State Sen. Scott Wiener told Reddit this week that the collapse in San Francisco auto burglaries is partly a result of the state law he wrote to close the "locked door loophole." But the sharpest decline landed in 2024, and his law didn't take effect until Jan. 1, 2025.

Auto burglaries really have plunged — SFPD logged a 22-year low in 2024, roughly half the prior year's total. That drop is one of the few unambiguous good-news crime stories in the city. The question is who gets to claim it. Wiener's SB 905 is a real change to California law, but the timeline and the prosecution data complicate the causal story he offered to a Reddit thread that drew more than 1,100 upvotes: the biggest single-year fall happened before the statute was on the books, and only a handful of cases have actually been charged under it.

In a widely upvoted post (external source, opens in a new tab) on the r/sanfrancisco forum, Wiener said break-ins had cratered and pointed, in part, to Senate Bill 905 — his 2024 measure ending the requirement that prosecutors prove a car was locked before charging someone with auto burglary.

That requirement was a genuine obstacle. Under the old statute, a smashed window alone wasn't enough; prosecutors had to establish the vehicle was locked, which often meant the owner had to appear in court to testify. District Attorney Brooke Jenkins made the argument publicly, telling KQED in 2023 that even with an eyewitness, her office "could be required to dismiss the case" absent an owner willing to swear the doors were locked. SB 905 makes evidence of forcible entry sufficient to charge the crime.

Gov. Gavin Newsom signed it on Aug. 16, 2024, as part of the Senate's "Safer California Plan." But as Wiener's own press release (external source, opens in a new tab) spells out, those laws did not become enforceable until the first day of 2025. The same release nods to progress city officials had already made in cutting break-ins — a decline underway before the statute existed.

Here's the timeline the post skips. Reported break-ins peaked around 28,500 in 2017 and were still around 18,400 in 2023. In 2024 — the year before the bill took effect — they fell more than 50%, to roughly 8,500, which SFist reported (external source, opens in a new tab) as a 22-year low. The city's own account credits enforcement, not the statute: SFPD's expansion of bait cars, drones and automated license-plate readers beginning in fall 2023, a campaign City Hall announced (external source, opens in a new tab) under then-Mayor London Breed. By February 2025, monthly reports were down to 457.

So the single largest drop — the one behind the plunging chart Wiener shared — happened while his law was still months from taking effect.

Then there's whether the law does the work once it is on the books. An analysis by Llewellyn Jones for Investigative Economics (external source, opens in a new tab), built on DataSF records, found most auto burglaries are still charged under the old section 459 — the statute containing the loophole — rather than the new section 465. More than 80% ran through 459 in 2021; 88% still did in 2025. As of that review, DataSF showed just seven cases charged under the new law. Conviction rates under the old statute, meanwhile, had long tracked those for non-auto burglaries — 40% to 60% — suggesting the loophole shaped which cases got filed more than whether they were won.

None of this makes SB 905 pointless. Closing a real evidentiary hurdle can matter at the margins, particularly for visitors who can't return to testify, and the law is barely a year old. But saying the decline is "in part" the result of the new law invites readers to pin a policy win on a fall that the calendar says was mostly finished before the policy existed. Wiener's office did not respond to a request for comment before publication.

The break-in numbers are a rare bright spot. The credit for them is still contested — and the author of a bill is not a neutral scorekeeper of it.