The number of homicides handled by many large policing agencies is down across Southern California — mirroring a national trend experienced in big cities.
Some who study the crime cite changes in strategy and leadership as driving factors behind the decreases, while others warn that the figures are just a return to normal after a COVID-19 pandemic that caused insecurity and stress, most notably in impoverished areas.
“We should not be prepared to pat ourselves on the back,” said Frank Vram Zerunyan, a professor of the practice of governance at USC’s Sol Price School of Public Policy. “We want to reduce those numbers to the point where we feel more comfortable.”
Among local law-enforcement agencies, 2021 and 2022 were particularly deadly years, according to homicide numbers collected by the Southern California News Group. The San Bernardino Police Department has had perhaps the starkest decrease since 2022, cutting its homicide number by more than half.
Only a couple of agencies have seen increases since a few years ago, including the Orange County Sheriff’s Department. But even those fluctuations are low.
In 2024, the San Bernardino Police Department had 25 homicides, its lowest total since 1999, said Capt. Nelson Carrington, who said things changed after Darren Goodman was sworn in as police chief in mid-2022. Since then, the department has focused on “proactive enforcement” — including a pronounced zeroing in on taking guns off of the streets.
In 2023, the department seized 1,218 firearms, the captain said, the most in a calendar year. And homicides fell from 72 the year before to 36.
“We’ve been much more proactive about being transparent about what the department is doing for their community,” Carrington said. “We want them to know how they’re (officers) working for our city, gaining trust and buy-in — the community partnership — we really feel like it’s paid major dividends for our department.”
Through June, the Los Angeles Police Department was on pace to see its lowest annual homicide total in nearly 60 years, officials said. As of late August, the department had seen 57 fewer homicides than through the same period in 2024.
But some warn that there is no one major factor that leads to lower homicide numbers — other social and economic factors, they say, are usually at play.
Christopher Herrmann, an assistant professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, attributed the rises in 2020 and 2021 partly due to the stress of the pandemic – dealing with job insecurity, housing, food and healthcare worries – followed by George Floyd protests in 2020 that further strained the relationship between law enforcement and the public.
“There’s lots of evidence that shows that COVID did have a big impact — and a negative impact — on people’s mental health,” Herrmann said. “When they’re not going well, people react in a negative way.”
Miguel Quintana-Navarrete, an assistant professor of criminology at UC Irvine, said prior to the pandemic, violent crime in general had been declining for nearly 30 years.
“The pandemic was a shock to the system in a sense,” Quintana-Navarrete said. “Now it’s coming back down to the more-normal trends. This isn’t happening just in Southern California, this is happening across most bigger cities.”
In Riverside, Capt. Chad Milby said the department moved detectives from their normal positions to help with crowd control during protests. Those detectives have since returned and the department’s homicide numbers were cut in half from 22 in 2021 to 11 in 2023 and in 2024.
“Now we’re back and fully staffed in those (areas), which has ultimately led us to perform our mission better,” Milby said.
He added that advances in technology and a higher crime-solve rate have assisted in deterring violent crime.
But while the numbers are decreasing, some warn these are more a return toward pre-pandemic figures — and generally not record-setting lows.
When the numbers are high like they were in 2020 and 2021, “there’s nowhere for them to go but down,” Herrmann said.
The numbers are, however, much lower than what Southern California suffered in the 1980s and 1990s, they said. Some communities in the ’90s suffered run-away numbers of gang homicides; in Los Angeles alone, the number of homicides topped 1,000 a year early in that decade.
Zerunyan, who focuses on policy related to the law, said a substantial correlation exists between poverty and crime and that recent improvements in technology and policy have helped bring numbers down, but there’s still more work to do.
“Even one homicide is too many,” said Zerunyan, the USC professor. “It’s about a life. We need to be thinking of it that way.”
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