Name: San Francisco’s crime rates shifted dramatically in 2020. Five charts show what’s going on
Brand: sfchronicle.com
SKU: sfchronicle-com-193
Availability: OnlineOnly

critic

San Francisco’s crime rates shifted dramatically in 2020. Five charts show what’s going on

preview

This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigateIn January, former S.F. mayoral candidate Richie Greenberg began a Change.org petition to recall San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin.“Our beloved city has seen an astronomical increase in crime, even under COVID-19 restrictions,” . “In 2020, violent crime, home invasions, rampant and unchecked drug dealing and business property theft have turned our city upside down.”The petition has garnered nearly 15,000 signatures, suggesting that others may also believe that San Francisco’s crime rates spiked dramatically in 2020.But a look at the data shows that while San Francisco’s crime rates did deviate from previous trends in 2020, most types of violent crime actually plummeted — and all violent crime rates remain near their lowest levels since 1975. Further examination of crime trends across the U.S. suggests that the pandemic has had a much larger impact on crime in San Francisco than the election of Boudin.The Chronicle gathered data from the San Francisco Police Department’s , which reports crimes per month according to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting Standard. The data isn’t perfect — for instance, an incident with multiple charges will have only its most serious charge counted, and the Bureau of Justice Statistics — but it provides a solid look at year-over-year trends.According to our analysis, crime rates in San Francisco steadily declined from 2017 to 2019. In the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, and Boudin’s first year as district attorney, some of these rates declined more sharply while others reversed course. Burglaries went up by more than 46%, and motor vehicle thefts increased by 22%.But rapes, assaults and robberies — all designated violent crimes according to the FBI — went down, as did larceny thefts, which are considered property crimes. The FBI defines larceny theft as taking someone’s property. The crime becomes a burglary if it involves the “unlawful entry of a structure,” and a robbery if it involves the use of force or the threat of force.And while homicides increased compared with 2019, they remained below 2017 levels. We chose 2017 as the benchmark for our data because it’s the earliest year available on the SFPD’s website.2020’s increase in homicides also doesn’t seem extraordinary considering that in 2019, the city had just 41 — , when San Francisco had .“In many parts of the country, and we’ve seen it in some California cities as well, including Sacramento and L.A., we’ve seen an increase in homicides,” Magnus Lofstrom, a policy director and senior fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California, told The Chronicle. “That’s something we haven’t seen a notable increase of in San Francisco.”Nationwide, for cities with populations between 500,000 and 1 million (San Francisco’s is about 880,000), murder rates spiked 26.5% in the last quarter of 2020 compared with the same period in 2019; aggravated assaults also surged.Jeff Asher, a crime analyst based in New Orleans, found that murders in metropolitan areas nationwide had in 2020 compared with 2019. In contrast, San Francisco went from 41 to 48 homicides from 2019 to 2020, a 17% increase. And the city’s 2020 murder rate was still 15% lower than in 2017.The recent decline in murder rates is just one part of a decades-long steady decrease in all forms of violent crime in San Francisco. From 1975 to 2015, homicides in the city decreased by 70%, rapes decreased by 50%, robberies decreased by 51% and aggravated assaults decreased by 24%, according to FBI data collected by the .It’s also not unique to San Francisco: The decline of violent crime since the 1970s has been well documented nationwide. Researchers are still trying to pinpoint why this decline has occurred.“There’s a whole bunch of ideas, from (an increasing number of) police officers all the way to reducing (levels of) lead,” Asher told The Chronicle. Lofstrom added that some studies have shown that each additional police officer prevents about .But one thing is clear, according to Asher: “It’s not increased incarceration that drove lower rates.” For instance, California’s have decreased substantially since 1996; its .Lenore Anderson, chief executive and president of the criminal justice reform organization Californians for Safety and Justice, said crime rates are largely determined by environmental factors like mental health, substance abuse and economic declines — like last year’s pandemic-driven recession.Updated to include drought zones while tracking water shortage status of your area, plus reservoir levels and a list of restrictions for the Bay Area’s largest water districts.“Criminologists and researchers will point to a variety of factors when we think about crime trends,” Anderson said. Aside from policing initiatives, “none of the factors they typically point to have anything to do with criminal justice policy.”That includes the District Attorney’s Office, in San Francisco and elsewhere. “I think that there’s a way in which the debate on crime policy gets so politicized so quick around individual elected officials or individual cases, when the truth is, there’s a much bigger gap that exists, which is the lack of attention paid to real crime prevention in the first place,” Anderson said.Take Sacramento, a city about 90 miles from San Francisco with a similar-size population. Sacramento takes a more traditional approach to prosecutions and has been endorsed by numerous law enforcement associations in the region. According to FBI crime data, the city saw assaults and homicides increase in 2020, while robberies and most property crimes decreased.Lofstrom said it’s difficult to tell why changing crime patterns looked so different in San Francisco and Sacramento last year. The one thing he’s sure of is that both the pandemic and, to a lesser extent, widespread protests after the death of George Floyd have altered normal patterns across the country.“What is clear is we’re talking about highly unusual events that wreaked havoc on our lives in many ways,” he said. “It’s not surprising that our crime rates reflect those things as well.”One possible factor behind San Francisco’s stark decline in most violent crimes last year, he said, was that the city’s large commuter population declined considerably as many knowledge workers performed their jobs at home — a factor that probably also affected crime in Sacramento.“There were simply fewer people in the city of San Francisco compared to before the pandemic,” Lofstrom said. Such a decrease could naturally lead to declines in crimes that require both parties to be physically present, like assaults and rapes; meanwhile, higher unemployment rates could motivate people to commit more property crimes like burglaries and car thefts.Susie Neilson is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: Twitter:Updated to include drought zones while tracking water shortage status of your area, plus reservoir levels and a list of restrictions for the Bay Area’s largest water districts.

This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigateIn January, former S.F. mayoral candidate Richie Greenberg began a Change.org petition to recall San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin.“Our beloved city has seen an astronomical increase in crime, even under COVID-19 restrictions,” . “In 2020, violent crime, home invasions, rampant and unchecked drug dealing and business property theft have turned our city upside down.”The petition has garnered nearly 15,000 signatures, suggesting that others may also believe that San Francisco’s crime rates spiked dramatically in 2020.But...

public

Susie Neilson

Delivering the Bay Area’s best journalism every day. Subscribe and support the newsroom: http://SFChronicle.com/subscribe

San Francisco’s crime rates shifted dramatically in 2020. Five charts show what’s going on

No article scores yet.

CRITIC REVIEWS

PUBLIC REVIEWS