California’s homicide rates drop to historic lows in 2025

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

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

Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders also caught his eye. “Your homicide rate is literally DOUBLE California’s,” he wrote to an address on social networks her.

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

“California cities hit record low homicide rates,” Newsom said in his State of the Union address earlier this month. “Oakland, lowest since 1967; LA, lowest since 1966; and San Francisco, lowest since 1954.”

After a spike in the early days of the pandemic, homicides are actually down across the country.

The reason for this is much less clear. In the parlance of crime researchers, the answer is “multifactorial.”

Magnus Lofström, criminal justice policy director 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 were closed, people were out of work, community-based violence prevention programs and many essential public services were on pause, Lofström said.

The numbers for 2020 were shocking. After years of decline, California’s homicide rate rose 31 percent in 2020 to 5.5 homicides per 100,000 people. In 2021, it rose again, to about 6 per 100,000 people.

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

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

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

Lofstrom said the nationwide homicide rate was 64.7 percent in 2019 and that it had dropped to 54.6 percent in 2021 — though rates can vary dramatically among police departments.

“What we’re seeing now in the data through 2024 is that we’re over 64 percent in terms of homicide permits,” Lofstrom said.

Oakland murders halved

Oakland Mayor Barbara Lee said homicides are down along with major gun crimes, including robberies and assaults with firearms. Oakland’s 67 homicides in 2025 are the lowest since 1967. 134 murders in 2021.

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

The numbers documenting the recent drop in homicide rates and the earlier spike come with a big asterisk: The way crime data is collected is inconsistent. Law enforcement agencies self-report to the FBI, which annually publishes data under the Uniform Crime Reporting Program. The California Department of Justice then produces statewide reports from those numbers.

But not every department reports its statistics. And among those who do, some don’t report all their data — or report the information differently. For example, some jurisdictions only count crimes that result in imprisonment.

California’s homicide numbers are 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 Department of Justice declined to provide CalMatters with updated numbers through 2025.

The decline in homicide rates was not as pronounced in Orange and Orange and Ventura counties, which never had a significant peak in the pandemic, and Kern County, where the homicide rate continues to be the highest in the state.

Crime is down across the country

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

As with the long-term decline in homicides, California’s recent decline is part of a national trend. A report released on Thursday by the Criminal Justice Council, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington, D.C., found that in 35 major cities across the country, homicides decreased by 21 percent 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 reductions in homicides tend to spend federal pandemic funds on violence prevention and have police departments that focus on people with repeat allegations 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.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and is republished under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives license.