Gun homicides nationwide have barely dropped, but in the Bay Area they're down 30%. In a year-long series, the Guardian investigates the initiatives that are saving lives in a region scarred by rising inequality and gentrification. Sign up for the series’ newsletter

In California’s Silicon Valley, the boom and the bust are playing out simultaneously. Tech companies have made the Bay Area one of the wealthiest places on earth. But on the streets of San Francisco and the cities around it, desperation is increasingly visible. A spiraling housing crisis has made it unaffordable for many people to live in the cities where they work. More than 30,000 people across the region are now homeless, many living in sprawling tent encampments or sleeping in their cars.

For each new millionaire household the San Francisco Bay Area has produced, there are at least four new people living below the poverty level. San Francisco’s property crime rate has spiked to the highest in the nation. Many people – tech newcomers and longtime residents alike – complain of feeling unsafe.

At the same time, with little fanfare, the Bay Area has seen a dramatic drop in its homicide rate, driven by a considerable decrease in deadly shootings.

Across the region, the overall gun homicide rate has dropped 30% in the past decade, a Guardian investigation of homicide data across more than 100 cities has found.

This homicide analysis is the first installment in a year-long Guardian series exploring how the Bay Area is defying expectations on gun violence amid growing inequality and economic pressures. Advocates and policy makers are already looking at the region to see what worked. One 2020 candidate, Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey, has cited Oakland’s success in reducing gun violence in his national platform to reduce violence nationwide. The Guardian’s series will investigate what really works to reduce the daily toll of shootings across the United States, and expose common myths and lies about gun violence in the country.

Our analysis of homicide data from 2007 to 2017, across more than 100 cities and towns in the 12 counties of California’s Bay Area, has found:

Gun homicide rates fell across all racial groups, but the decrease was largest for black residents.

The dramatic drop came as criminal justice reforms in California reduced the number of people incarcerated in state prisons and local jails. And it came as cities, including Oakland and Richmond, invested tens of millions of dollars in public health approaches to gun violence prevention.

Three cities that are undergoing intense gentrification saw the biggest drops in gun homicides. But outlying suburbs – the towns where many residents forced out by gentrification have moved – did not see a corresponding increase in violence.

Despite the decreases, stark racial disparities in the burden of gun violence remain, and many residents say they still don’t feel safe.

The Bay Area still sees nearly 300 gun homicides each year. But these changes are profound. The majority of America’s gun homicide victims are black, killed in everyday shootings in segregated, economically struggling neighborhoods in cities such as Oakland and Richmond. It’s this everyday toll of violence, not mass shooting casualties, that drives America’s gun homicide rate 25 times higher than those of other wealthy countries.

Homicides dropped much sharper across the Bay Area in the past decade than in the nation as a whole. Between 2007 and 2017, the homicide rate for the whole Bay Area fell by more than 30%. The nation’s overall homicide rate fell only about 7% between those years. Cities such as Chicago, St Louis and Baltimore have seen their number of residents lost to violence rise. The Bay Area is being reshaped by gentrification, rising housing prices, and the displacement of longtime residents from cities such as Oakland and San Francisco. But the total number of gun homicides is down across the region as a whole. The gentrifying cities of Oakland, Richmond and San Francisco became dramatically safer, recording 25 to 40 fewer gun violence deaths each year. Many other cities in the area saw modest decreases in gun homicides, or relatively little change. There have been small upticks in annual gun homicides in Antioch, Hayward, Vallejo, and San Jose, among other cities. But the increases were small – two, three, or six additional gun homicides each year. Stockton, which filed for bankruptcy in 2012 in the wake of the foreclosure crisis, is the only city that has seen a substantial increase in its gun homicide rate between 2007 and 2017, the last year of the Guardian’s analysis. It saw its annual number of gun homicides increase from 23 to 42. The bottom line: the huge drops in Oakland, Richmond, and San Francisco far outpaced the small upticks in other cities, leading to a net decrease in fatal violence.

How have things changed?

In the Bay Area cities that historically have seen the worst burden of violence, daily gun homicides have fallen dramatically, the Guardian’s analysis shows.

Cities that once ranked among the nation’s deadliest, such as Oakland and Richmond, have seen enormous decreases over the past decade. These are not single-year drops in killings, but declines sustained over multiple years.

There’s early evidence that local violence prevention strategies – including a refocused, more community-driven “Ceasefire” policing strategy, and intensive support programs that do not involve law enforcement at all – were a “key change” contributing to these huge decreases.

Gun homicide rates for all races have fallen, but the drop was largest for black Bay Area residents: a 40% decrease.

