California’s radical trends demand new thinking about crime. Yet state leaders still debate crime like it’s 1990 or 1970.
“California suffers rising crime”? “More incarceration reduces crime”? “Young people commit more crime”?
These common assertions are not just false, they’re the opposite of today’s realities.
In fact, California’s violent and property crime rates have plunged to their lowest levels ever recorded in more than half a century of statewide records. Data from 82% of the state’s law enforcement jurisdictions, including all 15 of its major cities, project that violent crime will fall by 11% and property crime by 6% in 2025 from already low levels in 2024.
California’s record-low crime – including lower murder, robbery, burglary, larceny, and vehicle theft rates for 2025 than in 1960 – accompanies trends so surprising that most crime experts have no explanation for them.
The get-tough era.
Harsh policies are still pushed as solutions to crime even though they don’t work. From 1980 to 1995, California implemented a barrage of new crackdowns and expanded prison building, boosting the numbers of Californians incarcerated from 67,000 to 233,000.
Yet those 15 years uniformly display the highest rates of violent crime ever recorded. Violent felonies peaked in the early 1990s and didn’t start falling until juvenile justice and drug law reforms passed in the late 1990s and former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger halted new prison construction in the 2000s. Incarcerations peaked at 268,000 in 2007, then fell sharply.
Property crime peaked in the early 1980s and has fallen ever since, regardless of what criminal justice policies prevailed.
The reform era
Dramatic trends accompanied the criminal justice reform era, beginning in 2010 with Public Safety Realignment (AB 109), continuing with marijuana decriminalization, Proposition 47’s reduced penalties for low-level property and drug offenses, and Proposition 57’s expansion of parole opportunities.
The closures of 5 large prisons, all state juvenile facilities, and more than two dozen local juvenile halls and camps brought reductions of over 110,000 in jail and prison incarcerations from 2010 to today.
Crime generally fell during the reform era. After fluctuations during the COVID-19 pandemic, violent crime now stands at 9% and property crime at 30% below their 2010 levels. California and other states experienced large crime declines in 2024 and projected for 2025. No single policy change, including 2024’s Proposition 36, can explain this significant shift.
Demolishing traditional ideology
Today, California’s highest violent crime levels, including homicide, are not in its once-notorious big-cities, but in rural counties with conservative politics. Property crime rates remain lower in rural areas than in urban retail centers.
Why did crime fall to record low levels, and will it increase again in the future? Obsolete mindsets should give way to modern assessment.
The media and law enforcement still cling to old notions of “teenage super-predators,” and racial diversity fueling crime.
In fact, the growth and diversity of California’s young population (73% are youth of color) have accompanied record reductions in crime. The state’s youth show the nation’s largest declines in crime, including declines of nearly 75% in violent crimes, 95% in property crimes, and 90% in total criminal arrests over the last three decades.
Crime by youth plunged from 242,000 arrests in 1995 to just 33,000 in 2024. Youth incarcerations in state and local detention facilities fell from over 20,000 in 1995 to just 3,500 today.
The dramatic drop in youth offending has boosted the peak age for criminal arrest from 18 or 19 prior to 2000 to 32 today – a remarkable trend experts insisted was impossible.
What do these trends predict about future crime?
The biggest drop in crime rates (down a staggering 95% over the last generation) occurred among Californians under age 15, indicating that crime will remain low into the foreseeable future. Dramatically fewer youths getting arrested augurs fewer justice-involved adults tomorrow, a trend already happening in sharply reduced crime by young adults.
Mike Males is a senior research fellow at the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice.