Crimes across the city of San Diego, including homicides, sexual assaults, and thefts, fell by nearly 3 percent in 2023, mirroring a continuing return to lower pre-pandemic crime levels locally and across the nation.
At a news conference Tuesday, Police Chief David Nisleit and Mayor Todd Gloria applauded the drop, crediting policing strategies such as large-scale operations and a focus on gun seizures. This is the second consecutive year the city has had a decline in overall crime.
“The men and women of the San Diego Police Department put on their uniforms every day with one goal in mind and that is keeping our community safe,” Nisleit said. “This is proven by the fact that San Diego remains one of the safest large cities in America year after year despite continued staffing shortages.”
However, a few crime types saw notable increases. Hate crimes surged almost 75 percent from 2022 to 2023, and animal cruelty jumped 500 percent, from four to 24 cases.
Gloria said city leaders have spent years encouraging people to speak out about hate crimes, which are chronically underreported.
“I’d like to think, on some level, that’s encouraging folks to come forward and report,” Gloria said. He added later, “I want to be a voice saying, ‘Not in San Diego, and if you think you can do this in our city, you will be held accountable.’”
This was the first year the department unveiled its annual crime statistics using the National Incident-Based Reporting System, also known as NIBRS. The system, run by the FBI, offers a more detailed breakdown of offenses when compared to the Uniform Crime Reporting Program’s Summary Reporting System, which offered a snapshot of only seven serious crimes. Both the FBI and law enforcement agencies began transitioning away from that system in 2021.
The new system provides statistics for more than two dozen crimes, broken down into three categories: crimes against persons, such as homicides and sexual assaults; crimes against property, including robbery, larcenies and vandalism; and crimes against society — drug offenses, prostitution and animal cruelty, for example.
This information is also available to view through the department’s new data dashboard, which shows information on crime categories and trends. The data is updated daily, allowing for a near real-time look of reported crimes citywide and drilled down to neighborhoods.
Several crime categories saw notable decreases from 2022 to 2023, including prostitution, which fell nearly 30 percent; burglary with a 16 percent decrease; sexual assault, which also dropped 16 percent; and homicide, which saw seven fewer cases, from 52 in 2022 to 45 in 2023.
Other major cities also saw decreases in homicides last year when compared to 2022 — one of several shifts indicating crime figures across the nation are returning to pre-pandemic levels.
In an analysis from the Council on Criminal Justice, 32 of 38 surveyed cities reported fewer homicides in 2023 than in 2022. Aggravated assaults, burglaries and larcenies also saw decreases.
“Overall, the findings suggest that most offenses in the sample cities are bending back toward 2019 levels, though some are not,” the report read. “Homicide, the most serious of the crimes, has yet to fully recede but, except in some cities, is trending in the right direction.”
Nisleit said several strategies helped fuel the city’s crime decreases, including the deployment of large-scale operations designed to crack down on a particular type of crime, such as Operation Better Pathways, which focused on human trafficking and sexual exploitation. The chief also pointed to his department’s focus on gun seizures. In 2023, officers confiscated nearly 2,000 illegal weapons, including 338 unserialized “ghost guns.”
Across San Diego, non-fatal shootings decreased by 23 cases — about 12 percent — as did crimes committed by gang members, which also fell 12 percent.
Nearly all forms of gang crime dropped last year except robberies, which remained the same from 2022 to 2023.
“I think life has returned to what is more like normalcy following the pandemic, but I know that we are still seeing the effects of law enforcement staffing issues, long-term mental health effects, as well as issues related to drug use and homelessness,” said Cindy Burke, the senior director of data science at the San Diego Association of Governments, or SANDAG.
Of the crimes that increased last year, hate crimes jumped from 38 in 2022 to 66 in 2023, department officials said. More than a third were racially motivated, but last year’s spike was largely fueled by cases involving religious bias, which quadrupled. Nearly half of those crimes had an antisemitic nexus.
Those kinds of incidents led Assemblymember Chris Ward and other local leaders, including Gloria, to get behind AB 3024, the Stop Hate Littering act, which would expand aspects of the Ralph Act, which states all California residents have the right to be free from any violence or intimidation by threat of violence because of personal characteristics such as race, religion or sexual orientation.
The bill would expand the definition of “intimidation by threat of violence” in that law to include littering acts, which would include instances when materials — such as antisemitic flyers — aim to terrorize owners of private property and a complaint is received and verified by local law enforcement or the attorney general’s civil rights department.
Bias against someone’s sexual orientation accounted for about 30 percent of hate crimes.
Animal cruelty, considered a crime against society in the new crime tracking system, also spiked, increasing from four cases in 2022 to 24 in 2023. Nisleit said police leaders plan to pay close attention to that category moving forward to determine whether last year’s figures were an anomaly.
Despite fluctuations over the last several years, San Diego remains at near-historic lows when compared with the rates seen in the 1980s and 1990s. Both violent and property crime rates have held fairly steady over the last decade.
