In the summer of 2025, as Donald Trump rolled out his plan to deploy the national guard to Washington DC and Chicago, he suggested other American cities were overrun with violence and could soon see federal troops: Memphis, Los Angeles, New York.
Oakland, the president argued, was beyond saving. “And then you have, of course, Baltimore and Oakland. They’re so far gone. We don’t even talk about that any more,” Trump said.
But as Trump was making these comments, Oakland was in the midst of a historic drop in homicides. The Bay Area city ended 2025 with 67 people killed, according to data from the Oakland police department, half of its 2021 high of 134.
It’s the lowest number of violent deaths recorded in 25 years.
The news has been held up by city officials, community advocates and nonprofit leaders as a sign that their respective and – sometimes combined – efforts to stem the violence are making a difference for those living in the city.
And it’s proved especially meaningful given the ground that was lost during the Covid pandemic, when the city faced deep economic woes and more than 100 people were killed in a single year for the first time since 2012.
“There was this narrative after the pandemic – and it carries into today – that things [in Oakland] are worse than they’ve ever been,” said Nicole Lee, the founder and executive director of Urban Peace Movement (UPM), a local nonprofit. “And sometimes these narratives get hijacked so people can use fear to control others. People sell products using fear, they win elections using fear. So it’s important to acknowledge when we see improvements.”
Local leaders each credit different trends when discussing the decline. Lee and other nonprofit leaders emphasize the city’s strong community networks and investments in historically neglected neighborhoods. The police chief says new technology and better coordination with departments in neighbouring cities has helped to solve crimes. They all agree, though, that there’s no one magic solution to stopping shootings, car break-ins and burglaries. Rather, they say, cooperation among city leaders, community organizations and law enforcement has helped steer the people police have identified as driving the violence down a different path.
While the decrease is a promising sign, it does not completely capture the experiences of people living in the city of over 443,000, especially of those who have lost loved ones to violence.
Earlier this month, a 33-year-old woman and a 25-year-old man were killed and seven other were injured in a mass shooting at a bar in the city’s downtown.
“It’s about trying to hold two perspectives at the same time, which is not an easy thing to do,” said Lee. “Even though there have been some gains made, even one loss of life to gun violence is devastating. For families, their life is never the same, and that has a real impact on our community and how we relate to each other in our day-to-day lives.”
Nor has the decline been equally distributed. Residents of East and West Oakland, where shootings have historically been concentrated, are still subject to the lion’s share of the gun violence. Twenty-eight of the 67 homicides last year happened in police areas five and six, which comprise East Oakland.
“I’m generally happy that the headlines are illustrating and naming that there is a decrease in our city – a city that has historically been peppered by violence,” said Caheri Gutierrez, an Oakland native and member of the city’s public safety commission. “But the downside is when you are actually in Oakland, in the neighborhoods, and you see or you hear about a homicide or another criminal act against a community member, then you kind of question [the statistics].”
“Numbers are one thing, but the people and stories behind them are a whole other thing. What happened on Saturday is another example of that,” Gutierrez added of the 8 March mass shooting.
Oakland is one of dozens of US cities where homicides have drastically declined the past year, with numbers in some cases even returning below their pre-pandemic levels. The Trump administration has been eager to claim credit, pointing at its aggressive law-enforcement policies and immigration crackdown as driving the decline. Oakland leaders say the administration’s tactics have done more harm than good, and the true motor of change lies within the city.
“They’ve been talking bad about my city for as long as I can remember,” Lee, a fourth-generation Oakland native, said about comments she heard people make about the city growing up. “People would say, ‘Oh, you must be dodging bullets.’ But there’s a richness and a confluence of lots of history in this city that makes something really special.”
Pioneering gun prevention programs
Oakland, the California port city along the San Francisco Bay, has long been known for its struggles with violence and its pioneering social and cultural movements. It’s the birthplace of the Black Panther party and of Kamala Harris, and has been at the heart of social and civil rights activism in the US. It’s also been at the forefront of community gun violence prevention programs.
Before the pandemic, the city had gained national recognition for its success in lowering gun violence. From 2012 to 2019, killings dropped from 131 to 78. Much of this decrease was attributed to the city’s Ceasefire program, a groundbreaking collaboration between police, violence interventionists and faith leaders, to reach the small group of mostly young Black and Latino men who were driving most of the city’s violence.
