A story I missed over the weekend:
…
Louisville is representative of a national issue. In the United States, people often get away with murder. The clearance rate — the share of cases that result in an arrest or are otherwise solved — was 58 percent in 2023, the latest year for which F.B.I. data is available. And that figure is inflated because it includes murders from previous years that police solved in 2023.
In other words, a murderer’s chance of getting caught within a year essentially comes down to a coin flip. For other crimes, clearance rates are even lower. Only 8 percent of car thefts result in an arrest.
…
Why does America solve so few crimes? Experts point to five explanations.
Number two on the list, is, of course, “guns”. There’s even a handy little graph of “Gun homicide rates, 2023”, that includes the U.S., Canada, Sweden, Spain, and Australia. Not included: Switzerland.
What this story brings to mind, though, is David Simon’s great book Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets. My copy is in a box somewhere, so I’m going off memory here: Lawrence can probably fill in the lacunae. (I’d buy the Kindle edition for reference, but they want $14 for that.) There’s a several page section where Simon breaks down the numbers for one year’s worth of homicides. (I believe it was 1988.)
Some of the homicides were things like vehicle accidents (remember, there’s a difference between “homicide” and “murder”). Some were self-defense incidents. Some were cases where the killer died in the act (such as arson or a murder-suicide)…
…and at the end of the day, as best as I recall, your chances of even being charged with a homicide in Baltimore that year were about one out of three. And your chances of getting a sentence of more than ten years were basically zero: you had to do something awful (like molesting and killing a child) to get more than that. And a ten year sentence, with the parole laws in effect at the time, plus time spent in prison before trial, and good time credit, meant that you were likely to get out of prison after three years.
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
And for what it’s worth, the Austin Police Department cleared 100% of their homicide cases for 2023. I don’t think 2024 figures are in yet, but APD has been consistently above 90% clearance since 2014.