This week the news came out that in 2025 Los Angeles recorded its lowest homicide total in more than half a century, according to preliminary police data — a development that mirrors steep declines in killings across many major U.S. cities.
But while the numbers themselves are striking, the Los Angeles Times’ reporting on the decline illustrates a deeper problem that has long plagued crime coverage: when violence falls, police are allowed to explain why, largely without challenge from independent or reform-oriented voices.
According to tentative figures reported by the Los Angeles Police Department through Dec. 31, the city tallied 230 homicides in 2025, “a nearly 19% decrease from the year before.”
If the number holds, the Times reports, “it would be the fewest killings since 1966,” when Los Angeles had a significantly smaller population. Measured per capita, “it was the city’s safest year since 1959.”
The Times notes that homicides are down not just in Los Angeles, but nationally. Compared with 2024, killings fell “dramatically in Washington (31%), Chicago (30%), New York City (21%) and San Francisco (20%) — leading some researchers to call it the largest one-year drop on record.”
A decline of that scale across jurisdictions with very different policing strategies should immediately complicate claims that any single department’s approach is responsible.
The paper is careful on the basic facts. It flags that homicide figures could rise slightly as cases are reviewed and explains a key data dispute that has confused the public.
Since switching to a new federal reporting system, LAPD’s website now includes certain traffic-related deaths that were previously excluded, “such as suspected cases of vehicular manslaughter or crashes in which the driver was found to have been drunk or otherwise criminally negligent.”
With those cases included, the total number of killings recorded last year rises to 313, a discrepancy the Times acknowledges has “some residents concerned the department isn’t giving a full crime picture.”
The article also correctly warns that “experts have long cautioned against putting too much stock in year-to-year crime statistics, which can fluctuate based on complex, intertwined factors — including how authorities classify and count certain offenses.”
But when it comes time to interpret the trend, humility largely disappears but, more importantly, the voices that get to speak are decidedly from a single perspective.
Indeed, explanation is handed almost entirely to law enforcement officials, current and former.
LAPD Chief Jim McDonnell attributes the decline to institutional collaboration, saying it is “not the result of any single action, but the collective work of our first responders and follow-up investigators, our community partners, and the residents who continue to step forward and engage with us.”
Former Assistant Chief Horace Frank echoes that theme, saying, “A lot has to do with more accountability in the courts. A lot of it has to do with the police themselves. Kudos for the work of law enforcement and the support of the community.”
L.A. County Sheriff Robert Luna strikes a cautious tone, saying his department was “encouraged” by a decline from 184 to 159 homicides in sheriff-patrolled areas but adding, “We never lose sight of the fact that every number represents a life lost and a family forever changed. Any reduction matters, but even one homicide is one too many.”
The most direct causal claim comes from LAPD Deputy Chief Alan Hamilton, who runs the detective bureau.
Hamilton credits a renewed focus on “the small percentage of individuals responsible for an outsize proportion of violent crimes.” “I think it’s finally paying dividends,” Hamilton said, “because if you’re sitting in prison because you shot three people and not cycling through the system, the city will be safer.”
Hamilton also cites community policing and trust-building, saying programs like the Community Safety Partnership have encouraged people to come forward and helped police solve more crimes.
He adds another controversial factor: immigration enforcement.
Hamilton said he believes “the ongoing federal immigration crackdown has had a deterrent effect simply by adding the presence of more law enforcement officers to the streets over the past year.”
Notably absent from the article are voices from the criminal justice reform community or independent academic criminologists who have spent decades studying violence trends.
No reform researchers are asked whether incarceration has actually increased, whether clearance rates changed, or whether similar declines occurred in cities that pursued less punitive approaches.
The result is that police explanations, however plausible, are allowed to stand largely unfalsified.
The one non-law-enforcement voice quoted is Tina Padilla, a longtime gang interventionist. Her account sharply complicates the idea that immigration enforcement has been an unqualified deterrent.
Padilla says organizations like hers now provide diapers, formula and other essentials in addition to violence mediation, but immigration raids have “without a doubt disrupted life for wide swaths of the city’s immigrant population.
“They are just scared of any type of documentation, let alone signing up their child for services, because of the repercussions,” Padilla said.
Her comments highlight fear, instability and the erosion of trust — outcomes that criminologists have historically linked to increased, not decreased, long-term harm. Yet her perspective functions more as human interest texture than as an alternative explanatory framework.
The article also notes a critical tension that undermines enforcement-based claims.
“With the city facing a budget crunch,” police officials and union leaders have warned that fewer resources could drive crime up.
Yet the data show killings fell “even as the LAPD has steadily shrunk and seen officers conduct fewer traffic stops and interactions with the public than in past years.”
That fact alone raises questions the article does not pursue: if police staffing and contacts declined, what exactly is doing the explanatory work?
What is missing is any sustained engagement with structural factors that criminologists routinely identify as central to homicide trends.
The article does not examine demographic aging, particularly declines in the highest-risk youth cohorts.
It does not seriously analyze post-pandemic normalization after the temporary spike in violence during COVID-era unemployment and social disruption.
It does not address economic stabilization, changes in substance use patterns, or the well-documented tendency for extreme years to be followed by regression toward the mean.
Instead, the piece drifts toward a familiar pattern. When outcomes are positive, credit flows inward to institutions.
When harms are acknowledged — fear among immigrants, service disruptions, lingering inequities in neighborhoods like South L.A. — responsibility diffuses outward, attributed to federal policy or social conditions rather than local enforcement choices.
This is what modern copaganda often looks like — as Alec Karakatsanis argues in his book of the same title.
It does not rely on sensationalism or false claims but rather source dominance. Police provide the data, the narrative and the explanation, while other perspectives appear marginal or absent.
Even in a story that acknowledges uncertainty, the interpretive authority remains concentrated.
None of this negates the importance of the homicide decline. Fewer deaths matter. Lives saved matter. But how society understands why violence falls shapes what it chooses to fund, expand or dismantle next.
If declines are framed primarily as proof of policing success, reform strategies are sidelined even when evidence suggests violence can fall without expanded punishment.
The Los Angeles Times story documents a real and significant trend. What it does not do is fully interrogate the assumptions built into its explanations.
When crime falls nationwide, the most important question is not who gets the credit, but what actually works.
Answering that requires voices beyond those who wear badges — voices that remain largely missing from mainstream crime reporting.
That limitation is especially striking given the Times’ own framing that “why killings are down is up for debate.”
Even in an article that explicitly acknowledges uncertainty, the debate itself is narrowly defined, with law enforcement officials largely setting the terms of explanation and alternative frameworks left unexplored.
When the question is posed but the range of credible interpreters is constrained, the appearance of debate masks a deeper imbalance over who is allowed to shape public understanding of crime, safety and justice.
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“Hamilton said he believes “the ongoing federal immigration crackdown has had a deterrent effect simply by adding the presence of more law enforcement officers to the streets over the past year.”
Thank you President Trump.