Key findings include:

• Property crime rates have fallen by 53% since 1995. This decline continued steadily through the 2000s and 2010s.
• Property crime rates have fallen by 16% compared to 2009, the last year before California’s criminal justice reform era. This period includes marijuana decriminalization and legalization, Public Safety Realignment, Proposition 47, and Proposition 57.
• These trends may continue into 2024. The latest available data, which cover 48 California cities for the first three months of the year, show crime declines across almost every major crime category, including an 11% decline in theft and a 17% drop in burglary, compared to the first three months of 2023.
• Several factors complicate recent data reporting and may have inflated 2023’s already-low property crime statistics. These include the end of COVID-19 restrictions, which had temporarily suppressed most types of crime; a change in how police agencies report data to the FBI, which may have boosted rates for certain low-level offenses; and an effort by retailers and law enforcement interest groups to portray California as a hot-bed of retail theft, which may have affected reporting for certain property offenses, such as shoplifting.

Given the nature of crime statistics, certain crimes, cities, and years will always fluctuate. However, opponents of reform are deliberately falsifying crime issues. As the state has reopened after COVID-19 and shifted to a new statistics system that generally increases reported crime figures, California crime rates have remained near record lows.

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