How high is the crime rate in Fresno? Police department’s stats appear to match US trend
The crime rate in Fresno was down in 2023, matching a decline nationally, statistics show.
The number of intentional homicides in Fresno fell to 35, which was down 43.3% from the previous year and less than half the grim high of 74 in 2021 and 2020, numbers from the Fresno Police Department show.
The number of shootings also declined to 359 last year, according to Fresno police, from 449 the previous year, a drop of about 20%.
The decreases in homicides and shootings had the added benefit of freeing up Fresno police to investigate more thoroughly, Fresno Chief Paco Balderrama said.
“When your clearance goes up, justice is being executed,” he said Friday during a news conference flanked by Mayor Jerry Dyer. “There’s no need for a retaliation shooting, and it really helps us all the way across.”
Stats for killings, rapes, robberies in Fresno
The 34 killings the city recorded through Friday had all been cleared by detectives. Balderrama said arrests had been made in all of those cases and charges had been filed by the Fresno County District Attorney’s Office in each.
The city’s 35th homicide, a stabbing, came on Sunday. Police have not announced an arrest in that case.
Fresno police cleared 83% of intentional homicides in 2022 and 73% the year before. They cleared 38% of the murders in 2020, their numbers show.
The number of rapes reported in 2023 declined by 18.8%, as did the number of robberies, which fell by 8.3%.
Commercial burglaries were down by 44.2% while 25.1% fewer homes were burglarized in 2023.
Both Balderrama and Dyer noted non-police violence prevention plays a part in crime reduction, pointing to groups like Advance Peace and the Boys and Girls Club.
“Crime doesn’t increase or decease simply by the efforts of the police department,” Dyer said. “It really is about the community.”
The drop in crimes locally and nationally fly in the face of the perception, according to a recent Gallup poll that said 77% of Americans said they believed crime was worse nationally than the prior year. A majority (55%) said the same thing about their local area
More Fresno officers
Fresno Police Department reached 859 sworn officers in 2023, which Balderrama credited for the decline in crime when he spoke on Friday. That’s 278 more officers hired since Balderrama was hired in 2021.
Scholarly research does not necessarily agree with that take. Some studies find no correlation between police spending and a decrease in violent crime.
But crime has declined nationally with major cities reporting declines among the highest on record, according to nationally recognized analyst and independent criminologist Jeff Asher, who analyzed statistics from 175 agencies with public data.
The intentional homicide rate was down 13% nationally.
Seven of the eight crimes tracked by the FBI in the Uniform Crime Report trended down this year nationally, he wrote. Only car theft was up.
“The quarterly data in particular suggests 2023 featured one of the lowest rates of violent crime in the United States in more than 50 years,” Asher wrote.
