The Bay Area’s three largest cities continued to see drops in homicide in 2025, each of them hitting decadeslong lows, the Chronicle found.
San Francisco and Oakland saw particularly sharp declines. San Francisco’s 28 homicides in 2025 were the fewest since 1954, according to a Chronicle analysis of police department and FBI data, and Oakland’s 57 killings were the fewest since 1967.
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San Jose, which typically sees fewer homicides than San Francisco and Oakland, still saw a noteworthy drop: Its 26 total killings were the lowest number since 2010.
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The Bay Area drops, which build on decreases in killings in 2024, are part of a nationwide trend. Homicides across the country in 2025 probably had the largest one-year drop ever recorded — the third straight year setting such a record, according to crime analyst Jeff Asher. Several other cities are likely to hit the same kind of historic lows as San Francisco and Oakland, he found, including Baltimore, Detroit, New Orleans and Philadelphia. And smaller cities are seeing improvements too: East Palo Alto, for example, finished the year with no killings at all for the second time since 2023.
The declines show “tremendous progress that should be celebrated,” he wrote, while acknowledging that the thousands of homicides across the country each year are still far too many…