Oakland Mayor Barbara Lee touted the city’s double-digit, year-over-year drop in crime Wednesday while acknowledging that gun violence continues to traumatize many communities.
Citing the Oakland Police Department’s end-of-year crime report, Lee said lawbreaking was down by 24% across the board in 2025, while the city’s 67 killings represent a 22% drop in homicides compared to the previous year.
“Even with the historic progress, gun violence remains a challenge and we’re continuing our work with all of our partners to address it and to reduce it,” Lee said during a news conference at City Hall. “And yes, of course, I would like to eliminate it, like all of you.”
Lee, Interim Police Chief James Beere and Holly Joshi, who heads Oakland’s Department of Violence Prevention, said the statistics reflect the city’s ongoing commitment to work across departments and in cooperation with faith-based groups and community organizations on policing strategies and curbing violence of all kinds, particularly gun violence.
Joshi said Oakland began to see real progress when it reestablished its commitment to the city’s Ceasefire program in 2023.
The Ceasefire program is a data-driven effort to root out the causes of violence one person at a time.
“The experts in the field estimate that in Oakland at any given time there’s between 240 and 350 people that are most at risk of being involved in gun violence,” Joshi said. “So the strategy is specifically meant to identify and then intervene in the lives of those specific people.”
OPD committed to curbing crime
Beere said his department is fully on board with the program and other non-traditional efforts to curb crime.
“We’re not trying to arrest our way out of this problem,” he said.
Still, the department responded to 203,000 calls for service in 2025, took 1,200 guns off the streets and had a 95% clearance rate for homicides, according to Beere.
“If you engage in violent crime, we will catch you and we will bring you to justice and you will be charged,” Beere said.
“If you engage in violent crime, we will catch you and we will bring you to justice and you will be charged.” Paul Beere, interim chief of police
He also praised the department’s use of technology, like the city’s automated gunfire detection system, license plate readers and drones, as well as reorganization efforts that emphasize the patrol division and improving response times, including by hiring more 911 dispatchers.
In addition, Oakland Fire Chief Damon Covington said the MACRO program, which his department runs, has responded to 10,000 non-violent, non-emergency calls in the past three years and is designed to intervene in situations that don’t necessarily require a sworn police officer’s assistance.
“The program connects residents to care while allowing police to focus on violent crime and fire crews to respond to emergencies that require emergency medical support,” Covington said.
In addition to the drop in homicides in 2025, the city saw a 43% drop in robberies, a 49% drop in carjackings, a 39% drop in auto thefts and a 47% drop in commercial burglaries.
Lee and others acknowledged that the statistics themselves won’t necessarily make Oaklanders feel safe, especially if they or someone they know have been crime victims.
A matter of perspective
Lisa Hill, a California State University, East Bay professor of criminal justice, agrees and said it’s important for city leaders to address both crime and people’s perceptions of their own safety.
“I think that it sounds like they have addressed what the research has consistently reported, and that is using an evidence-based approach to law enforcement, specifically targeting high-crime, high-victim areas and actually working with the community,” Hill said.
She cautioned, however, that for people living in high-crime areas or who have been victimized, the numbers might seem like smoke-and-mirrors.
“If I were living there and I was hearing these numbers, that could have an opposing effect for me because I might be, ‘Wait a minute, I just got robbed last week and my cousin was just robbed and my neighbor down the street was murdered,’ and so that could feel as though certain communities are being left behind in these numbers,” she said.