Mission Local rebuts NY Post crime drop claim, cites homicide spike

A citywide crime drop can be real and still miss the point for a block in the Mission, where one more homicide changes how safe San Franciscans feel walking home. That is the credibility gap now driving the argument over whether the city’s safety story is being told honestly, or flattened into one headline number.

The dispute began with a New York Post framing that credited District Attorney Brooke Jenkins for a 54% crime drop, a narrative Mission Local pushed back on as too narrow and too tidy. San Francisco’s own numbers show why. The police department’s crime dashboard tracks Part I offenses, counts homicide by victims rather than incidents, and updates near-live as reports are modified. It also leaves out unfounded or unsubstantiated incidents, while monthly homicide totals sit in the department’s CompStat report, not the dashboard.

That matters because the city was coming off a historic low baseline. A San Francisco public-safety report said 2025 ended with 28 homicides, the fewest since 1954, while overall crime fell about 25%, violent crime fell 18% and property crime fell 27%. Those are the figures behind the broad claim that San Francisco got safer last year. But they do not erase what happened next.

By Feb. 18, a weekly SFPD citywide report showed six homicides year-to-date, compared with one at the same point the year before. By April 6, the count had climbed to 14 killings, nine of them firearm deaths. The latest year-to-date tally has reached 15 homicides. That is the number most likely to shape fear on the street, especially in neighborhoods that live with the city’s violence minute by minute, not as an annual average.

Nationally, the broader picture looks different. The Council on Criminal Justice reported in January that homicides in its 35-city sample were 21% lower in 2025 than in 2024, and that violent crime overall was at or below 2019 levels in those cities. Its researchers said 2025 U.S. homicide rates could end up near 4.0 per 100,000 residents, which would be the lowest ever recorded if national data confirm the trend.

San Francisco officials, including Mayor Daniel Lurie and SFPD leadership, have used the 2025 decline to argue their approach is working. Yet SFPD’s own 2025 annual report also says investigators cleared 34 homicides by arrest or other means, producing a 125% homicide clearance rate, a reminder that enforcement success and loss of life are not the same metric. The safer reading is not that one side is right and the other wrong, but that aggregate crime totals and homicide counts answer different questions, and only one tells families whether their city still feels dangerous.