The relationship between the Oakland police department and the department of violence prevention began to deteriorate following a 2016 sex scandal involving a minor, according to a 2023 audit of the program. It led the Ceasefire’s strategy to shift from one that narrowly focused on the people at the center of the gun violence to one that was “place-based”, with police zeroing in on troubled neighborhoods rather than individuals. The shift, Oakland’s interim police chief, James Beere, said in a recent interview, was a grave mistake.
“When we went away from the Ceasefire strategy, there was no proactive effort to prevent the violence, the relationships deteriorated, and it was more of a ‘someone committed a crime, let’s arrest them’ approach,” he said.
Pandemic-era stay-at-home orders added to the program’s woes, cutting off the direct communication between city residents and violence prevention workers. Even as restrictions on gatherings disappeared, Ceasefire never regained its footing.
The program was restarted in 2023, returning to its original focus. “Six percent of the population is picking up a gun. We laser-focus to hold them accountable,” said Beere.
Police use weekly reviews of shootings to identify the small portion of the city’s population responsible for the bulk of shootings. Program staff officers make contact with them, often in roundtable meetings known as call-ins that bring together police officers, faith leaders and violence interventionists, and implore those at risk of being on either side of a gun to accept the short and long-term resources that could keep them safe, alive and out of prison.
The program is led by the police and the city, but key to its success is its work with nonprofits that offer healthcare, job training, housing support and therapy to those who live where violence is concentrated, said Holly Joshi, the chief of the city’s office of violence prevention. The partnerships ensure that the people who are actively engaged in violence, and others who are high-risk of getting in the mix, have somewhere to go after the call-ins.
“Focused deterrence is the multi-pronged strategy. It requires all these system partners,” Joshi said. “Our office is a quarterback agency. We rely heavily on the community-based organizations for the other support they bring to the table.”
Joshi, a Black East Oakland native who exudes calmness and confidence, has worked throughout city government and the police department on issues like sex-trafficking and domestic violence.
“We’re not feeling like we’re in a space to do a victory lap, because homicides and shootings and violence are still huge, but we’re glad to be ending 2025 with double-digit reductions,” she said. “Of course, when you walk away from a strategy for so many years, the question should always come up: is this the right strategy for the types of gun violence Oakland is experiencing? The feedback loop of reductions is telling us yes.”
“The failure of going away from it and then the reinvestment is just double confirmation that it works,” echoed Beere.
The network of community organizations that Ceasefire relies on is an old one, and has been able to grow with support from philanthropic organizations, as well as federal, state and local aid. The nonprofit Youth Alive! established the US’s first hospital-based violence intervention program. Destiny Arts provides children and teens with dance and martial arts classes and a safe space to express themselves. Roots Community Health Center offers medical care, including doula services. Trybe organizes events like block parties where neighbors can connect and socialize. They all work towards one goal: allowing Oakland’s families and residents to enjoy the safety and resources that they’ve called for for generations.
Urban Peace Movement (UPM), Lee’s organization, was founded in 2006, when nearly 150 people were killed, mostly with guns, and the city was experiencing one of its deadliest years in recorded history. Then and now, her goal has been to bring peace and healing to the mostly Black and Latino people in the city who have been disproportionately harmed by violence. The organization trains young people to advocate for solutions to issues like gun violence and youth incarceration. The program targets young people living in the working-class neighborhoods where their neighbors and loved ones are overrepresented in the justice system and as victims of violent acts like robberies and homicides, and aims to show them how to help solve their community’s most entrenched challenges.
To Rakeem Naylor, one of UPM’s members, it’s clear that efforts like these have played a crucial role in bringing gun violence down: “I feel like we can definitely credit it to a lot of the programs right now.”
“We need to put kids into more sports, we need leaders,” Naylor said. “When I was younger I was guided the wrong way, because I didn’t have a father and I looked up to others as older brothers. But they misguided me to the wrong places.”
“The challenge is that we’re always in this fight politically about more police or more programs, and I think that gets in the way of the success,” echoed Lee, UPM’s executive director. “I don’t think we’re asking for something radical. We’re just saying that people in our communities deserve the same things people in safe neighborhoods have.”
