Cato’s Project on Poverty and Inequality in California has concluded that any effective approach to reducing poverty would require California to push forward with its efforts at criminal justice reform. After all, researchers at Villanova University found that without America’s rapid increase in incarceration over the past three decades, the poverty rate may have decreased by up to 20 percent more. Yet politically, the need for additional reform has run into a growing fear of a perceived increase in crime and a belief that criminal justice reform contributes to those increases. However, those concerns are misplaced.

The starting point for understanding crime in California is the fact that, despite significant media coverage of crimes like shoplifting and vehicle break-ins, property crime is at a historic low, with data from the California Attorney General’s office showing the lowest rate of property crime on record. On the other hand, homicides increased in 2020 from their 2019 rate, which had been the lowest since 1971. While the types of property crime changed from 2019 to 2020 (reporting from ProPublica points out that crimes like home burglaries may have decreased as people spent more time at home during the pandemic) there was no wave of, or even an increase in, overall property crimes. The data is similar for individual cities: San Francisco, for example, saw an increase in some types of crime, including homicides, but data from the San Francisco police department shows an overall decrease in both violent and property crimes from 2019 to 2020.

Clearly, then, there’s no wave of property crimes like some have suggested, but all the same it’s worth asking why homicides in particular increased in 2020. At least on the surface, reform-minded prosecutors taking office seemed to coincide roughly with increased homicide rates. But a deeper investigation shows that there’s no straight line between this political shift and increased murder rates. New District Attorneys in Los Angeles and San Francisco started their tenures with packages of reforms that decreased enforcement of some minor crimes. In Los Angeles, prosecutors were instructed not to charge individuals with a list of crimes including loitering, drinking in public, and disturbing the peace. In San Francisco, prosecutors were instructed not to charge individuals for contraband found during certain traffic stops and ended cash bail, the practice of holding accused individuals based on their ability to pay rather than their risk of committing crimes.

These local-level reforms occurred in 2020, the same year as homicides jumped, but while these developments were contemporaneous, it’s hard to argue that one caused the other. Notably, many of these reforms, like the shift in Los Angeles away from filing charges for minor offenses, affected only non-violent crimes. The effects of a policy like that in San Francisco of restricting charges that would have resulted from vehicle searches are probably more complicated. Some of the people interviewed in the ProPublica reporting cited above suggested that ending “stop and frisk” tactics by police made people more likely to illegally carry guns, and the traffic stops limited by San Francisco’s District Attorney would have amounted to a vehicular version of stop and frisk. Our colleagues have criticized stop and frisk at great length over the years. Not only is this tactic often unconstitutional, but it damages trust between police and the communities they serve, and its efficacy is questionable.

The most likely explanation for 2020’s increased homicides likely lie with the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. Job losses and school closures left millions of at-risk individuals isolated and likely with serious mental health struggles, while the shift away from in-person interaction made social services like violence and gang interruption programs harder to access.

It will take time to determine whether the uptick in homicide that occurred in 2020 continues beyond the end of the COVID-19 pandemic, and to dig deeper into the causes of this increase, but it seems clear, firstly, that California did not see a wave of property crime, and that the increased murder rate is not attributable to the state’s significant criminal justice reforms, which have reduced incarceration and paved the way for California to be able to close two prisons in the near future, saving taxpayers over a hundred million dollars annually. Beyond these criminal justice reforms, California should continue expanding options like restorative justice to compensate victims of crime and rehabilitation for convicted individuals, as well as approaches like violence intervention programs that aim to prevent crime before it occurs. California has made significant progress on criminal justice reform, and while there’s more work to be done, the next steps need to proceed with a clear understanding of where the state is, how far it’s come, and how it got to where it is.