Methodology

Purpose

The Oakland Homicide Clearance Tracker is a public 2026 dashboard for monitoring whether homicide victims in Oakland have public arrest and charge updates. 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.

• Traffic-collision deaths are excluded unless authorities classify the killing as murder or nonnegligent manslaughter.
• Fatal police shootings are excluded from both the tracked victim total and 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.

Sources and Limits

The tracker is built from public reporting, Oakland Police Department data, and court-adjacent public records. Because public sources can lag, the tracker may temporarily miss recent homicides, arrests, charging decisions, dismissals, or corrections.

A reported arrest is not a finding of guilt, and a case can change status as public information changes.