to being deployed to Fallujah.
San Francisco is apparently a fentanyl-soaked hellscape where your car window explodes the second you cross the Bay Bridge. Oakland is a Mad Max movie with rent control. Every Walgreens is being looted simultaneously. Everyone has been murdered at least twice.
There’s just one problem.
Crime is going down.
Not a little bit. Not in some obscure category like unlicensed street vendors that politicians can cherry-pick for a press conference.
Violent crime is down. Robbery is down. Shootings are down.
And homicide — the crime that is hardest to misreport, ignore or explain away, has fallen to levels the Bay Area hasn’t seen in generations.
San Francisco finished 2025 with 28 homicides, the lowest number recorded in the city since 1954, according to the San Francisco Police Department.
Overall crime in San Francisco fell 25 percent from 2024, while violent crime fell 18 percent, property crime fell 27 percent and shootings fell 16 percent, according to SFPD's year-end crime statistics.
To put 1954 into perspective, Dwight Eisenhower was president. Godzilla had just come out. Brown v. Board of Education had just been decided.
There were still fucking streetcars everywhere.
Yet somehow we have collectively decided that this is the historical moment when San Francisco has become too dangerous to enter.
Oakland is always the worst place on earth and dying, even when it isn't…
Oakland suffers from an even more severe version of this phenomenon because declaring Oakland dead has basically become a Bay Area tradition.
Oakland was dying in the '80s.
Oakland was dying in the '90s.
Oakland was dying during Occupy.
Oakland was dying because of gentrification.
Oakland was dying because people stopped gentrifying it.
Oakland is apparently the first city in human history capable of dying continuously for 40 years without actually dying.
I’ve lived in Oakland the majority of my life, and the Oakland of my childhood was noticeably more dangerous. Oakland has gotten better, Martinez has gotten better. Vallejo… Well, you can’t win them all.
And Oakland absolutely does have serious crime problems. Pretending otherwise would be equally stupid. A city having dozens of homicides isn't something to celebrate.
But there's an enormous difference between saying Oakland has too much violent crime and saying Oakland is more violent than ever.
The second statement simply isn't true.
Oakland recorded its lowest number of homicides since 1967 in 2025, according to both the City of Oakland and Associated Press.
AP's analysis puts Oakland at 57 homicides in 2025, down from 118 in 2023 — essentially cutting the city's homicide total in half in two years. Associated Press
The City of Oakland says that since reinvigorating its violence-reduction strategy in early 2024, homicides and shootings declined 49 percent in two years. City of Oakland
Think about that for a second.
Lowest since 1967.
The Summer of Love was happening across the Bay the last time Oakland had this few homicides.
This doesn't mean Oakland suddenly became Walnut Creek.
It means Oakland became considerably safer while half the internet became convinced it had transformed into the Strait of Hormuz.
Part of the problem is that humans are absolutely terrible at measuring danger.
We don't experience crime statistically. We experience it emotionally.
One murder happens three blocks from your apartment and you're going to remember it. You aren't going to wake up the following morning thinking, Well, statistically speaking, the rolling twelve-month homicide average remains encouraging.
You're going to think, Holy shit, somebody got murdered three blocks away.
That's completely reasonable.
But now add Citizen alerts, Nextdoor, Instagram, TikTok, X, Reddit, and local television news.
You also have local rappers claiming to have killed everyone in the entire Bay Area twice.
Thirty years ago, somebody getting their window smashed six neighborhoods away probably never entered your consciousness.
Today you can watch the security footage while taking a shit.
Then you can watch it again from another angle.
Then someone reposts it.
Then a local crime account posts it.
Then somebody with an American flag in their username who lives in Arizona explains that this is what happens when communists take over California.
By lunchtime you've experienced the same car burglary six times.
Your brain interprets that as six crimes.
Whenever you point out declining crime statistics, someone inevitably responds with an anecdote.
"Well my friend's catalytic converter got stolen."
That sucks.
It also isn't a statistical methodology. I’ve been a victim of car burglaries in both San Francisco and Oakland. That doesn’t mean crime isn’t decreasing. Stats don’t orbit you.
Crime declining doesn't mean crime disappeared. There are still dead human beings and devastated families. Nobody should look at a falling homicide graph and start popping champagne. Also we should never tell someone who has lost a family member to urban crime with the smugness of the cringest redditor in the world that crime is down and they’re being hysterical.
