This report uses the most recent San Diego County crime data that local agencies have actually reported in full: 2023 for county-wide totals, and 2024 and 2025 for the municipal police departments in the county that submitted all twelve months in both years. Every figure below names the agency that published it and the year it covers.
That split is deliberate. As the Methodology section sets out, the San Diego County Sheriff’s Office and the cities it polices under contract have a gap in their submitted monthly counts running from November 2024 through May 2025. County-wide 2024 and 2025 totals are therefore understated, and this report does not use them to describe a trend.
San Diego County population: 3,282,248 (U.S. Census Bureau QuickFacts, July 1, 2025 estimate). Employer establishments: 93,407 (U.S. Census Bureau QuickFacts, 2023). Nonemployer establishments: 299,736 (U.S. Census Bureau QuickFacts, 2023).
Violent Crime in San Diego County
The last year in which every reporting agency in the county submitted a complete twelve months was 2023.
County-wide violent crime, 2023: 12,552 offenses — 79 homicides, 641 rapes, 2,434 robberies and 9,398 aggravated assaults (California Department of Justice, Crimes & Clearances, 2023).
For 2024 and 2025 the reliable picture is at city level. Across the independently staffed municipal police departments in the county, violent crime moved modestly and in both directions.
| City | Violent 2024 | Violent 2025 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| San Diego | 5,727 | 5,246 | −8.4% |
| Chula Vista | 1,029 | 1,014 | −1.5% |
| Oceanside | 774 | 649 | −16.1% |
| Escondido | 638 | 495 | −22.4% |
| El Cajon | 443 | 467 | +5.4% |
| National City | 382 | 368 | −3.7% |
| La Mesa | 251 | 241 | −4.0% |
| Carlsbad | 225 | 236 | +4.9% |
| Coronado | 65 | 63 | −3.1% |
Source: California Department of Justice, Crimes & Clearances, 2024 and 2025.
Two government sources do not agree exactly on these counts. The FBI Crime Data Explorer records 5,755 violent offences for San Diego in 2024 and 5,273 in 2025, against the state DOJ’s 5,727 and 5,246; for Oceanside it records 782 and 654 against 774 and 649. The gaps are under one percent and reflect the separate paths agency data takes to Sacramento and to Washington, including different revision cut-off dates. Neither series is wrong, and where they differ this report cites both rather than picking one.
Property Crime and Commercial Burglary
County-wide property crime, 2023: 50,487 offenses — 6,421 burglaries (3,730 of them non-residential), 12,230 motor vehicle thefts and 31,836 larceny-thefts, plus 358 arsons (California Department of Justice, Crimes & Clearances, 2023).
Non-residential burglary is the category that maps most directly onto commercial premises. Among agencies with complete reporting in both years:
| City | Non-residential burglary 2024 | 2025 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| San Diego | 1,327 | 1,123 | −15.4% |
| Oceanside | 321 | 278 | −13.4% |
| Chula Vista | 226 | 237 | +4.9% |
| Carlsbad | 140 | 150 | +7.1% |
| La Mesa | 81 | 62 | −23.5% |
Source: California Department of Justice, Crimes & Clearances, 2024 and 2025.
Escondido, El Cajon and National City each recorded a non-residential burglary fall steeper than 30% over the same period. Declines that abrupt are more often a reporting or classification change than a genuine shift in offending, and none of the three agencies has published anything confirming them, so those figures are omitted here rather than presented as fact.
Shoplifting is the one substantial category moving the other way, and it moved in most of the county at once.
Shoplifting offenses, San Diego Police Department: 2,635 in 2024, rising to 4,152 in 2025 — an increase of 57.6% (California Department of Justice, Crimes & Clearances).
The same direction shows up in National City (199 to 391), La Mesa (160 to 247), Chula Vista (518 to 594), Escondido (573 to 630) and Oceanside (373 to 386), all from the same DOJ series for 2024 and 2025. Carlsbad ran against it, falling from 285 to 236. El Cajon’s figure fell by more than 30% and is omitted for the reason given above.
Theft from motor vehicles, which drives a large share of parking-structure and lot complaints, fell across the same agencies: San Diego 4,578 to 3,634, Chula Vista 495 to 449, Oceanside 569 to 504, Escondido 334 to 277 and La Mesa 181 to 147 (California Department of Justice, Crimes & Clearances, 2024 and 2025).
City-by-City Comparison Within San Diego County
Set side by side for 2025, the county’s independently policed cities look like this. Counts are raw offense totals, not rates, and are not adjusted for resident population, daytime population or tourism — a distinction the Sheriff’s Department itself makes when it explains that crime rates are calculated on residential population alone.
| City | Violent crime 2025 | Property crime 2025 |
|---|---|---|
| San Diego | 5,246 | 21,692 |
| Chula Vista | 1,014 | 2,915 |
| Oceanside | 649 | 2,570 |
| Escondido | 495 | 2,087 |
| El Cajon | 467 | 1,233 |
| National City | 368 | 969 |
| La Mesa | 241 | 813 |
| Carlsbad | 236 | 1,226 |
| Coronado | 63 | 269 |
Source: California Department of Justice, Crimes & Clearances, 2025.
Vista, San Marcos, Encinitas, Santee, Poway, Imperial Beach and Lemon Grove are absent from this table on purpose. All are policed under contract by the Sheriff’s Office and all carry the same November 2024 to May 2025 reporting gap, so their 2024 and 2025 totals cannot be compared with the rest.
