Analysis | June 3, 2026

Bay Area residents felt the drop in crime last year

By Danny Wessler

Every year, the Silicon Valley Poll takes the pulse of residents in five Bay Area counties, asking about issues affecting their communities and quality of life. Typically, concerns for the cost of living, housing, homelessness, and crime dominate the results.

While crime remains a widespread concern, respondents to the 2025 Silicon Valley Poll, fielded in August 2025, rated it notably lower than the previous year. In 2025, 72% of Bay Area residents described crime as at least a “serious problem” in their community, an 11-point drop from 83% in 2024. This represented the largest year-over-year shift among all issues measured in the poll, moving crime from the fifth to the ninth most serious concern in just one year, behind issues such as childcare costs, traffic, inequality, and low wages.

Notably, the drop in concern over crime was evident across all five counties surveyed rather than concentrated in a single part of the Bay Area. The share of residents rating crime as a serious problem fell by 14 percentage points in Santa Clara County, 10 points in San Mateo County, 9 points in both Alameda and Contra Costa counties, and 7 points in San Francisco.

The obvious question is whether this shift reflected a real change in conditions across the Bay Area. Did crime actually drop enough for people to feel a difference or was this just statistical noise?

Crime statistics from the California Department of Justice and local police departments provide a clear answer.

Looking across the same five-county region covered by the Poll, reported crime rates in the Bay Area fluctuated within a relatively narrow range between 2015 and 2019 before falling sharply in 2020 during the pandemic. Crime rates then rose steadily over the following three years, reaching their highest level in nearly a decade by 2023. At its peak, the region’s crime rate was 12% higher than its pre-pandemic average, driven largely by increases in reported shoplifting (+34%), motor vehicle theft (+56%), and assault (+99%). This post-pandemic spike in crime became a frequent subject of local and national news coverage, particularly in San Francisco.

In 2024, however, the trend reversed. Crime rates fell 15% year-over-year, returning to levels more consistent with — and slightly below — the pre-pandemic average.

While comparable data covering the entire region is not yet available for 2025, preliminary crime statistics from police departments in the Bay Area’s largest cities can provide an early indication of whether the decline observed in 2024 represented a sustained drop in crime rates or just a single year of improvement.

The early evidence is striking: reported crime in San Jose and San Francisco fell significantly across most major categories, often by double-digit percentages.

In San Francisco in particular, robbery and burglary fell by more than 20%, while car theft declined by 43%. The San Francisco Police Department announced at the beginning of the year that the homicide rate had reached a 70-year low.

While these data are preliminary and not representative of the entire Bay Area, they suggest that the drop in crime rates in 2024 continued into 2025, pointing to a region that may actually be safer today than it was before the pandemic.

This is good news for residents and instructive for policymakers. The Silicon Valley Poll detected something real: Bay Area residents reported feeling less concerned about crime at a time when crime rates were actually falling across much of the region — in some places quite sharply.

While perception and reality do not always align, comparisons like this demonstrate the value of measuring both. Public opinion can provide an early signal of change before it is fully reflected in official statistics, while official statistics can help contextualize and validate shifts in public opinion. In this case, crime statistics help us understand what happened, and the Silicon Valley Poll helps us understand whether — and how — Bay Area residents experienced it.

The next Silicon Valley Poll will be fielded in August and released in early October. As conditions across the region continue to evolve, the Poll will help track not only what is changing in the Bay Area, but also how residents are experiencing those changes.

For more historical data on crime in the Bay Area — along with many other topics — please visit our regional data hub, siliconvalleyindicators.org.

About the Author

Danny Wessler is a senior researcher at Joint Venture Silicon Valley. You can learn more about Danny on his bio page.