Stanislaus County reports lowest number of homicides in over a decade. What’s behind drop?

A downward trend in homicides at the state and national levels is reflected in the Valley. Fresno and Stanislaus counties have seen a big drop in homicides in recent years, with the latter’s 2023 toll being the lowest in a decade.

Stanislaus County recorded 17 homicides in 2023, based on numbers provided by every law enforcement agency in the county. There were 27 in 2022, 26 in 2021 and 33 in 2020, according to the California Department of Justice’s data set. The highest number of homicides in the past decade was in 2017, when there were 41.

In the city of Fresno, there were 25 homicides in 2023 — down 43.3% from the previous year and less than half of the 74 reported in 2021 and 2020. The Fresno County Sheriff’s Office investigated 21 homicides — 13 of which were in its jurisdiction.

So between the two agencies, 46 homicides were investigated. By comparison, Fresno County recorded 83 homicides in 2022 and 87 in 2021. Previously, the lowest number of homicides recorded in the county in the past decade was 54, in 2018.

According to an NPR report, 2023 saw a 12.2% decline in murders nationwide compared to 2022. But the cause for declining rates of homicide and other violent crimes is uncertain. The news outlet’s report attributes it partially to improved policing. “In San Francisco, police there say they’ve been better at making arrests,” it says. ”... Baltimore voted for a new prosecutor who vowed to be tough on crime [and] the police say they are targeting violent hotspots ...”

Fresno Chief Paco Balderrama also attributes success to effective and preventive policing, saying case clearance rates played a part in the reducing number of murders. “When your clearance goes up, justice is being executed,” he said during a Dec. 29 news conference. “There’s no need for a retaliation shooting, and it really helps us all the way across.”

Stanislaus Sheriff’s Office boosts specialty teams

Stanislaus County Sheriff’s Office spokesman Sgt. Luke Schwartz said that from his perspective in local law enforcement, he can only theorize on what’s caused the decline in homicides. But he seems to agree with the NPR sources.

“We can attribute the decrease in annual homicide statistics to the hard work of the men and women in uniform who aim to make their communities safer,” Schwartz said. “The Sheriff’s Office has expanded and filled positions and specialty teams which have not been staffed before. Our investigations bureau are able to assume control of patrol cases more rapidly, they utilize information readily made available from crime analysts and then they aggressively pursue any and all leads to ensure timely arrest and prosecution.”

Staffing increases in the Sheriff’s Office’s Community Resource, Special Investigations and Major Crimes units were contributing factors as well, Schwartz said, as were increased efforts on threat assessment and “smart policing.” Smart policing, he said, means an increase in analytic analysis, increased patrols in “hot spots,” adjusting resources based on data and “conducting research and completing workups of suspects and locations.”

Though an increase in staffing is helping the Sheriff’s Office, it doesn’t explain why homicides are declining even in some communities where the number of police officers has been in decline, as the NPR report notes. This is true even in Modesto.

The Modesto Police Department has been having trouble recruiting and retaining officers, The Modesto Bee previously reported. Fifteen of the officers who left since 2020, left to work for the Sheriff’s Office — one of the top two agencies MPD officers left to go work for.

However, Modesto’s homicide rates have been falling as well. The city recorded 16 homicides in 2020, nine in 2021 and 10 in 2022. In 2023, it had eight.

This trend applied to other major U.S. cities. Minneapolis Police Department staffing decreased by almost 40% after George Floyd’s murder at the hands of officers in May 2020. Still, homicides in Minneapolis fell 8% from 2022 to 2023, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reported.

“The circumstances surrounding homicides have become less clear over time. The share of homicides with an ‘unknown’ circumstance doubled from 22% in 1985 to 43% in 2022,” reads a mid-2023 report by the Council on Criminal Justice, a nonpartisan group.

CCJ’s report also found that “murders in 30 large American cities declined by 9.4% in the first half of 2023 compared to the first half of 2022” and that If that trend continued through the end of 2023, the nation will have experienced one of the largest single-year homicide reductions in the era of modern record keeping.”

Data from CCJ for the second half of 2023 had not been published as of February 2024.

Sharing information, getting illegal guns off streets

Ivan Valencia, assistant chief of the Modesto Police Department, credited new technology and, like Schwartz, a recent increase in collaboration among the various agencies in Stanislaus County.

“There’s a lot of variables in place and a lot of things that are done very well,” said Valencia. “It’s a combination of different things. I do believe in this county, we work really well together with with all our public safety partners, whether it be federal, state, Sheriff’s Department and different police agencies where we do share a lot of information.”

Valencia said the way information is passed among agencies became much more efficient in recent years because of user-friendly database dashboards, accessible by all agencies, that include information from investigations down to beat-cop reports.

“In the past, we would need an analyst to go through different databases and even just the hassle of going from one database to another and entering a password oftentimes becomes an obstacle,” he said. “You (now) have a dashboard that can access all these different databases and actually centralize the information.”

Valencia credited software advancements, new license plate readers and recently acquired air support as contributing to the reduction in homicides. He also pointed out that an increased effort to get illegal guns off the streets was a big part of it.

“We identify an individual that has a perfect propensity for violence. We refocused our efforts on those people. And in the past, I think we did have a lot more gang violence, but there are people out there doing traffic stops, conducting interviews, talking to people and they get an awful lot of illegally possessed weapons off the streets,” Valencia said.

Guns remain weapon of choice in most homicides

Shootings remained the main method of homicide in Stanislaus County and for homicides investigated by the Merced County Sheriff’s Office. All but one of the homicides in the Modesto Police Department’s jurisdiction last year were the result of gun violence. Stabbings were most prevalent in domestic-violence homicides investigated by Stanislaus County’s law enforcement agencies and the Merced County Sheriff’s Office.

According to the CCJ report, 78% of homicides nationwide were committed with firearms — the highest proportion since 1980.

In the city of Merced, the homicide numbers are less consistent. The Merced Police Department reported eight homicides in 2023, up from six in 2022 but well below the 13 in 2021. That year was tied for first in number of homicides in the city in the last decade. Merced also had two years with only one homicide apiece: 2016 and 2018.

There also were no clear trends in Madera County Sheriff’s Office numbers, though homicides in its jurisdiction are historically less than 10 a year. It investigated seven in 2023, three in both 2022 and 2021 and four in 2020.

Several agencies in the region reported zero homicides for 2023, including the Newman and Oakdale police departments in Stanislaus County, the Ripon Police Department in San Joaquin County and the Sonora Police Department in Tuolumne County.