Oakland’s crime rate, consistently higher than the Bay Area’s other big cities, has surged since the COVID-19 pandemic, while the rates in San Francisco and San Jose have leveled off, an analysis of California Department of Justice data shows.
The data presents a striking contrast between the Bay Area’s biggest cities at a time when crime has become a growing concern across the region. An August poll by the Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies found voters statewide are lining up 2-to-1 to support a November ballot measure to toughen penalties for repeat theft and drug offenses, which is backed by the mayors of San Francisco and San Jose.
A look at 20 years worth of state justice department crime data shows Oakland’s rate of reported crimes per 100,000 people has consistently surpassed that of San Francisco and San Jose. The figures also reveal that:
- Oakland’s overall 2023 crime rate was higher than at any time in the past two decades, up 100 percent since 2020, 56 percent since 2013 and 86 percent since 2003. Oakland’s 2023 violent crime rate was up 174 percent since 2020, 72 percent since 2013, and 150 percent since 2003. Oakland’s 2023 property crime rate was up 90 percent since 2020, 52 percent since 2013 and 72 percent since 2003.
- San Francisco’s overall 2023 crime rate has fluctuated, up 15 percent from 2020, down 16 percent from 2013, and up just 2 percent from 2003. San Francisco’s 2023 violent crime rate was up 16 percent from 2020, but down 27 percent from 2013 and 14 percent from 2003. San Francisco’s 2023 property crime rate was up 14 percent from 2020, down 15 percent from 2013 and up 4 percent from 2003.
- San Jose’s overall 2023 crime rate was as low as it’s been in 20 years, down 15 percent from 2020, 22 percent from 2013 and 12 percent from 2003. San Jose’s violent crime was up — 11 percent since 2020, 41 percent since 2013 and 27 percent since 2003 — but remains lower than San Francisco or Oakland. And San Jose’s 2023 property crime rate was as low as ever, down 19 percent since 2020, 30 percent since 2013 and 18 percent since 2003.
The Bay Area’s big cities combined total and property crime rates are higher than 20 years ago, though trending down, while violent crimes are lower but trending up.
It’s unclear why Oakland’s crime rate has diverged so sharply from those in San Francisco and San Jose, especially in recent years. In 2023, the number of Oakland car thefts was the highest in more than 20 years, increasing 114.5 percent from 2022 to 2023 — a rate of roughly one car stolen for every 27 residents.
That divergence in crime rates appears to be affecting the fortunes of the city’s leaders.
In Oakland, where business owners earlier this year threatened to withhold taxes in a strike protesting crime and blight, Mayor Sheng Thao faces a recall vote in November, as does Alameda County’s District Attorney Pamela Price.
In San Francisco, Mayor London Breed is battling to keep her job against competitive challengers in November, an effort that wasn’t helped by the shooting injury of 49ers football player Ricky Pearsall during a brazen daytime robbery over Labor Day weekend in the city’s Union Square shopping district.
In San Jose, Mayor Matt Mahan cruised to an easy re-election in March.
The Oakland mayor’s office and police department declined to comment on the recent surge in the city’s crime rate.
But Sgt. Huy Nguyen, president of the Oakland Police Officers’ Association union, blamed a lack of city and department leadership for allowing staffing shortages in the department and imposing policies that fail to hold criminals accountable, such as not chasing stolen vehicles.
“Crime increases because of the opportunities people have to realize that they can commit crimes and get away with it,” Nguyen said.
The Oakland police department has been under federal court monitoring since 2003 following civil rights lawsuits over a team of officers known as the “Riders” who were accused of brutality, costing the city $10 million in a settlement. The department has seen a succession of chiefs, most recently with Thao last year firing former Chief LeRonne Armstrong over his handling of misconduct investigations.
Yet city reports suggest others share the blame. An April report by the city auditor on why Oakland failed to meet a deadline to secure a state retail theft prevention grant last year said the mayor “could have exercised leadership” in seeking the grant.
San Francisco was among the cities that did receive state retail theft prevention grant money a year ago. Its $15.3 million is earmarked to help deal with property crimes that have been a long-standing challenge in the city, said Evan Sernoffsky, director of strategic communications at San Francisco Police Department.
“We’ve taken aggressive approaches to reducing property crime that have shown positive results,” he said. “San Francisco, unfortunately, has been challenged by particularly auto burglaries because tourists come here. They visit the tourist sites, and a lot of times, they have luggage in their vehicles.”
Though San Francisco’s violent crime rate has been creeping up in recent years, Sernoffsky noted that “generally speaking, San Francisco has always had very low violent crime rates compared to other major cities in the country.”
In San Jose, the 2023 overall crime rate is lower than 20 years ago, when a private statistics publisher hailed it as America’s Safest Big City. That mainly is due to a drop in property crimes — the violent crime rate is higher than 20 years ago, though still lower than San Francisco’s and one-seventh of Oakland’s rate.
San Jose police also received a state retail theft reduction grant, for $8.5 million. San Jose police noted the department’s transition, along with others, to a different statewide crime reporting system complicates comparisons from 2022 to 2023.
And Mayor Mahan has taken leadership in urging passage of the November ballot measure, Proposition 36, to toughen penalties for repeat property crime and drug offenders. The initiative would modify a measure voters passed 10 years ago, Proposition 47, that lowered penalties for property and drug crimes to reduce prison crowding.
Proposition 36 critics have pointed to declining crime statistics overall to suggest such a measure isn’t needed, and risks increasing the prison population.
“By most accounts, the effects of Prop. 47 were quite positive and did not have the effect of increasing crime,” said Jack Glaser, a criminal justice and public policy professor at UC Berkeley.
But others counter that the crime rates reflect only what victims report to police, which doesn’t always happen with lower-level drug and theft offenses that are lower priorities for police, especially with the consequences reduced.
George Fisher, a criminal law professor and the co-director of the Criminal Prosecution Clinic at Stanford University, said victims are not motivated to report crimes if they don’t believe police will act, and victim surveys present a truer picture in those cases.
Fisher has some theories of why Bay Area cities’ overall crime rate has risen since 2020. With the COVID-19 pandemic, “people were generally not out on the streets in the same way as before, and those who were on the streets to commit crimes would have been a little more apparent and easy to catch.”
In addition, outrage over the 2020 video-recorded police killing in Minnesota of George Floyd — the officer who led his arrest for using allegedly counterfeit money was convicted of murder — made officers wary of making arrests for minor offenses, Fisher said.
“Nationwide, police agencies were demoralized and saw little benefit in making arrests except in the most serious of crimes,” Fisher said.
But those factors would affect city police departments equally and would not explain the stark differences between the crime rates in Oakland, San Francisco and San Jose.
The Oakland police association’s Nguyen said “there’s poor leadership in the Oakland Police Department, and it is a lack of leadership within the city, leadership that is willing to take a stance on supporting the police department.”
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