OAKLAND, Calif. — The trauma among Oaklanders after a grueling spike in violence and property crime during the COVID-19 pandemic may not yet be healed, but now even the fiercest tough-on-crime voices here have begun to acknowledge that the city is becoming safer.

Oakland leaders, meanwhile, saw fit to take a victory lap Thursday, announcing that crime is down across the board this year through the first days of August, compared to the same stretch of time in years past. It continues a linear trend since last year of lower crime, citywide.

“Our work is far from done,” Mayor Barbara Lee, who took office in May, said at a news conference. “We’re going to keep building on this progress with the same comprehensive approach that got us here.”

As of Aug. 3, police had investigated 41 crimes as homicides this year — a 24% decrease from this time last year, when there were 54 investigated homicides and 65 at the same time in 2023.

Reported burglaries are down by 25%, robberies by 41% and violent crime as a whole by 29%, according to police data. Property crime has followed the trend, with 41% fewer reports of automobile break-ins, as well as 45% fewer carjackings and commercial burglaries alike.

There is room for skepticism among Oakland residents, especially those who have not bothered filing a police report after experiencing crime because they doubt anything would come out of it.

But homicides, at least, would be hard for a community or police force to ignore. And the city police officers union, which previously has cast significant doubt on any talk of improvement, acknowledged in a Thursday news release that “we are making some progress.”

“We need to get the word out,” Police Chief Floyd Mitchell said Thursday, “so people can feel confident about shopping and eating and enjoying themselves.”

Cities across the country saw crime levels regress to pre-pandemic levels around 2023, but Oakland took a couple more years to catch up to the trend. And while 2025 is not over, the city is currently on pace to log one of its lowest homicide totals in decades.

Oakland has also shown dramatic improvement in how quickly emergency dispatchers are answering 911 calls, doubling their speed since 2023 — though the city still lags behind the standard required by the California Office of Emergency Services.

Although vacancies among dispatcher staff have remained mostly steady, Mitchell said Thursday that six new hires are set to start on the job, which would nearly halve the number of unfilled jobs.

Police response to emergency calls — that is, when officers actually arrive to the scene — has lagged since 2022, a decline mostly attributed to a lack of staffing.

Police staffing is worse now than when Oakland’s crime was in the throes of a pandemic spike. There were 126 investigated homicides in 2023, though in October of that year, there were 771 sworn officers.

On Thursday, there were 652 officers on the force, with nearly 100 cops out on some kind of administrative or medical leave.

Mitchell acknowledged “there’s a natural ebb and flow to crime and crime statistics,” though, at large, city leaders attributed recent improvements to a revival of Oakland’s Ceasefire strategy, a program designed to intercept end retaliatory violence, especially between warring gangs.

A combination of police, local church leaders and officials in the Department of Violence Prevention take part in the strategy, which involves offering jobs and social benefits, in exchange for no arrests, to those deemed likely to engage in gun violence.

Holly Joshi, the city’s chief of violence prevention, recalled a recent case in which Ceasefire officials determined gun violence could be a consequence of an East Oakland street fight that had left a person unconscious.

The pitch they made to the likely retaliators: “There are many eyes on you, including law enforcement, (but) we have an alternative,” Joshi said.

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