For months we’ve seen glowing reports about how crime in Oakland has gone down. The latest was from over the weekend: “SF, Oakland see fewest homicides since Cold War era”
It’s good news for those of us who live in Oakland. Good news, too, for Barbara Lee, who can brag about it and imply that she, and her progressive colleagues who control power in Oakland, are the reasons Oakland is no longer the violence capital of the U.S.A. Lee credits initiatives such as Operation Ceasefire and the city’s Department of Violence Prevention for the statistical decline.
However, there’s an inconvenient fact standing in the way of this claim: Violent crime is down all over the country, not just in Oakland. Homicides in the top 30 cities was down 17 percent from 2024 to 2025. So were aggravated assaults, including gun assaults and sexual assaults. Robbery fell by 20 percent and carjackings by 24%. Residential burglaries, larcenies and shoplifting all saw double-digit decreases. From coast to coast, crime is plunging although, as I’ll make clear, nobody knows why.
As the Council on Criminal Justice, a nonpartisan think tank funded by some of the biggest philanthropies in the country, notes, “This is…a time when greater research is warranted to better understand the changing crime landscape and craft effective crime control approaches for today and the future.” In short, no one quite understand why crime goes up or down, from one year to the next. Explanations are always ex post facto.
Lots of things run in cycles. Humans love to impute reasons for them. The truth is, nobody really understands why crime runs in cycles. It tends to spike, in our country, during the summer, but that’s not hard to figure out: people are outdoors more, including at night. Not even hardcore thugs like bipping cars when it’s eight below zero, but give them a 78-degree night and they’re off to the races.
But aside from that, “There is no universally accepted explanation for why crime rates are falling,” explains Wikipedia. In a New Yorker piece, the reporter Adam Gopnik terms this “the great crime decline,” although he borrows this from a book (by Patrick Sharkey) whose full title, “Uneasy Peace: The Great Crime Decline,” suggests that the great decline may be a temporary lull in an otherwise perpetual cycle of violence.
Sharkey himself attributes the decline to “hard work by residents, organized into community groups and block clubs, that transformed urban neighborhoods.” This is a feel-good explanation: the harassed folks who live in crime-ravaged neighborhoods finally got together and figured out a way to combat crime, house-by-house, child by child. This conforms to Barbara Lee’s interpretation that violence prevention efforts, spurred by the city government but spread down and laterally to churches, nonprofits, community groups and schools, have finally taken hold. What this theory fails to explain, though, is that we know (or are pretty sure) that crime will surge again in the future.
I don’t mean to sound defeatist. It’s just that we’d be foolish to anticipate a new era of kumbaya, in Oakland or anyplace else. We have to be prepared for the time when crime roars back with all its evil malevolence. How to prepare for it? By having a strong police force. It would be foolhardy for progressives to argue—as they will--that, now that crime is back to manageable levels, we can afford to defund the police. The time to buy insurance—fire, earthquake, flood—is before you need it, so that it will be there when you’re desperate. Once the disaster hits, it’s too late for insurance, as we found out the hard way over the last ten years.
So let’s have a strong police force now!
Steve Heimoff