California records historically low homicide rates in 2025

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For the second year in a row, the governor Gavin Newsom celebrates California’s declining homicide rate, using it as a cudgel against his political enemies.

“Your state’s homicide rate is 117 percent higher than California’s,” he told her. said a congressman from Missouri who attacked Newsom on social media last summer.

Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders also caught his eye. “The homicide rate is literally double that of California,” he wrote on social networks at her.

What has become clear over the past three years is that homicides have decreased in Los Angeles and San Francisco, but also in Fresno Oakland, Richmond and Lodi.

“California cities witness historic low homicide rates,” Newsom announced. in his State of the State address earlier this month. “Oakland, lowest since 1967; Los Angeles, lowest since 1966; and San Francisco, lowest since 1954.”

After a peak in the early days of the pandemic, homicides have declined across the country.

The reason is much less clear. In forensic investigators’ terms, the answer is “multifactorial.”

Magnus Lofström, director of criminal justice policy at the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California think tank, said the spike in homicides during the pandemic may have resulted from disruptions in government operations: Schools closed, people lost jobs, community violence prevention programs and many essential public services were suspended, Lofström said.

The numbers for 2020 were shocking. After years of decline, California’s homicide rate increased 31% in 2020, reaching 5.5 homicides per 100,000 residents. In 2021, it rises again, reaching approximately 6 murders per 100,000 inhabitants.

But that trend began to reverse in 2022, when the number of homicides dropped 7%, then 14% in 2023 and another 12% in 2024. By the end of 2024, California’s homicide rate had dropped to 4.3 per 100,000 residents.

California’s population was around 20 million the last time the state recorded such a low homicide rate, half of what it is today.

At the same time that the number of murders is increasing, the percentage of cases solved by the police is decreasing. A police department’s “clearance ratio” compares the number of crimes reported to the number of arrests made.

Lofstrom said the statewide homicide rate was 64.7 percent in 2019 and dropped to 54.6 percent in 2021, though Rates can vary dramatically between police departments.

“What we’re seeing now in the data through 2024 is that we’re back over 64 percent in homicides solved,” Lofstrom said.

Half of the murders in Oakland

Oakland Mayor Barbara Lee said homicides are down, as are serious gun crimes, such as robberies and assaults with firearms. Oakland’s 67 homicides in 2025 are the lowest since 1967. In 2021, he registered 134 kills.

In Los Angeles, homicides are down more than 18 percent to 230 in 2025, according to analysis of LAPD data by the Los Angeles Times.

The numbers documenting the recent drop in homicide rates and the previous spike come with an important caveat: The way crime data is collected is inconsistent. Law enforcement agencies report directly to the FBI, which releases data each year under the Uniform Crime Reporting Program. The California Department of Justice produces state reports based on these numbers.

But not all departments report their statistics. And among those who do, some don’t report all of their data or the information is different. For example, some jurisdictions only count crimes that result in imprisonment.

California homicide data is provided by the state Department of Justice as of the end of the fiscal year in June, so the most recent statistics are from 2024. The Justice Department declined to provide CalMatters with updated numbers through 2025.

The drop in homicide rates was less pronounced in Orange and Ventura counties, which never saw a significant spike in the pandemic, and in Kern County, where The homicide rate remains the highest in the state.

Crime is down across the country

A long-term analysis of crime statistics, specifically homicide data, shows that the 2020-21 crime rate nationally and in California is still a fraction of its early 1990s highs. Simply accounting for year-over-year changes obscures a larger truth: Crime in the 2020s has declined significantly compared to the rate 20 or 30 years ago.

Like long-term declines in the homicide rate, California’s recent decline is part of a national trend. A report released on Thursday by the Criminal Justice Council, an independent think tank based in Washington, DC, found that in 35 major cities across the country, homicides decreased by 21% between 2024 and 2025.

When the FBI releases its crime statistics later this year, Criminal Justice Council researchers said in the report that the national homicide rate could drop to 4 per 100,000 people, which would be the lowest homicide rate ever recorded.

Shani Buggs, an associate professor at UC Davis and a public health researcher, said in the report that cities with significant declines in homicide rates tend to spend federal pandemic funds on violence prevention and have police departments that focus on people with multiple reports of violent crime, helping them quickly resume pre-pandemic release levels.

“We don’t have reliable multi-sector data or comparable contextual information available across jurisdictions to definitively identify — now or perhaps ever — what caused these declines,” Buggs said.