Los Angeles homicides have plunged to levels not seen since the 1960s, part of a dramatic turnaround from the pandemic-era crime surge that gripped the city. But buried inside the celebratory citywide numbers is a starker pattern: Black Angelenos continue to be killed at rates far beyond their share of the population, and in pockets of South Los Angeles, that violence hasn't slowed at all.
Black residents accounted for 57 of the 162 homicides recorded in Los Angeles through mid-September, or 35% of all victims, according to an analysis by the Los Angeles Times. That's despite Black people making up just 8% of the city's population. The number of Black victims was down from the 75 recorded over the same stretch in 2025, even as the citywide homicide count fell from 192 to 162 during that same window, the Times reported. Latino victims numbered 72 through mid-September, down from 82 a year earlier, while white victims fell from 28 to 22 and victims listed as Asian, Middle Eastern or other dropped from 7 to 6, per the same analysis.
A South LA Patrol Area Bucking the Citywide Trend
Nowhere is the disparity sharper than in the LAPD's 77th patrol area, which covers South Los Angeles around Florence Boulevard. The area recorded 20 killings through mid-September, and Black residents — who make up roughly one-third of the area's population — accounted for 12 of those deaths, the Times found. Citywide, the Southeast, 77th Street and Newton police divisions lead Los Angeles in homicides, according to the paper's reporting.
Experts told the Times there likely will not be one simple explanation for why overall killings have fallen so sharply while the racial gap among victims has not closed. They said disparities in healthcare, jobs and housing access are thought to affect crime rates in communities of color, and cautioned that the precise cause of the broader decline may not be fully understood for years.
The Man Working to Stop the Next Killing
The persistence of violence in neighborhoods like Hyde Park was made brutally literal on Aug. 6, when 51-year-old Reginald Foreman was shot and killed while working with a 2nd Call team on weed abatement near 59th Place and Crenshaw Boulevard, according to ABC7. Foreman — known to friends as Big Ant or BA, per the Times — grew up in South Los Angeles and joined the Rollin' 100 Crips as a teenager before later attending truck-driving school and becoming a gang interventionist. His sister, Aimee Johnson, said he changed after the birth of his first child, and he went on to have five children of his own, the Times reported.
Foreman was hired in June 2026 by Skipp Townsend, who founded the violence-intervention nonprofit 2nd Call and had known Foreman for nearly three decades. At 2nd Call, Foreman worked to resolve gang conflicts and clean up neighborhoods, including on the Destination Crenshaw revitalization project, and was working at a vacant lot near Crenshaw Avenue and 60th Street at the time he was shot, according to the Times. Townsend has said homicides often arise from arguments, unpaid debts or social-media insults rather than any grand scheme.
Witnesses told investigators a masked youth opened fire on Foreman and another 2nd Call worker that day, the Times reported. Police have announced no arrests and have not offered a motive for the shooting. The killing occurred in the Hyde Park neighborhood of South Los Angeles.
A Second Loss for a Small Nonprofit
Foreman's death marked the second fatal shooting of a 2nd Call activist in two months, following the killing of Eric Washington at a Fourth of July party in Compton, as reported by CBS News Los Angeles. The organization had operated for 20 years without losing an employee to violence before this year, according to the Times. 2nd Call posted a tribute to Foreman after his death, per FOX 11 Los Angeles.
Citywide Numbers Tell a Different Story
The LAPD's citywide crime profile recorded 238 homicide offenses from the start of 2026 through Oct. 17, down 13.8% from 276 during the same period in 2025, according to the Los Angeles Police Department's own data. The city recorded 230 homicides in all of 2025, its fewest since 1966, the Times previously reported.
The decline isn't unique to Los Angeles. Homicides are down in most large U.S. cities.
Political Fight Over Who Gets Credit
The crime numbers have become fodder in Los Angeles politics. Mayor Karen Bass, speaking Monday at a news conference outside the Van Nuys police station, said she has increased and expanded gang intervention and youth development programs and that funding for alternative response initiatives has tripled during her tenure. Bass said those alternative programs have begun integration into the city's emergency response system, and argued that racial disparities among homicide victims underscore the importance of prevention and intervention work. The city has also opened an Office of Community Safety to support gang interventionists, who help defuse neighborhood conflicts before they escalate into violence.
Bass has leaned on the crime drop in her campaign messaging more heavily than her mayoral challenger, City Councilmember Nithya Raman, according to the Times. Raman has said she would expand the mayor's community safety office to oversee unarmed crisis response and other city agencies, and has proposed weekly reviews of the LAPD, Fire Department and other agencies in which officials would present current performance data, identify system failures and commit to time-bound fixes. Raman has also discussed replacing LAPD Chief Jim McDonnell, though she has not specified when or whom she would choose, the Times reported. Both candidates have advocated hiring more gang intervention workers and investing further in alternatives to policing, including unarmed response for calls involving mental illness, homelessness and drug addiction.
Separately, city officials this week touted a 47% drop in homicides — a reduction of 161 deaths — comparing the four years from October 2022 to October 2026, according to City News Service. None of those tallies change the reality facing families like Foreman's, who are still waiting for answers about why a man who spent his days trying to stop violence became one more name on the list.
