It’s a city in chaos, folks! The streets are bedlam! Billionaires think the president should call in the National Guard to calm things down! But, actually, crime continues to be down, and SF is on track to have yet another historically low homicide count.

San Francisco’s 2024 homicide rate was 35, which itself marked a 64-year low, and the lowest number of killings in the city since the Eisenhower administration. But things are looking even less violent here in 2025, with the Chronicle noting Tuesday that we could be on track for another historically low number — perhaps 27 by the end of the year. That would mark the fewest killings recorded here since 1954.

The SFPD’s crime dashboard shows that the city has had 22 homicides to date in 2025. That includes the father and two children killed in a gruesome murder-suicide last week in Westwood Park — some of the details of which we still do not know.

With just 10.5 weeks left in the year, if the current rate holds, the city would see another five (or so) homicides before the new year. That would match the homicide rate of 71 years ago — which itself was a low point for the 1950s, when the city would start to see homicides rise for a 20-year period, peaking in 1976 at 146.

Notwithstanding the uptick in violent crime that we saw during the pandemic, SF’s homicide rate has been trending generally downward since a high water mark in 2007, when the city saw 98 homicides.

As the Chronicle also notes, per-capita homicides have been trending downward in most of the nation’s large cities, with San Francisco’s 2024 rate among the ten lowest. In Los Angeles and Portland, where President Trump and other Republicans have tried to paint portraits of unrest and violence, homicides were down 26% and 51% respectively in 2024.

San Francisco, in fact, is seeing an overall drop across most categories of crime this year — though the SFPD dashboard does not track drug-related arrests. Assaults are down 14% compared to the same period last year, rapes are down 16.5%, and robberies are down 23%.

Burglary and larceny theft — the category in which car break-ins fall — are down 28% and 22.5% respectively in 2025.

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