Crime is Down in San Diego but the Police Use of Unprovoked Force Against Black People is Up; Black Residents are 7X More Likely to be Assaulted by SDPD in Liberal City

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San Diego police officers are using force more often in encounters with residents, even as the city’s crime rate declines, according to data obtained by Times of San Diego.

As use-of-force reports increase, the racial gap has widened over the past three years. SDPD officers are seven times more likely to use force on Black residents than on white residents, and nearly twice as likely to use force on Hispanic residents as on white people.

To analyze trends, Times of San Diego requested all police use‑of‑force reports from 2017 through 2025. During that period, reported use-of-force incidents rose, as did reports of officers facing violent encounters.

Because officers often report multiple types of force in a single incident — for example, completing a physical takedown and then deploying pepper spray on the same person — Times of San Diego removed duplicate entries so that each instance referred to a single encounter. Times of San Diego then filtered the incidents by race. To calculate rates, we obtained population data from the city, divided the number of incidents for each racial group by that group’s total population, and multiplied by 1,000 to achieve per‑capita rates.

After adjusting for population, Black residents make up just over 5% of San Diego’s population, while white residents comprise nearly 42%. Of the nearly 79,000 Black residents in San Diego, 17.4 out of every 1,000 had force used against them in 2025. That compares with 2.5 out of every 1,000 white people.

The 2025 rate of 17.4 use‑of‑force incidents per 1,000 Black residents was just below the peak of 17.9 per 1,000 people recorded in 2023.

It remains well above the 2017 level, when nearly 12 out of every 1,000 Black residents experienced police use of force.

While the use-of-force disparity is highest between Black and white people, the rate at which San Diego police used force on Hispanics also rose dramatically over the past nine years. In 2017, police reported 955 use-of-force incidents with Hispanics, which, when factoring in population, put the use-of-force ratio at 2.3 Hispanic people who had force used on them out of every 1,000 people – the same ratio that white residents experienced that year. [MORE]