In the past 10 years, tens of thousands of black residents have moved out of Oakland and San Francisco, as skyrocketing rents and housing prices have made the cities increasingly unaffordable. But in the region as a whole, the total number of black residents has remained steady, as the number of black residents living in the Bay Area’s outlying suburbs has increased, according to annual census estimates.

These areas are still dangerous. It’s the same trauma people are going through Mya Whitaker, youth counselor

Even with the decrease, stark racial disparities remain. The risk of being killed with a gun is still 22 times higher for black residents than white residents across the region, and many black residents who live in neighborhoods long burdened by violence say they don’t yet feel safe.

“These areas are still dangerous. It’s the same trauma people are going through,” said Mya Whitaker, a 27-year old foster youth counselor who grew up in East Oakland and still lives there. “One false move can get you killed out here.”

Racial disparities in gun homicide rates persist Black residents are still 10 times more likely to be killed by gun violence than others, despite the large decrease in the gun homicide rate over the last few years. Guardian graphic | Source: California Department of Justice; US Census Bureau

“There’s still a lot going on that the statistics don’t always capture,” said Tyjohn “TJ” Sykes, 26, who works in Richmond’s RYSE Youth Center and runs a workshop on what safety means for young residents. “Someone could come through your neighborhood shooting every night, but if they don’t hit anyone and it doesn’t get recorded that doesn’t heighten my sense of safety.”

The decrease in overall violence also hasn’t brought about a corresponding drop in police shootings. An average of at least 14 people were killed by the police each year, most by gunfire, but some killed by other means, in the greater Bay Area since 2007, according to reports compiled by the state attorney general.

Thousands of black residents have recently left Oakland and San Francisco. Tim Hussin / The Guardian More than 30,000 people across the region are now homeless. Tim Hussin / The Guardian

But the change in the gun homicide rate translates into hundreds of fewer people killed across the Bay Area over the past decade. In 2017 alone, the region suffered 111 fewer gun homicides, and 151 fewer total homicides, than a decade before.

Violence still claims many lives – but progress has also saved some Projected homicides based on 2007 rates, compared to actual Guardian Graphic | Source: California Department of Justice; US Census Bureau

Who gets to benefit?

As officials in cities such as Oakland have touted the progress in gun violence numbers, they have repeatedly faced the same question: is the drop in gun violence just a result of gentrification?

Local leaders and activists have said the assumption is deeply flawed.

“The idea that gentrification is more responsible for the reduction in shootings and homicides is offensive to the hundreds of outreach workers, community members and practitioners on the frontlines actually doing this work daily,” said Pastor Michael McBride, a Bay Area activist who leads a national campaign to end gun violence and mass incarceration.

An academic study of gun violence in Oakland neighborhoods found that the city’s focused deterrence strategy, known as “Ceasefire”, significantly reduced shootings, even when accounting for the level of gentrification in different areas.

Still, the fact that big drops in gun violence are coming at the same time as intense gentrification and displacement has raised troubling questions for some local activists about who will get to benefit from living in a safer Oakland – and whose interests the decreases in shootings may ultimately serve.

Some violence intervention workers themselves have been priced out of Oakland, and can no longer afford to live in the city where they are working to prevent shootings and help survivors of violence, according to Anne Marks, the executive director of Youth ALIVE!, a local nonprofit.

Are we cleaning up the city for other people to move in? Wayne Clarke, Oakland Impact Center

Wayne Clarke, the executive director of the Oakland Impact Center, said that, to the young men he mentors in East Oakland, it sometimes looks like, “the system, or public safety, cares more about the city, now that there’s gentrification and you’ve got big businesses and you’ve got dollars and you’ve got white people moving in,” Clarke said. “Before, it was just a city full of poor people, and we’re just going to let them kill each other.”

“As we make the city safer, are we opening up the floodgates more for gentrification? That’s what it feels like,” Clarke said. “Are we cleaning up the city for other people to move in?”

Wayne Clarke, who mentors young men, sits outside the house where he grew up. Tim Hussin / The Guardian Clarke talks with West Oakland resident Elsie Bell about how the neighborhood has gentrified. Tim Hussin / The Guardian

Why is this happening now?

It may be impossible to pinpoint exactly what factors are driving the changes in the Bay Area, experts say. Violence is complex, shaped by a multitude of elements and dynamics. But some wider trends are clear.

The Bay Area’s drop in gun violence does not reflect a drop in overall “crime”. The rate of property crimes such as theft and burglary have decreased only 16% across the region as gun violence has fallen by nearly a third. San Francisco has seen its property crime rate increase even as the number of people killed in gun homicides has dropped.

