Clearing up Homicide Clearance Rates

摘要

Law enforcement's ability to make arrests following crimes appears to have significantly diminished in recent years. This is especially true for homicide: From 1980 to 1996, the rate at which homicide cases were cleared nationally decreased more than 7 percent. (The clearance rate is the proportion of crimes in a jurisdiction for which the police report an arrest.) Although the rates nationally are declining, some cities have continued to show fairly high clearance rates for homicide as well as for total crime. Others have had much lower rates than the average. What makes one department's clearance rates better than another. It turns out to be more than the way the department defines and counts its clearance rates or how many homicides occur each year.