Kern County recorded 5,968 violent crimes and 17,416 property crimes in 2025, according to the California Department of Justice. Violent crime fell 4.9% from 2024 and property crime fell 13.1%, but the county’s violent crime rate of 644 per 100,000 residents remains roughly 49% above the statewide rate of 433. One city of nearly 20,000 people filed no data at all.
Kern County had an estimated population of 927,068 as of 1 July 2025. Policing is split: the Kern County Sheriff’s Office (ORI CA0150000) covers unincorporated Kern plus contract areas, with an FBI-reported service population of 298,272 for 2025, while eleven independently staffed city and district police departments reported separately in 2025 — Bakersfield, Delano, Ridgecrest, California City, Shafter, Taft, Tehachapi, Wasco, McFarland, Bear Valley and Stallion Springs. Arvin Police Department still exists as a reporting agency but submitted no data for 2025. Maricopa Police Department disbanded in September 1997 and its statistics have been folded into the Sheriff’s Office totals ever since. This page uses data years 2019 through 2025 from the July 2026 release of CA DOJ’s Crimes & Clearances dataset, with homicide cross-checks against the FBI Crime Data Explorer.
Violent Crime in Kern County
| Year | Violent total | Homicide | Rape | Robbery | Aggravated assault |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2019 | 5,567 | 84 | 455 | 1,238 | 3,790 |
| 2020 | 6,216 | 116 | 331 | 1,190 | 4,579 |
| 2021 | 6,718 | 124 | 355 | 1,249 | 4,990 |
| 2022 | 6,687 | 101 | 293 | 1,276 | 5,017 |
| 2023 | 7,574 | 71 | 416 | 1,183 | 5,904 |
| 2024 | 6,274 | 72 | 434 | 964 | 4,804 |
| 2025 | 5,968 | 61 | 353 | 938 | 4,616 |
Source: California Department of Justice, Crimes and Clearances with Arson 1985–2025 (data years 2019–2025).
Kern County’s 2025 violent crime rate was 644 per 100,000 residents, against 433 per 100,000 for California as a whole.
Source: CA DOJ, Crimes and Clearances with Arson 1985–2025 (data year 2025); rates calculated using U.S. Census Bureau population estimates, 1 July 2025.
Aggravated assault accounts for 77% of Kern’s violent crime total, so the county-level trend is effectively the assault trend. Robbery is the category that has fallen furthest, from 1,276 in 2022 to 938 in 2025. Because two agencies changed reporting status during the comparison window, a like-for-like count across the fifteen agencies that filed complete data in both 2024 and 2025 gives 6,199 violent crimes in 2024 against 5,875 in 2025, a decline of 5.2% — close to the headline figure. Clearance rates were 40.9% for violent crime and 12.1% for property crime in 2025, with 48 of the county’s 61 homicides cleared.
Source: CA DOJ, Crimes and Clearances with Arson 1985–2025 (data years 2024–2025).
Property Crime & Commercial Burglary
| Year | Property total | Burglary | Non-residential burglary | Vehicle theft | Larceny-theft |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2019 | 29,604 | 7,595 | 4,537 | 5,883 | 16,126 |
| 2020 | 27,890 | 6,358 | 4,201 | 7,537 | 13,995 |
| 2021 | 29,208 | 5,507 | 3,839 | 8,843 | 14,858 |
| 2022 | 29,542 | 6,444 | 4,653 | 9,061 | 14,037 |
| 2023 | 24,740 | 5,191 | 3,539 | 8,012 | 11,537 |
| 2024 | 20,052 | 4,289 | 2,786 | 5,751 | 10,012 |
| 2025 | 17,416 | 3,539 | 2,151 | 4,030 | 9,847 |
Source: California Department of Justice, Crimes and Clearances with Arson 1985–2025 (data years 2019–2025).
Non-residential burglary in Kern County fell to 2,151 offences in 2025, down 22.8% from 2,786 in 2024 and down 52.6% from 4,537 in 2019.
Source: CA DOJ, Crimes and Clearances with Arson 1985–2025 (data years 2019, 2024 and 2025).
Non-residential burglary is the category that maps most directly onto commercial premises, and it has more than halved in six years. Two caveats sit behind the county figure. Vehicle theft fell 29.9% in a single year, from 5,751 to 4,030, which is large enough to warrant a reporting-artifact check; it survives that check, because the decline is broad-based rather than concentrated in one agency — Bakersfield Police fell 29.3% and the Sheriff’s Office 27.3% — and statewide vehicle theft fell 25.2% over the same period, from 166,319 to 124,488. The second caveat is a genuine outlier: Union Pacific Railroad’s Kern County police agency reported 148 non-residential burglaries in 2025 against 69 in 2024, a 114.5% rise on rail property that runs against every other agency in the county and should be treated as a reporting change rather than a trend.
