Why Is Overall Crime Down but Homicide Up in San Francisco?

Crime is down in San Francisco. So why is homicide up?

That is the paradox the city has to answer. In 2025, San Francisco recorded 28 homicides, the fewest since 1954. Robbery with a firearm fell 45%. Car break-ins fell 43%. That was real progress, and it did not happen by accident. The city’s moderate coalition won elections, reset priorities, and forced public safety back into the center of local government. SFPD reported the 2025 decline here.

Then 2026 started moving in the opposite direction on the one number nobody can spin away.

By mid-May, San Francisco had already recorded 17 homicides, roughly double the pace from the same point in 2025. Yet the broader crime picture is still improving. Property crime is down sharply. Robberies are down. Car break-ins are way down. The city is not seeing a generalized crime wave. It is seeing a homicide-specific failure. NBC Bay Area reported on the city’s 17th homicide here.

That breaks both lazy narratives. The “San Francisco is dangerous again” crowd is wrong because most crime is falling. The “everything is fine” crowd is wrong because dead people are not a vibes problem.

Four months into 2026, San Francisco had 14 homicides, nine involving guns, and city leaders were already calling for a ceasefire. KQED covered the ceasefire call here.

The real story is that a series of statewide court decisions, compounded by institutional failures outside any one local office, has left San Francisco with fewer tools to hold high-risk defendants before trial, right as the city is trying to understand why fewer crimes are producing more deaths. Here are the five failures.

Failure 1: The bail ruling that narrowed the DA’s playbook

The legal chain starts before 2026. In In re Humphrey, the California Supreme Court held that courts cannot keep people in jail before trial simply because they cannot afford bail. In In re Harris, the court tightened what trial courts must actually find before denying bail in serious cases. Then, on April 30, 2026, In re Kowalczyk went further: if judges use money bail, it generally has to be reasonably attainable, and outright no-bail detention remains limited to narrow constitutional categories.

That matters because Jenkins was not relying on arbitrary high cash bail as a public safety strategy. Her office was using the lawful tools available to prosecutors to seek pretrial detention for defendants they argued posed the greatest risk, including repeat offenders. Kowalczyk narrows those tools outside the listed constitutional detention categories, including certain violent felonies and sexual assault offenses.

The Los Angeles Times reported that Kowalczyk motions quickly began flooding California courts, with judges forced to revisit detention decisions and prosecutors warning that repeat offenders were being released without bail. Jenkins called the ruling devastating.

The caveat is important: there is not yet a confirmed bail-release-to-homicide link in any individual 2026 San Francisco homicide case. We should not pretend there is.

But the structural point stands. The DA’s office is now trying to fight 2026 gun violence with a pretrial detention toolkit the Supreme Court just narrowed through no fault of local prosecutors.

Failure 2: The juvenile justice black box

California closed the Division of Juvenile Justice on June 30, 2023 and transferred the remaining youth to counties. The state shifted responsibility for its most serious young offenders downward, then made it harder for the public to understand what happened next. CDCR described the final DJJ transfers here.

California DOJ data show juvenile homicide arrests rose from 68 in 2019 to 124 in 2024, while adult-court transfers for juveniles fell sharply.

But in individual cases, juvenile records are sealed. That protects minors for good reasons. It also means the public often cannot know whether a young homicide suspect had prior arrests, prior weapon contacts, prior probation failures, or prior opportunities for intervention.

That is not a small transparency problem. It is the whole ballgame.

In San Francisco, the Board of Supervisors needed formal oversight just to drag basic information out of the city’s own juvenile justice system. Meanwhile, Juvenile Hall remains open years after supervisors voted to close it, costing roughly $543,000 per detained youth per year. GrowSF has the cost breakdown here.

The city is spending luxury-college money per youth and still cannot tell the public, in a clean, accountable way, whether the system is preventing the next Jayda Mabrey case.

Failure 3: The machine gun in your pocket

A Glock switch is small enough to fit in your hand and can turn a semiautomatic pistol into a machine gun. Federal officials say a converted pistol can fire up to 1,200 rounds per minute. ATF has described the danger of conversion devices here.

This is the technology piece of the homicide paradox. If the number of shootings is flat but more victims are dying, one obvious place to look is lethality: faster fire, more rounds, worse wounds, less time for anyone to survive.

ATF data show machine-gun conversion device recoveries and traces jumped from 658 in 2019 to 5,816 in 2023, a 784% increase. These devices are small, cheap, and increasingly common nationally. ATF’s trafficking report is here.

California has tried to close parts of the legal gap. AB 383, effective January 1, 2026, expanded firearm restrictions for certain minors adjudicated for serious or violent offenses. The fact that the state was still closing juvenile firearm loopholes in 2026 is itself the story. AB 383 is here.

San Francisco does not need a massive increase in total shootings to get a homicide spike. It needs a small number of young, impulsive, armed people with more lethal hardware.

That appears to be exactly the risk profile now.

Failure 4: The courts, the DA, probation, and police are not one system

San Francisco has pieces of the answer scattered everywhere.

SFPD has shooting data. The DA has charging and detention data. Probation has juvenile supervision data. Courts have bail and release decisions. State agencies have juvenile realignment data. None of it is integrated in a way that lets the public answer the obvious question: what failed before the body dropped?

This is the quiet failure underneath every public safety debate in San Francisco. The city can argue endlessly over ideology because nobody can produce the integrated timeline.

Was the suspect previously arrested? Was a weapon involved? Was the case diverted? Was probation supervising them? Did a judge release them? Did a program touch them? Did anyone follow up? Did any agency warn anyone else?

For adults, some of that data is hard to get. For juveniles, much of it is sealed. For courts, much of it is fragmented. For elected officials, the incentives are obvious: talk about “root causes” or “accountability,” but avoid building the dashboard that would show exactly where responsibility sits.

If the moderate coalition wants to keep public safety gains, this is the next fight. Not slogans. Integration.

Failure 5: City Hall is still debating symptoms while the mechanism is changing

The homicide spike is not proof that San Francisco’s public safety reset failed. It is proof that the reset is incomplete.

The first phase was obvious: voters threw out the people and policies that normalized disorder. That helped produce the 2025 crime drop.

The next phase is harder. It requires asking why fewer crimes can coexist with more killings. That means looking at pretrial release, juvenile supervision, firearm lethality, sealed records, and interagency data, all at once.

Nobody in government is connecting the whole chain.

That is how you get a city where crime is down, homicides are up, and every faction can cherry-pick the statistic it wants.

San Francisco does not need another round of “tough on crime” versus “everything is fine.” It needs a homicide audit: A real case-by-case, system-by-system review of every 2026 killing. This means looking at prior contacts, release decisions, juvenile history where legally reviewable, weapons, switches, supervision, warrants, and missed interventions.

DA Brooke Jenkins is also holding a Zoom town hall on Tuesday, June 9 at 6 PM to explain the new Kowalczyk pretrial release ruling and what it means for public safety. For anyone trying to understand one piece of this puzzle, that is a good place to start. Register here.