Well, the bad news is still that we've hit a 12 year high for homicides in the City and County of San Francisco, with two weeks left to go in the year. On the statistical side, though, the SFPD year to date murder count has moved down by three victims, from 100 to 97.

What happened to those three victims? Well, they're not any less dead, unfortunately. Rather, three of them were reclassified into non-murders. Namely, one victim's death was reclassified as a justifiable homicide (he attacked his girlfriend, who then killed him in self-defense), one double homicide has been redesignated as a domestic murder-suicide (so the murder stays on the homicide list but the suicide victim drops off the list), and the SF State student (at right) that the cops originally thought had been murdered after attending a party has been reclassified as an accidental death, possibly as a result of a bad LSD trip.

If you follow the SF Crime Blog, their murder count for the YTD reached a high of 101. That's because they're counting the Hayes Valley death of Hughes de la Plaza as a murder (at number 56). The SFPD still hasn't decided one way or the other where to classify de la Plaza's death.