What the Data Means for Local Businesses
The headline for commercial operators in San Diego County is a split. Almost every category tied to vehicles and forced entry is falling, while theft from the sales floor is climbing steeply. A retailer reading only the county-level property crime number would draw exactly the wrong conclusion about its own exposure.
The shoplifting increase is the single most business-relevant movement in the data. It appeared in six of the nine independently reporting cities in the same year, which makes it unlikely to be a quirk of one department’s recording practice. San Diego alone logged 1,517 more shoplifting offenses in 2025 than in 2024. Retail, grocery and pharmacy sites in particular should expect loss-prevention pressure to be higher now than the general downward trend in property crime suggests.
Commercial burglary is more mixed. San Diego, Oceanside and La Mesa saw non-residential burglary fall; Chula Vista and Carlsbad saw it rise. Even after the decline, the City of San Diego recorded 1,123 non-residential burglaries in 2025 — roughly three commercial break-ins a day in that jurisdiction alone. Overnight lock-up and patrol coverage remains the practical control for that risk, because the DOJ series shows non-residential burglary concentrated in the hours when premises are closed.
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Get a Free QuoteMethodology — How These Figures Were Compiled
Every figure in this report was pulled live from a government source on 2 September 2026. Nothing is estimated, projected, or taken from an industry average, and any number that could not be verified against a live source was left out.
Geography check. San Diego County exists only in California, but agency names repeat across states, so each department was matched to its FBI originating agency identifier under California, San Diego County — for example CA0371100 for San Diego Police Department and CA0370000 for the San Diego County Sheriff’s Office. No data from a similarly named agency elsewhere was used.
The reporting gap. FBI Crime Data Explorer monthly violent crime counts for the San Diego County Sheriff’s Office run at 100 to 155 per month through October 2024, then fall to 51 in November 2024, 5 in December 2024, and 8, 7, 7, 11 and 21 for January through May 2025, before returning to 71 in June 2025 and 96 to 140 per month for the rest of the year. Monthly counts for 2021 through 2023 show no comparable pattern. The identical shape appears in Vista, San Marcos, Encinitas, Santee, Poway, Imperial Beach and Lemon Grove, all of which the Sheriff polices under contract, and does not appear in Coronado, which runs its own department. This is a submission gap, not a fall in crime.
What that rules out. Because those agencies feed the county roll-up, the county-wide totals the DOJ publishes for 2024 and 2025 (12,190 and 10,457 violent offenses; 44,248 and 39,167 property offenses) are understated by an unknown amount. They are recorded here for completeness but are not used for any year-over-year comparison, and no attempt has been made to estimate the missing months.
Figures deliberately omitted. Any 2024-to-2025 fall steeper than about 30% was treated as a probable reporting artifact and dropped unless the agency confirmed it. That removed the Sheriff’s Office and all seven of its contract cities; non-residential burglary for Escondido, El Cajon and National City; shoplifting for El Cajon; robbery for Oceanside, Escondido, Carlsbad and El Cajon; motor vehicle theft for Chula Vista, Oceanside, Carlsbad and National City; and theft from motor vehicles for Carlsbad and National City. County-level 2025 robbery sub-categories such as gas station, convenience store and bank robbery were dropped for the same reason.
Sources that could not supply figures. The San Diego County Sheriff’s Department publishes no current crime statistics of its own; the most recent tables on its Crime Analysis Unit page cover 2017, and the page directs the public to third-party mapping services and to regional data instead. Nothing in this report is sourced directly from the Sheriff’s own publications. The San Diego Police Department does publish complete 2025 NIBRS counts, released in February 2026, but they are broken out by neighbourhood with no citywide total, so San Diego citywide figures here come from the state DOJ and the FBI instead.
Where sources disagree. The California DOJ and the FBI publish slightly different counts for the same agency-years. Both are reproduced above rather than reconciled, because the difference is a genuine artefact of two separate collection systems and not an error in either.
Sources
- California Department of Justice, OpenJustice — Crimes & Clearances dataset, San Diego County and individual agency queries, data years 2016–2025. Accessed 2 September 2026.
- FBI Crime Data Explorer — summarised agency data for San Diego County originating agency identifiers, monthly counts 2021–2025. Accessed 2 September 2026.
- San Diego Police Department — Annual Crime Reports, NIBRS actual crimes January–December 2025 (published February 2026). Accessed 2 September 2026.
- San Diego County Sheriff’s Department — Crime Analysis Unit, Uniform Crime Reporting notes. Accessed 2 September 2026.
- U.S. Census Bureau — QuickFacts, San Diego County, California. Accessed 2 September 2026.
More California County Crime Reports
This page is part of a series of sourced county-level crime reports covering Southern California. Each one is compiled the same way, directly from California Department of Justice data.
- Los Angeles County Crime Statistics: 2026 Report
- Orange County Crime Statistics: 2026 Report
- San Bernardino County Crime Statistics: 2026 Report
- Riverside County Crime Statistics: 2026 Report
- Ventura County Crime Statistics: 2026 Report
- Santa Barbara County Crime Statistics: 2026 Report
- Kern County Crime Statistics: 2026 Report
All reports in this series are collected under California crime statistics.