Vol. I, No. 29 · San Francisco — Wednesday, August 26, 2026 · Price: cleared, allegedly

BY HAZEL WONG, NUMBERS DESK

Police call a crime “cleared” when they solve it: an arrest made, or a suspect named. A cleared case is a good outcome. It does not mean the stolen property came back. In 1985, San Francisco police cleared 8,386 of the 49,088 property crimes reported that year. That is one case solved for every six. In 2018, the last year the state published a San Francisco count and still the most recent figure eight years later, police cleared 3,235 out of 49,214. That is one in fifteen. Both figures come from a third-party mirror of the state’s own crime file, structurally consistent with how the state has always published it but not independently cross-checked against a second source tonight.

The crime itself did not go away. The count rose to a 33-year high of 57,562 in 1990, fell to a low of 32,365 in 2010, a 44 percent drop from that peak, then climbed back to 49,214 by 2018. Start to finish, the net change from 1985 to 2018 is roughly a quarter of one percent. The endpoints happen to match; the swing in between was real.

What collapsed is the solve rate. It fell from 17.1 percent in 1985 to 8.2 percent in 2005, rose a little to 9.9 percent in 2010, then fell again to 6.6 percent by 2018. The simplest excuse would be that police were buried under more cases. The numbers rule that out: by 2010 the caseload was down 34 percent, and the solve rate had still fallen from 17.1 percent to 9.9 percent. Something else changed, and the state’s own numbers cannot say what.

Violent crime tells a steadier story. Police solved 42.2 percent of violent crimes in 1985 and 33.9 percent in 2018, a real decline, but nowhere near property crime’s collapse. Homicides and robberies still draw a full investigation. Break-ins increasingly do not.

San Francisco’s own county-level count stops at 2018; the state has not published an update since. Its statewide count continues, and points the same direction. Across California, the solve rate for property crime (the state’s term is “clearance rate”) fell from 10.7 percent in 2019 to a low of 7.2 percent in 2022, then recovered only partway, to 9.8 percent, in 2024. Whatever is happening in San Francisco is not a local anomaly.

The pre-2019 numbers come from the state’s Criminal Justice Statistics Center, whose county-by-county file is not available for download on the agency’s current site within a normal deadline. This desk used a mirror of that same official series, published by the San Diego Regional Data Library and last updated in June 2020. Its structure and totals match how the state has always reported this file. The 2019–2024 statewide figures come straight from the state’s own current annual report.

Confidence is high on the numbers themselves: they are the state’s own count, collected the same way every year. That count came through a mirror this desk did not independently cross-check line by line tonight. Confidence is low on why the collapse happened. Staffing, a shift toward crimes with less physical evidence, and changed investigative priorities are all live theories in departments outside San Francisco; this desk has not yet tested any of them against San Francisco’s own budget and staffing record. That is next.