Crimes across the city of San Diego, including homicides, sexual assaults and thefts, fell by nearly 3 percent in 2023, police said, mirroring a continuing return to lower pre-pandemic crime levels locally and across the nation.
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.
Nisleit said San Diego “remains one of the safest large cities in America year after year, despite continued [police] staffing shortages.”
However, some types of crimes had notable increases. Reports of hate crimes surged almost 75 percent from 2022 to 2023, and cases of animal cruelty jumped from four to 24.
Gloria said city leaders have spent years encouraging people to speak out about hate crimes.
“I’d like to think, on some level, that’s encouraging folks to come forward and report,” he said.
This was the first year the Police Department unveiled its annual crime statistics using the National Incident-Based Reporting System, or NIBRS. The system, run by the FBI, offers a more detailed breakdown of offenses when compared with the Uniform Crime Reporting Program’s Summary Reporting System, which offered a snapshot of only seven types of serious crimes. The FBI and other law enforcement agencies began transitioning away from that system in 2021.
The new system provides statistics for more than two dozen crimes, broken into three categories: crimes against a person, such as homicide and sexual assault; crimes against property, including robbery, larceny and vandalism; and crimes against society, such as drug offenses, prostitution and animal cruelty.
The information is available to view through the department’s new data dashboard on crime categories and trends. The data is updated daily, allowing for a nearly real-time look of reported crimes citywide and drilled down to neighborhoods.
Several types of crimes had 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, of which there were seven fewer cases — 45 in 2023 compared with 52 the year before.
Other major cities also saw decreases in homicides last year compared with 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 cities surveyed reported fewer homicides in 2023 than in 2022. Cases of aggravated assault, burglary and larceny also decreased.
“Overall, the findings suggest that most offenses in the sample cities are bending back toward 2019 levels, though some are not,” the report states. “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 San Diego’s crime decreases, including deployment of large-scale operations designed to crack down on particular types of crime, such as Operation Better Pathways, which focused on human trafficking and sexual exploitation.
The chief also pointed to the Police 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 , which also fell 12 percent, police said.
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, 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 anti-Semitic nexus, police said.
Those kinds of incidents led state Assemblyman Chris Ward and other leaders, including Gloria, to get behind Assembly Bill 3024, the Stop Hate Littering Act, which would expand aspects of the Ralph Act, which states that 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” to include instances when materials such as fliers aim to terrorize people 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 ed for about 30 percent of hate crimes, police said.
With the spike in cases of animal cruelty, Nisleit said police leaders plan to pay close attention to that type of crime moving forward to determine whether last year’s figures were an anomaly.
Despite fluctuations over the past several years, San Diego remains at near-historic lows when compared with the crime rates of the 1980s and ’90s. The rates of both violent and property crimes have held fairly steady over the past decade.
La Jolla crimes 2024
Here are the numbers of reported crimes in La Jolla in each category thus far in 2024 (through March 26), along with the percentage rise or fall compared with the average of the past three years, according to the San Diego Police Department’s crime data dashboard:
• Crimes against a person (e.g., assault, sexual assault, intimidation, kidnapping): 33 (down 23 percent)
• Crimes against property (e.g., theft, vandalism, burglary, robbery, arson, fraud, extortion): 222 (down 18 percent)
• Crimes against society (e.g., drug and alcohol violations, disorderly conduct, prostitution, tresing, weapons violations, animal cruelty): 36 (up 44 percent)
— La Jolla Light staff contributed to this report. ◆
