Stockton Killings Up, Underreported and Unsolved

I try to tell people, in this city with an underreported population by tens of thousands of legal residents, the true number of killings is never acknowledged.

Stockton officially had 35 homicides in 2009, which is lower than average in the past, but more than in 2008. The Record's report admitted they cut out many deaths for these numbers,

No one the police kill are ever tallied, even if the death hasn't been ruled "justifiable homicide", no "justifiable homicides" are counted, and no DUI killings are counted.

Seems to me, death by cop, justifiable homicide, and car crashes would be three of the biggest sources of death tolls, I mean, at this point we're just talking about cold blooded murder, involving no law enforcement, and no vehicles, and still, Stockton can get up to 1 a week, like in 2006, 2005, 2004, where 40 plus people fit the category.

For regional comparison, Stockon in 2009 was 35, the entire county was 52, with the second highest city Tracy with 5.

2009 saw some of the worst rates for law enforcement, only 10 of the 35 cold blooded, unjustified, non police, non vehicle murders led to any arrests.


So in Stockton, if you're murdered, there's a 71.5% chance the police will completley fail in catching the criminal.


My contetion is this, if the police can't solve over 70% of the murders, and Stockton is actually much larger in population than anyone will admit, with or without the illegal encampments I know exist, and can show you on a map. How can we trust the number is actually 35? If someone is killed, and you don't find the body, and the person never officially existed in Stockton to begin with, there is no stat, that person was and will ever remain a ghost.

And it is precisely those people on the fringe who are most likely to be involved in shady operations, who are most likely to be murdered. The undocumented illegal brothers, sisters, cousins, of documented legal immigrants. The ones who couldn't get legal status, so they can't work legally, living either in the encampments or with their legal relatives. Either way, they must work, so they do it illegally. And once one crosses the legality threshold, once the threat goes straight to deportation, there is no limit, and here come the drugs, prostitution, slave labor, sex slavery, and with these criminals, all ghosts in the machine, murder goes unnoticed, unchecked, undocumented, and unsolved, or perhaps obvious to those who knew the victim, but never officially reported.


I have recently been in discussion about the subjectivity of focusing on blocks of time such as years and decades, so to throw in one more unhappy stat, 16 of 2009's murders in San Joaquin county were in November and December, 8 each. This is double the average. 2010 isn't looking good.