Nor is it only large, high-crime cities. Murder clearance rates have been falling nationwide for half a century, according to FBI data compiled by the Murder Accountability Project. When you try to follow murder cases after the police declare them solved, the problem just gets bigger.
Data compiled by the Washington Post show that exceptional clearances have become relatively more important as arrest rates have continued to slide. Some cases are closed because the prime suspect is dead—for instance, if they commit suicide, are shot by police, or get murdered themselves. While some murder victims were undoubtedly involved in previous crimes, closing a case this way can leave lingering doubts.
There are no legal or national standards for clearing a murder this way, and deceased suspects cannot defend themselves. There is no national system for tracking prosecutions after police make an arrest, but the numbers we have are not reassuring.
In , the Bureau of Justice Statistics BJS conducted a survey of the 75 largest counties in the United States, which are collectively responsible for about half of all murders. One year after an arrest, only a third of murder charges had any kind of resolution whether a conviction or acquittal ; after two years, fewer than two-thirds were resolved. All this assumes for the sake of argument that people convicted of murder are always guilty, which they are not —for instance, a study of death penalty cases estimated a wrongful conviction rate of 4.
In cities like Chicago, Baltimore, and Detroit, punishment for murder is actually the exception, not the rule. The growing trend of unsolved murder spans half a century, and it has left hundreds of thousands of cold cases in its wake. According to Thomas Hargrove , founder of the Murder Accountability Project, there have been over , unsolved murders in the United States since the s. We have DNA evidence, cell phone tracking, license plate scanners, and dozens of other new tools.
The FBI has collected fingerprints from over million people, facial recognition data for million, and DNA profiles on over 18 million.
One prime suspect in any statistical puzzle is bad data. In fact, figures collected by the FBI and published by the Murder Accountability Project show that police often fail to report information on thousands of murders. In particular, during the heyday of high clearance rates in the s, the share of homicides actually reported to the FBI was lower than in later decades. The under-reporting theory also fails to explain why the trends for so many individual cities which are easier to verify than the aggregate national figures so closely mirror the nationwide trend.
More on that below. In the s, some scholars began pointing the finger at Ernesto Miranda—or at least the landmark Supreme Court case that bears his name. The decision in Miranda v. Arizona required police to issue so-called Miranda warnings to suspects taken into custody, advising them of their right to remain silent and to have an attorney present during questioning.
Some argued that this made police work more difficult by discouraging confessions. That sounds plausible, but the evidence for it is thin.
In fact, overall crime clearance rates had been dropping since at least , well before the Miranda case—and subsequent cases that reduced Miranda rights did not cause any notable uptick in solving murder. Miranda warnings are the law of the land across the country, but data collected by the Washington Post from 55 major US cities show that murder clearance rates vary enormously.
The FBI put this data in a hideous, unreadable chart. Here, I offer a clearer version:. The numbers are bad across the board. For murder, the clearance rate is For rape, For property crimes, it drops below 20 percent. In some communities, the murder clearance rates, for example, drop even lower. While police arrested someone in 63 percent of the killings of white victims, they did so in just 47 percent of those with black victims.
The good news is the crime and murder rates fell in , following two years of increases in violent crime and murder in particular. But the clearance rate numbers suggest that there is room for police to improve. In fact, the low clearance rates might be one thing that helps keep crime higher in the US than it would be otherwise.
This is nothing new. The murder clearance rate has generally hovered around 60 percent for years. And the violent crime clearance rate has remained around 45 percent and the property crime clearance rate around the high teens, according to a Pew Research Center analysis. And that makes people distrust the police and justice system. That not only makes people less likely to report crime, but it might lead to even more law-breaking.
And the lack of arrests keeps repeat offenders on the streets as well, free to commit more crime without consequence. The majority of homicides go unsolved in a growing number of major American cities, an alarming trend that has worsened significantly during the last 20 years. Seventy-three major police and sheriff's departments reported to the FBI that they failed to make an arrest in most of the homicides they investigated last year, according to a new study by the nonprofit Murder Accountability Project.
The study examined departments that experience at least 10 homicides each year. Nearly 6, homicides went uncleared in Under U.
0コメント