Poor Mojo's Newswire

But perhaps the most telling statistic is OPD's solve rate — known in criminal justice circles as the clearance rate — for homicides. According to the department's Criminal Investigations Division's annual management report, OPD investigators solved and prosecuted just 32 of the 110 homicide cases of 2011, or a clearance rate of 29 percent. Similarly, OPD posted a 30 percent clearance rate in 2010, when investigators sent 27 of the 90 murders that year to the Alameda County District Attorney's Office for prosecution. This is a decrease from 2009's clearance rate of 43 percent, when OPD investigators arrested and prosecuted individuals in 47 of the 109 homicides that year.

"People are literally free to kill again if they want," said Eugene O'Donnell, a professor of criminology at the City University of New York-John Jay and a former NYPD lieutenant, after being told about OPD's low clearance rate for homicides. "There's nothing more undermining to a community's sense of order," he added, referring to how Oakland's high number of unsolved murders contributes to the distrust of police prevalent in the city's impoverished neighborhoods, already heightened by The Riders scandal and recent officer-involved shootings.

By comparison, the San Francisco Police Department's homicide unit posted a 52 percent clearance rate in 2011 and a 64 percent clearance rate for this year to date. The California Department of Justice's report on 2010 homicides put the statewide clearance rate for homicides at 63.8 percent for that year.