The point is that a massive decline in homicide is a massive decline in homicide.
You cannot spend years demanding that politicians reduce crime and then, when crime dramatically declines, simply refuse to acknowledge it because acknowledging improvement conflicts with your preferred narrative.
And this isn't exclusively a Bay Area phenomenon.
California recorded 1,374 homicides in 2025, down from 1,666 in 2024 — a 17.5 percent decline, according to the California Department of Justice.
Adjusted for population, California's homicide rate dropped 18.6 percent, from 4.3 homicides per 100,000 people in 2024 to 3.5 in 2025. That 3.5 homicide rate was a record low, according to the California Department of Justice.
Violent crime statewide also fell 10.2 percent in 2025, from 480.3 crimes per 100,000 residents to 431.1, according to California DOJ.
And here's where the whole "California has never been more dangerous" argument becomes especially stupid.
California's violent-crime rate was 1,103.9 per 100,000 residents at its 1992 peak. In 2025, it was 431.1. California Department of Justice
So when your uncle on Facebook tells you California has never been more dangerous, he's not just slightly wrong.
He's living in a completely different statistical universe.
Yesterday I pointed out the Bay Area is way safer than the media makes it out to be. It went super viral. It got 200k views in less than 24 hours and was even reposted by Boots Riley. But most of the traffic was to tell me that Bay Area crime is worse than ever and that I’m a ‘libtard.’
Which is a perfect illustration of how San Francisco might be the greatest example in America of the gap between perception and reality.
There are absolutely blocks in San Francisco where you'll encounter homelessness, addiction, public drug use and severe mental illness. The Tenderloin didn't magically turn into Disneyland because homicide declined.
But disorder and violent crime aren't synonyms.
Seeing someone smoking fentanyl on the sidewalk can make a neighborhood feel unsafe. Seeing tents, garbage or someone screaming at nobody can make a city feel like it's deteriorating.
Those are legitimate quality-of-life problems.
They just don't mean you're statistically more likely to be murdered.
Again: San Francisco recorded 28 homicides in 2025, a 20 percent decline from the previous year and the lowest total since 1954. San Francisco Police Department
And it wasn't just murder.
San Francisco robberies fell 24 percent. SFPD
Robberies involving firearms fell 45 percent. SFPD
Motor-vehicle theft fell 44 percent. SFPD
And perhaps most shocking to anyone whose entire understanding of San Francisco comes from viral security-camera footage, car break-ins fell 43 percent. SFPD
Those aren't numbers from some nonprofit whose executive director owns a "Defund the Police" tote bag. They're numbers published by the fucking police department.
At some point reality has to matter. I think that's the uncomfortable part.
Crime isn't merely a public-safety issue anymore. It's entertainment.
It's political content.
It's engagement bait.
Nobody goes viral posting security footage of someone successfully purchasing toothpaste.
Nobody starts a YouTube channel called People Had A Pretty Normal Day In Oakland Today.
Fear has an algorithmic advantage.
And the Bay Area is uniquely valuable because San Francisco and Oakland already exist as political symbols. To some people, they're not cities filled with hundreds of thousands of mostly normal people going to work, buying groceries, walking their dogs, and complaining about rent.
They're arguments.
San Francisco represents liberalism.
Oakland represents progressive criminal-justice reform.
So every robbery becomes evidence in a national political debate while the millions of completely uneventful human interactions occurring around it become invisible.
None of this means we should stop caring about crime.
Oakland should want fewer homicides.
San Francisco should want fewer robberies.
We should demand improvement.
But when improvement actually happens, we should probably acknowledge that too. Because right now we're living through one of the strangest contradictions in modern Bay Area history:
People are increasingly convinced they're living through an unprecedented crime wave at precisely the moment San Francisco and Oakland are recording homicide totals they haven't seen since 1954 and 1967, respectively. SFPD | City of Oakland
The Bay Area isn't crime-free.
It isn't perfectly safe.
It never has been.
But if you're waiting for the statistics to finally confirm that San Francisco and Oakland have become the apocalyptic hellholes you've been hearing about online, I have some unfortunate news.
The numbers are moving in the opposite direction.
