Methodology

Purpose

The Oakland Homicide Clearance Tracker is a public 2026 dashboard for monitoring whether homicide victims in Oakland have a public arrest or charging update. It is meant to make homicide clearance easier to inspect in plain language, not to replace official police, prosecutor, court, or medical examiner records.

Counting Rules

The tracker counts one row per homicide victim. Multi-victim incidents share an incident ID and OPD case number when those are available. The public arrest rate is a victim-level proxy: a victim is counted as arrest-reported only when a public source reports an arrest tied to that homicide case. Cases with no clear public arrest report are counted as no public arrest or unknown.

• Fatal police shootings are not included in the arrest-rate calculation.
• Published homicide-count articles are used as reconciliation checkpoints, not as placeholder rows.
• Race and ethnicity are shown only when a credible source reports them directly.
• Charging updates are tracked separately from final conviction outcomes.

Sources And Limits

The tracker is built from public reporting, Oakland Police Department data, and court-adjacent public records. Police data helps check case numbers and dates, but it is not treated as a complete victim list by itself. Because public sources can lag, the tracker may temporarily miss recent homicides, arrests, charging decisions, dismissals, or corrections.

Public summaries avoid naming alleged perpetrators on the front page. A reported arrest is not a finding of guilt, and a case can change status as public information changes.

Maintainer

The tracker is maintained by Gabriel Lenz, Professor of Political Science at UC Berkeley. Problems, corrections, and suggestions can be filed in the public GitHub repo.