Source: CA DOJ, Crimes and Clearances with Arson 1985–2025 (data years 2024–2025), agency-level records for Bakersfield, Kern Co. Sheriff’s Department and Union Pacific RR – Kern; statewide totals from the same dataset.
City-by-City Comparison Within the County
| Agency | Population (2025) | Violent | Violent per 100k | Property | Property per 100k | Non-residential burglary |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bakersfield PD | 422,165 | 2,081 | 493 | 9,400 | 2,227 | 1,161 |
| Delano PD | 52,334 | 167 | 319 | 345 | 659 | 17 |
| Ridgecrest PD | 28,333 | 159 | 561 | 238 | 840 | 8 |
| California City PD | 13,300 | 68 | 511 | 179 | 1,346 | 6 |
| Kern Co. Sheriff’s Office | 298,272 | 3,139 | — | 5,906 | — | 772 |
| Arvin PD | 19,820 | no data filed | — | no data filed | — | no data filed |
Source: CA DOJ, Crimes and Clearances with Arson 1985–2025 (data year 2025); city populations from U.S. Census Bureau QuickFacts, estimates of 1 July 2025; Sheriff’s Office service population from FBI Crime Data Explorer (2025). Rates are calculated, not published. No rate is shown for the Sheriff’s Office because its service population is reported on a different basis from city populations and covers unincorporated areas and contract jurisdictions.
Bakersfield carries the county’s property crime burden in absolute terms — 9,400 of the county’s 17,416 property crimes, and 1,161 of its 2,151 non-residential burglaries. Per resident, however, Ridgecrest and California City both record higher violent crime rates than Bakersfield, and Delano records the lowest of the four. Arvin, a city of 19,820, is absent from the 2025 dataset entirely; its crimes are not redistributed to another agency, so every county total on this page understates Kern by whatever Arvin experienced.
Homicide: Two Government Sources, Two Counts
| Agency | Year | CA DOJ count | FBI CDE count |
|---|---|---|---|
| Kern Co. Sheriff’s Office | 2023 | 34 | 34 |
| Kern Co. Sheriff’s Office | 2024 | 40 | 40 |
| Kern Co. Sheriff’s Office | 2025 | 26 | 27 |
| Bakersfield PD | 2023 | 29 | 29 |
| Bakersfield PD | 2024 | 28 | 28 |
| Bakersfield PD | 2025 | 33 | 33 |
Source: California Department of Justice, Crimes and Clearances with Arson 1985–2025 (data years 2023–2025); Federal Bureau of Investigation, Crime Data Explorer, summarised agency offences for ORI CA0150000 and ORI CA0150200 (data years 2023–2025).
For five of these six agency-years the two governments agree exactly. For the Sheriff’s Office in 2025 they do not: CA DOJ records 26 homicides and the FBI records 27. Neither figure is wrong. The two systems are different collections — CA DOJ’s Crimes and Clearances is a summary monthly return under California Penal Code sections 13010–13012, while the FBI’s figure comes from incident-based NIBRS submissions — and a single case reclassified between willful homicide and another category, or recorded in a different month, is enough to separate them by one. The county-wide DOJ total was 61 homicides in 2025, down from 72 in 2024, and 33 of the 61 were in Bakersfield. Anyone citing a Kern homicide count should name the collection it came from and the year it covers.
What the Data Means for Local Businesses
- Commercial burglary risk has fallen faster than violent crime risk. Non-residential burglary is down 52.6% since 2019, while violent crime is up 7.2% since 2019. A premises-security decision based on burglary trends alone will read the county as improving; one based on assault exposure to staff and customers will not.
- Where you are inside Kern matters more than the county average. Bakersfield holds 54% of county property crime, but Ridgecrest and California City record higher violent crime per resident. A county-level rate of 644 per 100,000 is not a useful planning number for a single site.
- Only about one property crime in eight is cleared. The 2025 property clearance rate was 12.1%, against 40.9% for violent crime. For a business, that means the realistic value of security spending sits in deterrence and evidence quality rather than in recovery after the fact.
Methodology — How These Figures Were Compiled
Every figure on this page was retrieved directly from the publishing agency in September 2026. Sources used:
- CA DOJ, Crimes and Clearances with Arson 1985–2025 (July 2026 release) — agency-level counts of violent crime, homicide, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, property crime, burglary, residential and non-residential burglary, vehicle theft, larceny-theft and clearances. All Kern county and agency counts and all statewide totals on this page come from this dataset.
- CA DOJ, Crimes and Clearances data context document (revised June 2026) — the agency-specific data characteristics and limitations list, used for the submission-gap check below.
- FBI Crime Data Explorer — summarised agency offences and clearances by ORI, used to cross-check homicide counts and to establish the Sheriff’s Office service population.
