Nearly half of America's murderers get away with it

Boston Globe

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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% in 2023, the latest year for which FBI data is available. And that figure is inflated because it includes murders from previous years that police solved in 2023.
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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% of car thefts result in an arrest.
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Compared with its peers, America overall does an unusually poor job of solving killings. The murder clearance rates of other rich nations, including Australia, Britain and Germany, hover in the 70s, 80s and even 90s. Several issues, including a lack of resources, the sheer volume of cases and a distrust of the police, have converged to make the jobs of American detectives much more difficult. 'It's a serious problem,' said Philip Cook, a criminal justice researcher at Duke University.
The lack of legal accountability emboldens criminals, leading to more crime and violence.
'It's a vicious cycle,' Brian Forst, a criminologist at American University, told me. 'When the bad guys see that the police are not there to deter crime and catch criminals, they remain on the streets to do more bad stuff. And the rest of the community is less deterred from crime. They think, 'Why not? I'm not going to get caught.''
Building Deterrence
Many things lead someone to commit a murder, but one factor is whether murderers are caught after the act. First, a locked-up killer can't kill more people, which is what criminologists call an incapacitation effect. Second, the act of catching a murderer deters would-be killers.
In the 18th century, Italian criminologist Cesare Beccaria devised the deterrence theory that criminal justice systems worldwide have depended on since. He cited three primary principles to deterrence: the severity of a punishment, the speed at which someone is captured and the certainty he or she will be found.
American policy often focuses on severity. In recent decades, lawmakers responded to spikes in crime by increasing the length of prison sentences. They paid less attention to the certainty and swiftness of punishment. Yet those two other factors may matter more to deterrence, some experts say. If people don't believe the police will catch them -- and quickly -- then the length of their punishment won't really matter. Empty threats won't deter them.
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'The certainty of being caught is a vastly more powerful deterrent than the punishment,' concluded the National Institute of Justice in its review of the evidence.
The experience of communities with unchecked violence, which are often poor and Black, is instructive. The reality of daily robberies, shootings and killings forces people to take a harder view of the world to survive, as journalist Jill Leovy documented in her book 'Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America.' John Skaggs, a retired detective from Los Angeles, told her that the gang members he dealt with were often 'regular guys' who joined gangs and acted violently for self-protection.
When the justice system is unlikely to catch criminals, people feel they can act with impunity, experts argue. They might even feel that they have to commit a crime -- such as killing someone who threatens them -- to protect themselves.
'Take a bunch of teenage boys from the whitest, safest suburb in America and plunk them down in a place where their friends are murdered and they are constantly attacked and threatened,' Leovy wrote. 'Signal that no one cares, and fail to solve murders. Limit their options for escape. Then see what happens.'
What Went Wrong
Why does America solve so few crimes? Experts point to five explanations.
1. A lack of attention and resources:
We
can
solve difficult cases. Indeed, studies show that police departments solve more murders and shootings when they spend more time and money on them. One program in Boston, which revised procedures and boosted resources for homicide investigations, led to a 23% increase in clearance rates. The New York Police Department has one of the best-funded and staffed police departments in the country, and it consistently reports higher clearance rates than other major cities.
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But departments and lawmakers have for decades focused on proactive strategies, such as flooding neighborhoods with police officers, that emphasize stopping crime before or as it happens. Those strategies can work to combat crime, studies have found. But they don't have to come at the cost of the other side of policing: catching criminals after the act.
2. Guns:
America has more firearms than any other country in the world, and these weapons make it easier to get away with murder. A drive-by shooter can ride off before anyone sees his face, making it easier to kill anonymously. Killing another person with a knife, on the other hand, 'is a pretty intimate act that is likely to generate more and different kinds of evidence,' Cook, the Duke researcher, said.
3. The types of crime:
The United States has more gang crime than other rich countries, and it's harder to solve. A personal crime involves people with more history. A husband who kills his wife has a legal relationship with her, easily found in court records. Family members know the killer and victim intimately. That is less likely for gang crimes; a gang member who kills a stranger in a carjacking gives the police less to work with. Gang members also work together to get away with crimes, and potential witnesses are often scared to testify against them.
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4. Volume:
The United States has far more murders and fewer police officers, after controlling for population, than other rich countries. The number of cases overwhelms the police. A detective who deals with only one murder per year gets much more time on the case than a detective who deals with one murder per week. 'We've gotten swamped over the years,' said Emily McKinley, a deputy police chief in Louisville who previously worked as a homicide detective. 'Violent crime, we've lost control of it.'
5. Distrust of the police:
High-profile deaths and protests have exposed abuses in police departments across the country. Detectives rely on witnesses to solve crimes. But 'ordinary citizens are not going to want to cooperate with the police when they see the police as alien storm troopers,' Forst said. They also are less likely to cooperate if they believe that the police can't or won't protect them from a crime suspect's retaliation.
Potential Solutions
Some of these problems are hard to solve. Lawmakers and jurists have wrestled with the abundance of guns for decades. And while killings in America have plummeted since the 1990s, the murder rate remains much higher here than it is in other rich countries. These ingrained problems will probably prevent the United States from matching Australia's or Germany's high clearance rates.
Still, some policies could help. Experts point to two ideas. First, lawmakers and the police could commit more resources to solving murders. Some members of Congress want more funding for the police -- and detectives in particular -- but those proposals haven't gone anywhere. Police departments could also shift existing resources to solving more crimes, as the Boston study suggested, but that would require prioritizing the issue over others.
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Second, the police could make greater use of modern technology. Cameras helped catch a suspect in the case of the UnitedHealthcare executive Brian Thompson in New York City. The police department used facial recognition software and widely shared photos and videos of the suspect. Within days, a fast-food worker in rural Pennsylvania tipped them off.
In recent years, more police departments have embraced Flock cameras, named after the company that makes them, that can automatically read license plates and detect gunfire. Departments have also installed more traditional cameras. But the devices aren't ubiquitous, even in the biggest cities. And while private cameras are often around, police officers can't always gain access to them.
Not everyone is on board with widespread use of cameras. Civil libertarians have raised privacy concerns; they worry that the government could abuse the technology to spy on or harass Americans. 'We have to have conversations about how to use the technology responsibly,' said Jennifer Doleac, the executive vice president for criminal justice at Arnold Ventures, a public policy philanthropy group. 'But these tools can help us.'
Back in Kentucky, policymakers have taken some steps. Louisville's police department has released a new anticrime plan, installed more cameras around the city and increased recruitment. State lawmakers, meanwhile, passed a law in 2023 that made it easier for police departments to rehire retired officers to help with staffing shortages. Still, the changes have not yet produced results. From 2023 to 2024, the murder clearance rate in Louisville actually declined.
'I want someone to be held accountable for taking my son's life,' said Delphine Prentice, the mother of Damion Morton, who was shot and killed in 2017. But after eight years, she added, 'I'm about to give up hope.'
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