About California Crime with Amy Jean
California Crime with Amy Jean is a narrative storytelling true-crime podcast built around a simple belief: the people at the center of these stories should never be lost in the telling of them.
As a consumer of true crime, I began to feel that empathy for the people involved in these cases was slowly being stripped away. Real lives were too often overshadowed by sensationalism, and somewhere along the way, it seemed we were becoming desensitized to the fact that these stories happened to real people.
I started thinking about the kind of true-crime content I wanted to consume. I wanted someone to tell me a story—but with a victim-centered and compassionate approach. I wanted deeply researched episodes grounded in credible sources, records, and original documents. And I wanted to go beyond simply telling people about crimes that happened in their communities by providing information that might help them prevent crime, recognize risks, and better protect themselves and the people around them.
Deep Dives. Real Lives. Stories Told with Compassion. is more than a tagline. It is a shortened version of the philosophy behind California Crime with Amy Jean.
Deep Dives means doing the research and taking the time to understand the story beyond the headlines. Real Lives is a reminder that the names in these cases belong to three-dimensional human beings—not characters in a story. And Stories Told with Compassion means extending what I think of as the Compassion Pass: the understanding that human beings and their circumstances are complicated, and that reducing someone to a single decision, moment, mistake, or label rarely helps us understand what happened.
Compassion does not mean ignoring wrongdoing or withholding facts. It means telling those facts without forgetting the humanity of the people involved.
With every episode we produce, we hope to live up to that philosophy.
Deep Dives. Real Lives. Stories Told with Compassion.
- Amy Jean
Host & Producer
California Crime with Amy Jean is hosted and produced by Amy Jean Alvarado, a former public safety and law enforcement dispatcher with more than a decade of experience taking emergency calls. Her work behind the scenes during emergencies and critical incidents continues to inform the way she approaches the stories covered by CCAJ and serves as a constant reminder that behind every call for service, case number, court record, and headline are real people whose lives have been forever changed.
As host and producer, Amy researches, writes, and narrates each episode, drawing from public records, court documents, contemporary reporting, interviews, and other primary and credible sources to reconstruct each story as fully and thoughtfully as possible.
Her years spent listening to people during some of the most difficult moments of their lives ultimately shaped the philosophy behind California Crime with Amy Jean: facts matter, details matter, context matters but so does humanity.
The mission was never really about crime.
It was always about people.
Sound Engineer
Josh Alvarado is the sound engineer behind California Crime with Amy Jean. A musician, audio engineer, and producer since 2003, Josh holds a degree in Music Technology and has produced work across a wide range of musical genres.
For CCAJ, Josh brings more than two decades of experience in music and audio production to the recording and technical production of the podcast, helping shape the sound of each episode and creating the space in which its stories can be heard.
