SAN JOSE – Amanda Estantino routinely works long hours to get to the bottom of San Jose’s most violent crimes. It isn’t unheard of for her to go two days without heading home.
“We’re tenacious like that, and we and everybody cares from the beginning, so we’re not playing catch-up. So we’re able to follow the lead, do the 48-hour investigation,” she said, referring to the crucial investigative window immediately after a killing. “Everybody wants to be here.”
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The San Jose-raised homicide detective is a member of an investigative unit that has achieved a 100% clearance rate for the past three full years, solving 35, 36, and 29 homicides in 2022, 2023 and 2024 respectively. In 2025, with 18 homicide cases to date through Thursday, the department is reporting a 100% rate.
But Estantino, who has been with the San Jose Police Department for 12 years — three in the homicide division — doesn’t fixate on stats.
“We don’t see it as 100%. We see it as hard work, dedication, hours and hours of work, and then it leads to the 100%,” Estantino said. “People want to solve the homicide. It’s the most dangerous and most shocking of the cases that we investigate.”
The homicide clearance rate is extraordinary for a city that hovers around 1 million residents. San Jose does have some not-so-big-city characteristics working in its favor, like a modest homicide frequency: The city has not tallied 50 killings in a single year in over three decades.
Even then, San Jose’s clearance rate still stands out among peer cities both in the Bay Area and across the country. Nationally, just over 50 percent of homicides get cleared, according to statistics maintained by the FBI.
San Francisco also boasts a high rate, with clearance figures of 85%, 94% and 94% between 2022 and 2024, while Oakland has posted clearance rates of 35%, 50%, and 64% in that same stretch, according to figures provided by those cities’ police departments.
“I think our high clearance rate means that we’re doing something right. I think it means that we as a department are taking these cases seriously,” said Lt. John Barg, the SJPD homicide commander and a veteran of the unit. “I think it’s a reflection of the support we have from our community, because we do and we’re fortunate to work in a city that really supports its law enforcement and prioritizes crime reduction.”
A case clearance isn’t as definitive as it might appear: It simply means that someone has been arrested, or formally identified, in connection with a crime. Most of those arrested are criminally charged, and many are convicted, but that is not a requirement for a clearance. A small percentage of cases are deemed cleared through “exceptional means” when a suspect is identified but leaves the country, is otherwise deemed unfindable, or dies. From 2022 through this year, none of San Jose’s clearances were exceptional declarations, after recording one in 2021 and two in 2020.
Jillian Snider, a former veteran NYPD police officer who is now a Resident Senior Fellow at the R Street Institute in Washington, D.C. and a lecturer at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, said while a homicide clearance rate is not definitive, she aligns with Barg in what it means broadly.
“I urge people to not think of clearance rates as the … definition of good policing, but it is one of our main metrics in which we quantifiably measure police,” Snider said. “But when you’re in a community that has relatively lower rates of violent crime than the national average, that neighborhood itself will have a higher level of collective efficacy. The neighborhood cares about itself.”
Snider recently published a research paper analyzing middling case clearances in police agencies across the country, including for homicides, and outlining the challenges that get in the way. The biggest problems she identified are areas where San Jose seems to be doing relatively well.
“If you don’t have willing participation, you don’t have enough evidence or corroboration to effect an arrest. And that’s one of the biggest issues that you see in metropolitan areas that are seeing horrible clearance rates because no one wants to talk to police because they don’t trust them,” Snider said. “You have a big difference in the relationship between the police and the community in San Jose than you do in other jurisdictions where there’s more contention.”
Estantino emphasizes that information is a two-way street.
“When it comes to the general public, they’re very trusting of us, you know, I think because we’re very open to them too,” she said. “We want to provide an answer to the (victim’s) family, to the public, and to ourselves as to what happened so we can prevent this from occurring again, and to provide justice.”
Jeff Levine, a past president of the Roosevelt Park Neighborhood Association and a longtime resident, affirmed the strong relationships between his community and patrol officers and commanders that have been built over the years.
“They welcome and encourage people to work with them and be their eyes and ears,” he said. “It’s a partnership. Police can’t do it on their own, certainly not with the limited number of officers that they have.”
Homicides in San Jose involve a typical mix of personal disputes, gang conflicts and domestic and family violence. Very few are random attacks between strangers. The vast majority are committed with guns.
San Jose also has a manageable homicide caseload compared to similarly sized cities. Snider dryly points out that “it’s easier to close 100% of your cases when you don’t have that many cases to begin with.”
Barg and Estantino also credit the police department’s longstanding rotation system, which temporarily moves aspirational officers out of patrol and into investigative units, yielding a diverse skill set for many. Estantino added that numerous cases benefit from cross-pollination of information from other detective units like gangs and robbery.
“Patrol is the nucleus of San Jose PD. If they don’t get it right from the beginning, then we’re running around trying to figure it out late, or too late,” she said. “Everybody touches a case. It goes out like a spider web.”
Snider says it’s important for the public to keep in mind what a homicide clearance tells for the larger public safety picture, and perhaps more importantly, what it doesn’t.
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“They hear ‘case cleared or ‘case closed,’ and they assume the bad guy got arrested, the prosecutor got it, the judge found them guilty, and they’re going to prison for the rest of their lives,” she said. “In reality, you know that of all arrests made, barely around 10% of them actually see trial. Most of them are pled out way earlier. Homicides, of course, are a little different than your standard crime and those obviously take a lot longer … People just need to understand that 100% clearance does not mean 100% guilty verdicts in court.”
Tracking how many of the homicide arrests in San Jose’s three-year 100% window have resulted in convictions is challenging in part because homicide prosecutions often take years to complete, and don’t often end within the same calendar year of the killing. Some homicides aren’t charged as murder or manslaughter cases, such as a July arson death ruled to have been reckless and deadly negligence, further obscuring a definitive number.
One big factor working in their favor is that homicide investigations are highly prioritized in a police department, meaning they are treated with diligence that is typically more likely to yield convictions.
To Barg, the clearance rate is an affirmation of the unit’s foundational goals.
“It’s the most tragic thing to happen to someone’s family. It’s the kind of case we need to invest the most time and resources into,” he said. “And when we’re solving nearly all of those, I think it means that we’re putting our priorities in the right place.”