The desire for approval can blind one to the truth.
— The Emperor’s New Clothes, Hans Christian Andersen,1837
While City Hall continues to tout selective statistics and recovery narratives, a stark look at San Francisco County Jail bookings for May 2026 tells a different story — one of ongoing public safety failures, revolving-door justice, and a criminal element that treats arrest as a minor inconvenience (and for good reason).
A common way to avoid scrutiny of data is to post percentages rather than the actual numbers.
New data on statutes charged during jail bookings shows hundreds of Part I crimes — the FBI’s most serious offenses, including homicide, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny/theft, motor vehicle theft, and arson — alongside an overwhelming volume of lesser offenses such as drug crimes, warrants, and quality-of-life violations that continue to plague neighborhoods. The Voice analyzed the data for May 2026 and found that, despite the “Crime is down” refrain emanating from City Hall, violent crime remains alarmingly high.
– Homicides: Seven bookings under Penal Code 187(a)
– Robberies: 87 bookings under PC 211
– Aggravated Assaults (PC 245 series, including deadly weapon and great bodily injury assaults): Over 210 bookings
– Burglaries (PC 459): 206 bookings
These are not abstract numbers. Every one of these represents a victim — someone in San Francisco who was killed, robbed at gunpoint, beaten, or had their home invaded. Aggravated assaults and burglaries alone accounted for hundreds of serious felony charges in that single month.
Property crimes continue to fuel disorder
In May 2026, there were also 57 bookings for motor vehicle thefts (VC 10851). For grand theft, petty theft, receiving stolen property, and related larcenies, there were more than 280 bookings. The data suggests that San Franciscans are still dealing with smash-and-grabs, catalytic converter thefts, and organized retail theft rings.
The Part II flood: drugs, warrants, and repeat offenders
While Part I crimes represent the most serious incidents, they are dwarfed by the sheer volume of Part II offenses — misdemeanors, drug violations, resisting arrest, domestic violence, vandalism, and warrants. Notable statistics from the May 2026 booking data:
– Drug possession and sales: Hundreds of charges, including 349 under HS 11364(a) (paraphernalia) and 159 under HS 11351 (possession for sale).
– Resisting/obstructing officers: 154 under PC 148(a)(1)
– Warrants: en route felonies and misdemeanors alone exceeded 500, with hundreds more for local warrants.
– Vandalism (PC 594), domestic batteries, and probation/parole violations added hundreds of additional bookings.
This reflects what residents already know: the streets are still awash in fentanyl, open drug use, and repeat offenders who cycle through the system with little deterrence.
The $7 cheeseburger that changed state law
Despite years of policy experiments, from lesser penalties for theft under Proposition 47 to diversion programs to reduced prosecutions, the data show that San Francisco continues to generate a high volume of serious-crime bookings. The presence of dozens of homicide, robbery, aggravated assault, and burglary charges in a single month underscores that violent and predatory crime has not magically disappeared, no matter how officials spin it.
So, was crime really down 30 percent? Yes, if we don’t count those other 109,192 incidents.
The overwhelming number of drug, warrant, and low-level charges points to a failure of the “treatment over enforcement” model that has dominated for years. Arrests are happening, but the system appears ill-equipped to hold people accountable or break the cycle of addiction and recidivism. While the San Francisco Police Department is arresting and the district attorney’s office is charging, judges continue to release criminals back onto the streets, where they consistently reoffend.
Adding to the difficulty for local law enforcement is California’s new bail law, which emphasizes pretrial release and requires cashless bail whenever possible. The case that led to the California Supreme Court’s decision involved Gerald Kowalczyk, who used credit cards he found to buy a $7 cheeseburger in January 2021. Kowalczyk was a repeat offender with more than 60 convictions as well as a history of failing to adhere to his release conditions, causing a controversial pretrial algorithm to assign him the highest risk score on its scale. A San Mateo Superior Court judge set bail at $75,000, an amount Kowalczyk, homeless and unemployed, could not pay.
After the case bounced between courts, the California Supreme Court ruled that pretrial release is the “constitutional norm,” and detention is the exception, limited to specific cases such as violent felonies, sexual assault, or credible threats of serious harm. Unfortunately, California’s lax state laws mean almost nobody will be held in jail.
The Part I and Part II reporting dilemma
The FBI requires crime reporting from major police departments across the United States, including the most egregious offenses known as Part I crimes, such as homicide, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny/theft, motor vehicle theft, and arson. To comply, SFPD publishes a dashboard that shows these incidents according to a hierarchy rule, meaning only the most serious crime is counted per incident. For example, if someone is murdered during a robbery only the murder is recorded. This method of recording leads to an undercount of Part I incidents.