Criminal justice reforms have reduced the number of residents spending their lives behind bars. Since 2006, California’s state prison population has fallen by 25%, in part due to a 2014 voter-approved ballot measure that reduced the criminal penalties for nonviolent drug crimes and theft. The Bay Area’s county jails are incarcerating thousands fewer on a daily basis than they did a decade ago.

California has the strongest gun laws in the country, and it’s enacted more than 30 new gun control laws since 2009 alone, according to Robyn Thomas, the executive director of the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, which tracks gun legislation nationwide.

At the same time, Thomas said: “few of the laws enacted in the last 10 years would have been expected to entirely explain the significant reductions in the Bay Area.”

It was investment in local prevention strategies in Oakland, Richmond and San Francisco that was likely the “key change” that most significantly drove the recent 30% drop in gun homicides, she argued, though the “cumulative impact” of dozens of California gun laws enacted since the 1990s likely contributed to a decrease in violence.

The Bay Area has become more diverse in the last decade. Tim Hussin / The Guardian

Far right politicians have ramped up efforts to stoke xenophobia in recent years by linking violent crime to immigrants. But the Bay Area has long been racially and ethnically diverse, and diversity has increased over the past decade as more Latin American and Asian immigration moved in and more white residents moved away, census data shows. About 600,000 current Bay Area residents were born in Mexico, according to the most recent estimates. And over the past decade, the number of people immigrating from the Central American nations of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, has increased.

Nor have policies to shield undocumented immigrants led to violence, as Donald Trump and some of his Republican allies often warn. San Francisco saw a 49% drop in its gun homicide rate as it held to its pro-immigrant law enforcement policies.

Local community-led efforts do appear to play a role in the reduction, according to the Giffords Center, which recently released a policy paper examining Oakland’s gun violence decrease called A Case Study in Hope.

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Community outreach has been critical in reducing gun deaths, those on the frontlines say. Tim Hussin / The Guardian

So, what’s actually working?

At the heart of the different strategies Bay Area cities are using are the same basic elements: data, dollars, and community leadership, including leadership from formerly incarcerated residents.

“The common context among each of these cities – Richmond, Oakland, and San Francisco – is that they have adopted community-driven, non-law enforcement approaches, and they’ve been robustly funded,” said DeVone Boggan, who lead Richmond’s Office of Neighborhood Safety as it developed a nationally recognized fellowship program for men at highest risk of violence. Boggan now leads leads Advance Peace, an organization spreading that strategy to more cities.

“We have to extend the idea of what public safety is beyond policing and incarceration, to include these things like intervention, outreach and neighborhood empowerment,” Boggan said. “That’s the game changer. That’s the difference-maker.”

Understanding who commits violence has helped Oakland to reduce it. Tim Hussin / The Guardian

Longtime community outreach workers and violence interrupters, many of whom are formerly incarcerated, are crucial to making these public health strategies effective, experts across the region said.

Finally, better analysis of who’s behind the violence has helped law enforcement, social services and community groups intervene more effectively. In Oakland, for example, a 2017 study of every homicide that occurred over 18 months showed that only 0.16% of Oakland’s population, about 700 high-risk men, were responsible for the majority of the homicides.

And any reckoning should also give credit to the individual men who are deciding not to shoot, said Boggan.

“The individuals at the center of these conflicts are making healthier decisions,” Boggan said. “I think these individuals have to be a productive part of the solution. They have to be embraced and brought into the discussion.”

One of the early participants in Richmond’s fellowship program graduated from college last year and is preparing to start business school this fall.

“Gun violence is pretty much a form of disease. Once it starts affecting one person, it starts spreading,” said the former fellow, who asked that his name not be published.

In the summer of 2004, as a 16-year-old high school student, he was shot while listening to the Fourth of July fireworks in his hometown of Richmond. The shooting changed his perspective -- and his behavior.

“I wasn’t even thinking about carrying. I was playing football. All of a sudden, I think I need a gun,” he said.

He ended up going to jail for carrying a gun illegally. Years later, the Office of Neighborhood Safety’s peacemaker fellowship sent him on trips, including to Washington, DC and London, with other young men caught up in the long-running cycle of local fights and retaliations.

The fellowship helped him develop and realize a new vision for his life. He ended up graduating from the historically black college he had visited on one of the trips--a place, he said, where “I didn’t have to watch over my shoulder.”

“To have somebody who believes in you, and knows you’ve got the potential to go for it, stuff like that makes you want to keep going right,” he said.