The Scripps Howard News Service spent a year plowing through FBI statistics and learned that in many of America’s cities, fewer than half of all murder cases are solved. At least 6,000 a year go unsolved. It is a long way from what you see on the TV dramas, where the cases are often resolved inside an hour.
Scripps Howard has built a searchable database that allows you to find the murder clearance rate in your state or county over time. You can also see the trends in your county for weapons used, gender, race and ethnicity.
Scripps Howard reported that despite great new laboratory resources, more murders go unsolved than solved in some cities:
“Experts say that murders have become tougher to solve because there are fewer crimes of passion, where the assailant is easier to identify, and more drug- and gang-related killings. Many police chiefs — especially in areas with skyrocketing numbers of unsolved crimes — blame a lack of cooperation by witnesses and even surviving victims of violent crime.
“Still, some police departments routinely solve most of their homicides, even the tough ones, while others are mired in growing stacks of unsolved cases.
“Police solved only 35 percent of the murders in Chicago in 2008, 22 percent in New Orleans and just 21 percent in Detroit. Yet authorities solved 75 percent of the killings that same year in Philadelphia, 92 percent in Denver and 94 percent in San Diego.
” ‘We’ve concluded that the major factor is the amount of resources police departments place on homicide clearances and the priority they give to homicide clearances,’ said University of Maryland criminologist Charles Wellford, who led a landmark study into how police can improve murder investigations.”
I asked Tom Hargrove at Scripps Howard Media Services via e-mail to tell us more about the project and how you might be able to tap into his team’s good work. You can read his edited responses below.
Al Tompkins: What surprised you most when you crunched the numbers?
Tom Hargrove: The astonishing and disturbing pattern in the FBI data set is the variation in how often murders get solved. There are places in America where it is statistically unlikely for a killer to be caught. If you want to get away with murder, go to places like Detroit, Phoenix, Chicago or New Orleans. If you want to get caught, kill somebody in Denver, San Diego or Philadelphia.
When we interviewed police chiefs, some trends become clear. Law enforcement leaders in underperforming departments are not closely monitoring homicide clearance rates and have not made murder investigations a high priority. Chiefs in rapidly improving departments carefully watch their stats and adopt the “best practices” of homicide investigations that are emerging from recent research by criminologists and the FBI.
Police in underperforming departments are likely to say their solution rates are so low because witnesses refuse to cooperate or because they are beset by gang activity. But police in many other cities have learned how to get witnesses to cooperate and how to overcome the gangs.
We’ve found that poor homicide clearance rates usually result from a failure of will by local political leaders — police chiefs, mayors, city councils — to make murder a priority and to insist that they be solved.
Are there trends in the kinds of murder cases that go unsolved? Gender, race, geography, etc.?
Hargrove: Absolutely. Killings involving drugs, gangs or stranger-on-stranger robberies are much more likely to go unsolved than almost any other homicide. Racial minorities, men and teenagers or young adults are more likely than other groups to be the victims of unsolved homicide.
What about rural versus urban murders?
Hargrove: It might surprise many people, but police in rural areas tend to be much more efficient in solving murders than authorities in major urban areas. That’s because rural police often personally know the active criminals in their area and have fewer murders to solve, giving them more time to work a case.
If you were a local reporter, how would you take the next step in this story?
Hargrove: Our “Murder Mysteries” project is a story that can be done (and probably should be done) anywhere in America. Reporters can see homicide clearance data for their communities at our site. Then they have to solve the mystery: Why is the homicide solution rate lower (or higher) than the national average? Why (generally) have murders become so much harder to solve in recent years than in the 1980s or 1990s?
What would help police departments to solve more cases?
Hargrove: In our study, the police department that had the most dramatic improvement in murder clearance was Durham, N.C., where clearance rates went from about 40 percent in the 1990s to nearly 80 percent in recent years. “This doesn’t happen in a vacuum,” Durham Police Chief Jose Lopez told us in the course of our reporting. “We will canvass door to door to see what information we can get. If necessary, we’ll get up to 100 officers knocking on doors. It’s civilians, police, even elected officials who come out so we can get more witnesses … witnesses we otherwise would never have gotten. And that builds more trust throughout the neighborhoods.”
They call it “Community Response.” And it works. What also works is granting overtime to homicide detectives in hot pursuit of evidence, putting sufficient manpower on the ground in the critical first hours of a murder, and using new technology for sophisticated information-sharing between the narcotics unit, the intelligence and gang units and the homicide investigators.
The bottom line is that murder-solution rates need not be as bad as they have become. Killers can be caught. America just has to have the will to catch them.