Part II crimes include all other offenses — simple assault, fraud, vandalism, disorderly conduct, and drug violations — that are not classified as Part I. The FBI only records Part II crimes if someone is arrested for them. If no arrest occurs, the offense is not reported. This means:
– Part II crime counts in FBI reports reflect police enforcement activity, not the total number of incidents.
– Part II crimes are not included in the FBI’s monthly Part I crime totals, which are the standard basis for national crime statistics.
– The FBI’s own methodology states that agencies submit only arrest data for Part II offenses, so they cannot be aggregated into the same “known to law enforcement” totals as Part I crimes.
In practice, this means SFPD’s FBI submissions will only show Part I crimes, and any Part II crime data must be obtained separately. To pseudo-comply, SFPD has a clearance rate dashboard. A common way to avoid scrutiny of data is to post percentages rather than the actual numbers. On SFPD’s clearance dashboard, they show Part I clearance but not Part II. Other criteria also blur the numbers. For instance, according to SFPD clearance dashboard standards, an arrest of someone determined to be the wrong person who is released without being charged by the district attorney is considered a clearance.
How Mayor Lurie got his famous ‘crime is down 30 percent’ talking point
On Jan. 9, 2026, Mayor Daniel Lurie announced that crime was down 30 percent in San Francisco. Leaving out the obvious (many crimes go unreported), SFPD also states that many incidents “leak in” over time. This happens for many reasons, such as people waiting a week or more to file a report, a sergeant needing a longer period to review a report, victims finding out their insurance company won’t accept a claim without a police report number, or SFPD’s policy not to respond to priority B/C calls for service.
If city officials want to have favorable crime statistics, it’s prudent to grab them quickly, and that’s exactly what Lurie did to come up with his 30 percent stat. However, you can’t blame Lurie alone. The police chief appears in front of the police commission two to three times per month, asserting that crime was down for yet another week in a row, but it’s really sleight of hand: every week he compares five days of crime with the prior seven days. Lurie knows this and captures a 5 percent crime reduction by seizing those early numbers. When Lurie made the 30 percent claim, the SFPD dashboard had 27,321 total incidents through Dec. 28, 2025. By Jan. 11, SFPD had revised the total 2025 Part I to 27,877, a 24.5 percent decrease from 2024. As of March 1, SFPD had revised the total 2025 Part I to 28,443.
Yes, you read that right — between Jan. 11 and March 1, 2025, a total of 566 crimes leaked in, so the number of crimes went up and the decrease was higher. Also not included in Lurie’s 30 percent? Those pesky Part II crimes.
SFPD maintains an incident database for public scrutiny and the media. Whenever you read a report in mainstream publications like the San Francisco Chronicle or the Standard, they are taking the numbers from that database verbatim. How does it work? Records requests for crime incidents from SFPD mean SFPD runs a query against the database. What they don’t mention is everything left out of the query.
Take a diversion. When someone goes to mental health or drug diversion, their crime is “put on hold” until they complete the program, upon which the crime is wiped from their record. SFPD also excludes ongoing investigations and juvenile crime from its database. How many youth crimes are excluded? We don’t know exactly because SPFD won’t say, but in a city where people under 18 historically (and conservatively) commit up to 8 percent of all crimes, the numbers could be significant.
To put our observations to the test, the Voice filtered 2024 and 2025 incidents from SFPD’s database, removed supplemental reports (also remember that we don’t know what’s actually been hidden), and got 174,599 incident records over those two years. Again, these are only reported crimes and crimes noted by SFPD. Taking the largest Part I numbers from 2024 and 2025, we got 65,407. That means there were over 109,192 incidents missing from the “crime is down” mantra. So, was crime really down 30 percent? Yes, if we don’t count those other 109,192 incidents.
It would have been more accurate for Lurie to say nearly 30 percent of the 37.5 percent of crimes that SFPD tracks are down. When San Franciscans blast Lurie on social media about the state of the streets and the crimes they see and experience, they’re referring to the other 62.5 percent of reported incidents not included in City Hall’s talking points. It’s hard not to get taken in by Lurie’s infectious cheerleading for the city we all love. And he’s correct — things are on the rise in San Francisco. Unfortunately, crime is one of them, and no amount of P.R. can hide the truth.
