When Stocktonia approached Stockton Police to ask whether going without a single homicide in all of October was a record, the staff did a little research and found that there hadn’t been a murder-free month in the city since October, 2022.
Well, officers have dug a little deeper and concluded they had gone even longer without a month in which there was not a single homicide than they initially thought.
Now, the last month without a killing was January, 2019. That’s seven years — not the even four years that police calculated at first.
“We actually just found a clerical error on our part,” explained a police spokesperson, Officer David Scott. “October 2022 is when we thought it was the last month in Stockton without a homicide. There was actually a shooting incident that occurred in that month, but it was later reclassified as a homicide the following week.”
That would have been November, not October.
Going into November, 2026 was already shaping up as a quieter year when it come to homicides. There had been 23 so far this year compared to 33 over the first 10 months of 2025 –a 30% reduction.
The last homicide in Stockton occurred Sept. 26. A 17-year-old boy was discovered fatally wounded with a gunshot wound near north Sutter and east Flora streets. He was rushed to a hospital where he was pronounced dead.