L.A. on pace to see lowest homicide total in nearly 60 years as killings plummet
- - - L.A. on pace to see lowest homicide total in nearly 60 years as killings plummet
Libor JanyJuly 9, 2025 at 6:00 PM
A Los Angeles police officer holds up yellow crime scene tape after a double homicide shooting in Exposition Park last year. (Michael Blackshire / Los Angeles Times)
Homicides across Los Angeles fell by more than 20% in the first half of the year, leaving the city on pace to end 2025 with its lowest total for that crime category in nearly 60 years, according to an LAPD tally.
Although violent crime persists in parts of the city, homicides overall in L.A. have dropped to 116 through June 28, the most recent date for which reliable data were available, compared to 152 in the same period last year.
Homicides have been on a steady downward trajectory since 2021, when total killings eclipsed 400 amid the tumult of the COVID-19 pandemic. The falling homicide rate in the years since mirrors a national trend, with Baltimore, Detroit and other major cities recording similar declines.
Experts say the country may be in the midst of the sharpest decline in killings in history — one that can't be attributed to any single factor.
"What we’re seeing is a broader trend that goes over several years," said Charis Kubrin, a professor of criminology, law and society at UC Irvine. "We’re seeing homicide rates go down all across the United States."
The Los Angeles Police Department did not release homicide data in the 1970s, but it confirmed that the recent totals are on track for the lowest annual count since at least 1968.
Cities and unincorporated areas patrolled by the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department are also recording fewer killings. Through May 31, the most recent date for which data was published, those parts of the county had recorded 58 homicides. Over last year, 184 people were killed in areas that fall under the agency's jurisdiction, down nearly 100 from 2021.
The deflated crime numbers paint a decidedly different picture than the dystopian image of the city offered by President Trump and other senior U.S. officials as justification for the deployment of military troops in L.A. in recent weeks.
Areas in the city's more southern neighborhoods that have historically borne the brunt of L.A.'s violent crime trends have seen some of the most impressive turnarounds.
Take the LAPD’s 77th Street Division in South Los Angeles, which in years past has logged higher homicide tallies than the entire San Fernando Valley combined. But killings there dropped from a recent high of 63 in 2021 to 38 last year. The neighboring Southeast Division, which covers Watts and surrounding communities, saw its tally decrease by more than a third in that span.
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Kubrin and other researchers have long cautioned about reading too much into year-to-year crime data. She said the reasons for the improvements are likely rooted in the complicated and intertwined ways that cities have responded to the “stress, the political divisiveness and the economic downturn” since 2020.
“With all its diversity and challenges and issues, L.A. still reports lower homicide rates than other major cities," she said.
A theory that violence dips during economic boom times gained traction after studies found that high homicide counts of the early 1990s coincided with a recession, but a similar downturn in the mid-2000s didn't necessarily translate into more people being killed.
Conservatives point to mass tough-on-crime strategies, but Kubrin said other Western industrialized countries that lock up only a small fraction of the people as the U.S. also saw drops in crime.
The Trump administration has proposed slashing hundreds of millions in federal funding from school safety grants, youth mentoring programs and gang intervention networks, which research shows can help curb crime.
Jeff Asher, a leading expert in the field of criminology, deemed the recent period "the great murder decline," which he attributed to "strong investment in communities from private and public sources after the shock of the pandemic."
While the LAPD is already shrinking, some police critics continue to argue for shifting resources from the multibillion-dollar police budget to pay for programs that pull people out of poverty and provide them with stable income and housing.
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LAPD Deputy Chief Alan Hamilton told The Times that beefed-up police presence on city streets in response to recent emergencies has almost certainly had a deterrent effect that reduced killings, in addition to efforts by gang interventionists and social workers.
But Hamilton, who runs the department's detective bureau, warned that such gains could be eroded if the department continues to lose officers amid the city's ongoing fiscal crisis. The city could also see an increase during the hot summer months when bloodshed tends to spike, he cautioned.
“Obviously we flooded the streets during the fires and during the unrest,” he said. The department's strategy typically involves going after the small group of hardcore offenders driving most of the violence, an approach Hamilton said is paying off.
“I think we’re seeing the dividends of that, as opposed to casting a wide net,” he said.
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This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
Source: AOL General News
