Fresno Homicides Double in 2026, Outpacing Last Year's Early Figures

Nine homicides in fewer than three months. That is where Fresno stands as of March 23, compared with four at the same point in 2025, a year-over-year doubling that has drawn immediate concern from law enforcement and community leaders.

The spike comes at a jarring moment for a city that had been celebrating a historic public safety turnaround. Fresno recorded 22 homicides for the full year in 2025, bettering the previous five-decade low of 23 set in 1974. The department attributed much of that decline to fewer gang-related homicides, which fell from 22 to nine in 2025. The early 2026 numbers threaten to erode that hard-won progress before spring even arrives.

The city's downward trend had drawn statewide notice. In his state of the state address, Gov. Gavin Newsom declared that "California cities are seeing record-low homicide rates," singling out Oakland as having its lowest figure since 1967, Los Angeles since 1966, and San Francisco since 1954. Fresno was also among the cities CalMatters identified as showing declining homicides over the past three years. In Los Angeles, the improvement was especially striking: homicides dropped by more than 18% to 230 in 2025, according to a Los Angeles Times analysis of LAPD data.

The national picture offers some wider context. After a spike during the early days of the pandemic, homicides are down nationwide, though crime researchers characterize the causes as "multifactorial." Magnus Lofstrom, policy director of criminal justice at the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California, pointed to the disruption of civic infrastructure as a driver of the earlier surge. "Schools were shut down, people were out of work, community-based programs for violence prevention and many basic public services were put on pause," Lofstrom said.

Whether Fresno's early-2026 figure signals a genuine reversal or a statistical anomaly within a still-improving long-run trend remains an open question. Fresno recorded just 22 homicides in 2025, representing a 70% drop from 2020. Year-to-date counts through March can swing sharply based on a cluster of incidents, and a city of roughly 552,000 residents can see meaningful percentage swings from a small number of cases.

Any comparison also carries an important caveat: crime data in California is not uniformly collected. Law enforcement agencies self-report to the FBI under the Uniform Crime Reporting Program, and the California Department of Justice then compiles statewide figures from those submissions. Not every department reports its full data, and some jurisdictions count only crimes that result in incarceration, making direct comparisons across cities and across years imprecise.

Fresno Police Chief Mindy Casto, marking her first full year at the helm of the department, had been celebrating a historic milestone: the city's lowest murder rate in over half a century. How she and Mayor Jerry Dyer respond to the early 2026 count, and whether the pace holds as the warmer months arrive, will determine whether Fresno's hard-fought safety gains survive the year intact.