- U.S. Census Bureau QuickFacts — population estimates of 1 July 2025 (vintage 2025) for Kern County, California, Bakersfield, Delano, Ridgecrest, California City, Arvin and Wasco.
Rates per 100,000 are calculated, not published: DOJ counts divided by Census population estimates for the matching year. Because the county counts exclude Arvin while the county population estimate includes its 19,820 residents, the county rates shown here are marginally conservative.
Agency verification. Every agency used was confirmed against the FBI’s ORI register for California before its data was included. All 22 law enforcement agencies attributed to Kern County carry the CA015 prefix, including the Sheriff’s Office (CA0150000), Bakersfield (CA0150200), Delano (CA0150300), Ridgecrest (CA0150600), California City (CA0151100) and Arvin (CA0150100). No same-named agency from another state or county entered the dataset.
Submission-gap check. CA DOJ’s limitations list names one Kern agency for 2025: Arvin Police Department did not report for January through December. The same document records that Arvin also filed nothing for 2024 and 2023, and that Wasco Police Department began reporting in June 2024, making Wasco’s 2024 figure a seven-month partial. Arvin’s absence is confirmed in the data itself — the agency appears through 2022 and not after. Because of this, no year since 2022 is complete for Kern at county level, and the year-over-year comparison in this page is anchored on the fifteen agencies that filed full years in both 2024 and 2025, excluding Arvin and Wasco from both sides: violent crime 6,199 to 5,875, property crime 19,836 to 17,140, non-residential burglary 2,780 to 2,140. The headline county totals are reproduced as DOJ publishes them, with Arvin missing.
Three things could not be obtained and are therefore absent rather than estimated. The Kern County District Attorney’s Office publishes no crime or homicide counts on its departmental pages, so the second homicide count used here is the FBI’s rather than the DA’s. The Kern County Sheriff’s Office 2025 annual report is published as a PDF whose text is not machine-readable, so no figure from it is cited. Further FBI Crime Data Explorer cross-checks beyond homicide were cut short by API rate limiting, so violent and property counts in this page rest on CA DOJ alone. No figure has been carried over from the previous version of this page without re-verification.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is crime going up or down in Kern County?
Down in the most recent year on both headline measures. Violent crime fell 4.9% from 2024 to 2025 and property crime fell 13.1%. Over the longer run the two diverge: violent crime is 7.2% above its 2019 level, while property crime is 41% below it.
Why do CA DOJ and the FBI report different homicide numbers for the Sheriff’s Office?
They are separate collections with separate rules. CA DOJ takes summary monthly returns; the FBI takes incident-based NIBRS submissions. For 2025 the two differ by one case for the Sheriff’s Office — 26 against 27 — and agree exactly for Bakersfield and for both agencies in 2023 and 2024.
Are the 2025 figures for Kern County complete?
No. Arvin Police Department, serving 19,820 residents, submitted no data for 2025, and CA DOJ names it in the limitations list for that year. Every county total on this page is therefore a floor rather than a full count.
Which part of the county has the most commercial burglary?
Bakersfield, with 1,161 of the county’s 2,151 non-residential burglaries in 2025. The Sheriff’s Office jurisdiction recorded 772, and no other agency reached 20 apart from Union Pacific Railroad’s 148, which is rail property and appears to reflect a reporting change.
Sources
- California Department of Justice, Criminal Justice Statistics Center — Crimes and Clearances with Arson 1985–2025, July 2026 release (openjustice.doj.ca.gov)
- California Department of Justice, Criminal Justice Statistics Center — Crimes and Clearances data context and agency limitations, revised June 2026 (openjustice.doj.ca.gov)
- California Department of Justice — Crime in California 2025, July 2026 edition (openjustice.doj.ca.gov)
- Federal Bureau of Investigation — Crime Data Explorer, agency offence and clearance summaries by ORI (cde.ucr.cjis.gov)
- U.S. Census Bureau — QuickFacts population estimates, vintage 2025 (census.gov)
- Kern County Sheriff’s Office — Annual Reports index (kernsheriff.org)
- Kern County District Attorney’s Office — departmental publications index (kerncounty.com)
More California County Crime Reports
This page is part of a series of sourced county-level crime reports covering Southern California. Each one is compiled the same way, directly from California Department of Justice data.
- Los Angeles County Crime Statistics: 2026 Report
- Orange County Crime Statistics: 2026 Report
- San Diego County Crime Statistics: 2026 Report
- San Bernardino County Crime Statistics: 2026 Report
- Riverside County Crime Statistics: 2026 Report
- Ventura County Crime Statistics: 2026 Report
- Santa Barbara County Crime Statistics: 2026 Report
All reports in this series are collected under California crime statistics.