Policing changes
In addition to Ceasefire, Beere says other policing changes have contributed to the change. The homicide clearance rate in the city increased significantly from 2024 to 2025. Better coordination with the county’s probation department and other police departments across the Bay Area has helped Oakland police keep tabs on people who are repeatedly showing up on law enforcement’s radar, or are coming out of incarceration and may be at risk of being attacked by rivals, Beere said.
The department is increasingly relying on license plate readers and surveillance video to address crimes ranging from shootings to carjackings and sideshows. “Our network and the addition of technology has helped us see more reductions. For sideshows, human trafficking, even the violence, we’ve changed our strategy,” he said.
Caheri Gutierrez, an Oakland native and member of the public safety commission, says an upcoming increase in annual funding for the police, the office of violence prevention and the fire department through a new tax voters approved in 2024 will keep the momentum going.
But, she argued, those investments won’t bring returns if young people, their families and even those caught in cycles of crime and shootings don’t live in neighborhoods where they can enjoy safe parks and thriving businesses, or walk and drive along well-lit streets.
“When people have access to healthy foods, vibrant environments and supportive services, they thrive,” Gutierrez said. “If folks don’t have access to work, culturally relevant healthcare and community spaces, they’re more likely to engage in violence.”
She points to a neighborhood that is close to her heart, and central to her work in the city: the Fruitvale.
Today, the Fruitvale neighborhood is known for its large Latino population, but in the early-20th century it was home to many European immigrants, with families from Portugal and Germany. When Black and Latino families were pushed out of West Oakland in the 1950s and 60s, many planted roots in the Fruitvale.
In 2020, 19 people were killed in the area. Homicides hit a peak of 22 in 2022, but plummeted to six in 2024 and saw a small increase to 10 in 2025, according to Oakland police department data.
The change, Gutierrez says, is the result of decades of hard work from community leaders to transform the area surrounding the local transit hub into a small business and community resource corridor.
Gutierrez learned to read and write in English at the Cesar Chavez library, and attended elementary school around the corner from where her current office sits.
Where she remembers a parking lot separating a train station from a bus platform across the road, there are now apartment buildings filled with affordable housing, legal and health clinics, and locally owned restaurants and small businesses. And in an area where people used to loiter, sell drugs and rob commuters, teens, adults and seniors chat at a coffee shop called Powderface and families walk together from the nearby Head Start program.
Having coffee shops and busy shopping districts for people to walk through plays a significant role in the city’s success in lowering homicides, robberies and property crime, Gutierrez said.
“It’s a model that works. It’s data-driven and should be replicated throughout all neighbourhoods in Oakland and throughout the nation,” she said.
“Fruitvale is one thing – we’re doing great, we’re making progress. But Oakland can’t thrive unless all of Oakland thrives,” Gutierrez continued. “So expanding this kind of model to West Oakland and deep East Oakland, where it’s greatly needed, I think, is also going to help us continue to see a steady decline in violence.”
Despite the number of killings being half of what they were in 2021, the areas that see the most bloodshed have remained the same.
“I think they’re encouraging, and I think they’re important to talk about,” said Lee about the 2025 homicide numbers. “But it feels difficult to celebrate them because any time a family or a group of friends experiences a loss like that, even one, it’s devastating.”
Tim Conover, a 40-year-old father of two, was shot and killed at his own Fourth of July barbecue. Curtis Haynes a 28-year-old security guard at Oakland’s Highland hospital, died after being shot in East Oakland. Carla Lee, 29, was shot outside of her home just after stepping out to pick up her niece and nephew.
In addition to the stubborn presence of gun violence and the trauma that reverberates through families and communities, businesses are still dealing with break-ins, threats and harassment, Gutierrez said. Lately, she said, more of these stories are going unreported due to an increased hesitation to interact with law enforcement following sweeping immigration raids across the country.
“There’s quantitative data around the decrease, but it’s also very important to have the qualitative data that really reflects the narratives and the experiences of the community members,” Gutierrez said. “The business owners who are experiencing break-ins into their shops; mothers with children who are walking and being robbed midday; the day laborers on the corners – [they] are also being subjected to this kind of violence.”
