The Abridged version:
- Sacramento County had a substantial drop in homicides last year, and law enforcement agencies cleared them at a significantly higher rate.
- Large agencies statewide saw trends similar to the fewer homicides and higher rate of solved cases in Sacramento.
- Law enforcement officials said detectives had more time to revisit and solve cold cases, including a decades-old murder.
As the number of homicides plummeted in Sacramento County last year, the rate of murders solved shot up. Sacramento cops see a connection, as detectives had more time to focus on new — and reexamine old — cases, upping the clearance rate with each one solved.
Law enforcement agencies in the county documented 67 homicides in 2025 and recorded 62 homicide clearances, according to new data from the California Department of Justice. That’s the highest clearance rate the county has seen in 15 years.
The number of homicides fell by 20, or about 23%, from 2024 to 2025, the lowest number of homicides in at least 40 years.
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The two trends are related, local law enforcement officials said. Fewer homicides meant that detectives could spend more time on each one, increasing the chance of making an arrest. It also freed up more time to spend closing cold cases.
“A reduction in homicides creates an opportunity for our detectives to focus even more attention on each case,” said Sacramento police spokesperson Anthony Gamble.
A homicide is cleared when officers make an arrest and turn the suspect over to the court for prosecution. Homicides can also be counted as cleared if authorities have evidence to seek charges against someone who they cannot arrest due to circumstances outside their control, such as the death of the suspect.
The clearance rate is the number of clearances in a year divided by the number of homicides. Cases from previous years that get solved during the current year count toward the clearance rate.
Solving cold cases
One reason the clearance rate in Sacramento County was so high last year, officials said, was because detectives had time to solve old cases.
The city of Sacramento saw 42 homicides last year, and 30 of them were solved, Gamble said. The department also solved eight cases from previous years, boosting the clearance rate to more than 90%.
In one example, Sacramento police assigned a detective to look into an unsolved homicide from 1999 in Curtis Park. An intense investigation at the time did not turn up any leads. But the detective was able to identify a suspect and in October — 26 years after Alicia West was killed — authorities arrested 48-year-old Emil Ogg.
In another case, Sacramento sheriff’s deputies last year started looking again at the homicide of 22-year-old Octavio Rodriguez, who was shot and killed in December 2015 in South Sacramento. They were able to identify a suspect, Ignacio Navarrette. Deputies arrested him in July 2026.
Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office Sgt. Edward Igoe described looking at unsolved homicides as “re-digging through an old case that has already seen dozens of sets of eyes on it and then finding maybe that one small piece — ‘Hey, let’s dig into this a little bit more,’ and maybe it becomes fruitful.”
Homicides down statewide
Homicides were down across the state, and most of the state’s largest cities also saw an increase in their homicide clearance rates, state data shows. At the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office, a focus on pressuring gang members and confiscating their weapons, and an emphasis on community-oriented policing helped reduce some of the root causes of homicide, which contributed to the decline, Igoe said.
Both the city of Sacramento and the sheriff’s office employ three homicide teams. Homicide detectives are among each department’s most accomplished investigators.
Uncooperative witnesses are often the most common obstacle to solving a homicide case.
“Whether that’s out of fear of some type of retaliation, whether that’s out of, you know, ‘I ain’t no snitch’ type mindset, or whether or not they are maybe friends or acquaintances with the suspect or the victim or whatever it is, and they’re like, ‘Nope, I just don’t want to be involved with it’ – that’s probably the most difficult thing to get through,” Igoe said.
Surveillance assistance
Both Gamble and Igoe credited the increased prevalence of quality cameras posted throughout the county for helping provide evidence to solve homicide cases.
Igoe also cited license plate recognition technology as a factor in solving some cases. While that technology has proven controversial, Igoe said it lets detectives locate a suspect quickly, before evidence is destroyed.
Igoe gave an example of someone who saw a car with a particular plate leave a scene near Watt Avenue.
“I plug it into that technology and I can see, ‘Oh, hey, there he is. He’s at Watt and Auburn. He’s continuing northbound,’” Igoe said. “So now I can start getting deputies out there to try to locate the vehicle.”
Sacramento County coroner’s data and city police news releases do not suggest a significant increase in homicides so far this year. Igoe said the number of homicides investigated by the sheriff’s office “might be slightly higher than they were at this point last year.” Official data on homicides and clearance rates for 2026 will be released next year.