Killings reduced in other US cities
Oakland is not the only city in the US that has seen stunning declines in gun violence in the past year.
Though the federal government has yet to release national homicide data for 2025, a recent report by the Council on Criminal Justice, analyzing statistics in dozens of American cities, points to a 21% decline in the homicide rate between 2024 and 2025 nationally.
Killings are down in cities large and small, in the south and the midwest. Detroit recorded 203 people killed in 2024, a 60-year-low, and then saw further declines in 2025. In Chattanooga, Tennessee, homicides in 2025 were nearly half of what they were in the prior year, dropping from 27 deaths in 2024 to 14 the following year. Baltimore saw a double-digit decrease, with killings dropping from 201 in 2024 to 133 last year.
It’s not clear what, exactly, is driving this national decline.
Federal, state and local officials, police, researchers and community organizers have different explanations for why the numbers look the way they do. Some argue that the police and the courts have finally caught up post-pandemic. Others say that people returning to their normal routine plays a role. Some argue that the Biden administration’s investments in community-based violence prevention are the greatest driver of the decrease.
The Trump administration has said its policies are behind the decline: “It is an indisputable fact that President Trump’s immigration policies are saving American citizens from being killed, raped, and assaulted at the hands of criminal illegal aliens with no right to be here,” the White House said in January.
“President Trump is reversing the chaos and carnage unleashed by Radical Left Democrats who turned our streets into war zones by coddling criminals and opening our borders,” it wrote two weeks later.
Oakland leaders couldn’t disagree more. Rather, they argue, the federal government has undermined public safety in Oakland through actions like stripping millions of dollars from violence prevention programs.
“Our crime trend going down started in 2024, before this narrative about ICE enforcement,” Beere said. “We’re a sanctuary city. We do not, and we have not in my time in the last 27 years, assisted in immigration enforcement, and we’re not going to.”
Joshi said: “The vast majority of people who are either victims of homicides or committing them are US citizens, so I don’t see the correlation between any ICE enforcement and homicides and shootings going down in Oakland. We’re gonna remain a sanctuary city. It’s important for all of our residents to feel comfortable calling city government when they need something from us.”
While Oakland leaders may diverge in what factors they believe contributed most to the decline in gun violence, they all agree that an amalgam of policies and investments have made the difference. Perhaps no element is more important than the collaboration between city leaders, law enforcement and communities.
Lee of UPM described the Trump administration’s claiming credit for the decrease in killing as an attempt to discredit the hard work local groups and service providers have put in to help bring stability to their neighbors after the pandemic. “It’s just so sleazy and such a lie.”
‘It’s definitely changed my life’
Amid the political debates and the mounting challenges for nonprofits to secure sustainable funding, young people and the adults who work alongside them are still working to bring safety to their neighbors and hold officials to account.
Inside a downtown Oakland office in January, eight teens and young adults sat in the conference room of Urban Peace Movement. The rooms in UPM’s office are named after activists like James Baldwin and Ella Baker as a nod to those who continue to inform the work the youth are gathered to do.
The group was trying to figure out how it can fit a movie night into its plans for the next couple of months. Among the other items on the calendar: a forum about safety and justice in the city with officials like the head of probation, a city council meeting, and a town hall to condemn Alameda county’s use of pepper spray on youth in juvenile detention.
“The best thing to do as a young person is occupy your mind and time,” Naylor said. “There wouldn’t be as much violence if it wasn’t for not putting funding into the communities in the first place.”
Narayan, 17, another UPM member, said: “Programs like this give kids an opportunity to do extracurriculars and stuff where they can learn what it means to help out their community. If we want to lower that homicide rate in the future, have more programs.”
Their work in the community has not completely insulated them from violence – Naylor and Narayan have been robbed at gunpoint. Naylor recalls having guns pointed at him at different points in his life, once during an argument and twice by police during raids on houses in his neighborhood.
But both say programs like UPM need to be funded and expanded to reach those who assaulted them and to hold police accountable for incidents of mistreatment.
“I’ve been doing so much work over the past four years, it’s definitely changed my life. I would be a completely different person if I didn’t change the way I thought about things through these programs,” Narayan added. “I think it’s super important to start instilling that mindset at a young age.”
