Creators: Homicides Are Down but More Murderers Are Walking the Streets

Matthew T. Mangino
Creators Syndicate
October 29, 2024

In September, The New York Times declared that "the number of murders reported in the United States dropped in 2023 at the fastest rate on record."

The FBI reported that there were about 2,500 fewer homicides in 2023 than in 2022, a decline of 11.6%. According to Jeff Asher, a crime data analyst who publishes on Substack, the data suggests "the largest year-to-year decline since national record-keeping began in 1960."

However, the picture is not all rosy. In the criminal justice system, "clearance rate" is a term used to measure the rate at which law enforcement agencies solve crimes. In the FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting Program, law enforcement agencies can clear, or "close," offenses in one of two ways: by arrest or by exceptional means.

Clearance by exceptional means could include the death of a suspect or the reluctance of the victim or witnesses to cooperate in an investigation.

Declining clearance rates are a problem. A murder in America has a 50% chance of being solved.

Clearance rates have declined precipitously over the last 60 years. In 1965, clearance rates for murder hovered above 90%. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in 2022, the last year of available data, the clearance rate nationwide was 52.3%.

Although homicides have declined, solving murders has become more difficult. Even with modern investigative techniques, more homicides than ever remain unsolved.

The scope of the problem is enormous. For instance, in 2022, according to the FBI, there were 24,849 homicides. Based on the clearance rate for homicides in 2022, there are approximately 11,853 unsolved murders. That means there are probably more than 10,000 murderers walking the streets from 2022.

If you take the total number of murders over the last 10 years and divide that number by the average clearance rate, the result is more than 80,000 unsolved murders.

More than half of America's major police departments are struggling to solve homicides at the same level of success they enjoyed just a decade ago, according to a 2010 study of federal crime records by the nonprofit Murder Accountability Project.

The study focused on the nation's 160 police departments that investigate at least 10 homicides a year and annually report crime data to the FBI's Uniform Crime Report. Fifty-four percent of those departments reported less success in solving murders committed during the 10 years prior to the report than in the previous 10 years.

The problem is about more than police work. The MAP study found most departments with declining murder clearance rates also experienced an increase in homicides. These departments often are located in areas with declining tax bases or facing other kinds of fiscal challenges.

Some crime analysts have also cast doubt on FBI data. According to Newsweek, the concerns stem from the suggestion that the data "only covers 77 percent of the U.S. population and should be considered preliminary, given that state and local law enforcement agencies have months to report their data and correct any errors."

In addition, participating in the FBI's Uniform Crime Report is voluntary. If a police department refuses to provide data, it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to replicate the data.

This summer, the FBI said the first three months of 2024 saw a "historic" drop in rates of violent crime and murder across the country. That is good news, but is it accurate?

Asher wrote, "Crime almost certainly declined nationally in the first three months of 2024 compared to the first three months of 2023, but the FBI's data is almost certainly overstating that decline."

Matthew T. Mangino is of counsel with Luxenberg, Garbett, Kelly & George P.C. His book "The Executioner's Toll, 2010" was released by McFarland Publishing. You can reach him at www.mattmangino.com and follow him on X @MatthewTMangino).

To visit Creators CLICK HERE

Police departments are solving far fewer crimes than they did before pandemic

The F.B.I. released data this fall that gives us a glimpse of how policing in America has changed since the disruption of the pandemic years. The evidence is clear: Police departments across the country are solving far fewer crimes than they did before 2020, reported The New York Times.

The clearance rates — essentially the percentage of crimes leading to arrests — for violent or property crimes have dropped to their lowest levels since the F.B.I. started tracking them in the 1960s (though lower arrest standards probably drove the high clearance rates in the 1960s and 1970s).

In 2022 police departments, on average, solved only 37 percent of violent crimes, just over half of murders and nonnegligent manslaughters and only 12 percent of property crimes.

While headlines tend to focus on falling clearance rates in large liberal cities, the decline occurred nationwide in both red and blue cities, counties and states. The violent crime clearance rate, for example, fell considerably between 2019 to 2022 in big cities, which tend to be led by Democrats, as well as in small cities and suburban and rural counties, which tend to be led by Republicans.

Rising crime rates are unlikely to be the culprit. More crime could certainly lead to lower clearance rates — if a department makes the same number of arrests but crime doubles, then the clearance rate would fall as a matter of mathematics — but in fact, the F.B.I. reports that violent crimes fell between 2020 and 2022.

The exact causes of the decline in arrests are difficult to pinpoint, but the timing is clearly tied to the summer of 2020, suggesting that changes in policing and America’s dwindling confidence in law enforcement since the killing of George Floyd played a role.

Sentencing and judicial reform tend to make up the bulk of our policy responses to crime and policing, but this new data suggests that increasing the share of crimes that are solved — especially violent crimes — should be a major focus of policymakers nationwide.

Studies of crime and punishment have shown that a police force’s ability to solve crimes is more effective in deterring crimes than the severity of punishment.

If you were considering stealing a car, the primary factors guiding your choice probably aren’t the charges you’d receive or the time you’d serve if convicted. Instead, you’d be more concerned with the immediate question of witnesses, anti-theft devices and cameras that might bring the police to your doorstep. Moreover, imprisonment may even increase the chance a person will go on to commit crimes after being released.

Unfortunately, police departments are struggling in their efforts to improve their crime-solving abilities.

Many police departments — especially in cities — are much smaller than they were before the pandemic. Low morale and extreme stresses in the departments have led to high levels of resignations among older and more experienced officers and significantly fewer recruits to replace them. This year the number of police officers in New Orleans reached its lowest level since the 1940s, and the numbers in Los Angeles and Seattle declined to levels not seen in decades.

Having fewer officers available to respond to the scene of a crime means fewer clues, fewer witnesses and fewer tips for detectives to go on. It also means significantly longer response times, leaving clues to grow stale and witnesses to disappear before officers arrive.

Staffing shortages also trickle down to the investigative work that happens in offices and labs long after a crime has been committed. For a long time, conventional wisdom pointed to factors beyond the control of law enforcement — such as whether a witness was present or whether physical evidence was left behind — as the primary drivers of solving crimes. The work of the investigator was perceived to matter less.

But newer research from a criminologist, Anthony A. Braga, presents a clear connection between the amount of investigative resources dedicated to a crime and the likelihood of its being solved. It may seem obvious, but it takes bodies, time and sustained effort to work a case.

Another important factor is the change in national attitude toward the police in the wake of Mr. Floyd’s murder in 2020. Polling from Gallup shows that public support for the police has fallen significantly over the past few years. This year only 43 percent of people said they had a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of trust in the police — a 10 percentage point drop from 2019.

The solution to this problem is not as simple as hiring more police officers, especially considering the challenging hiring environment for police departments. Agencies should consider improving their clearance rates by employing more current officers as investigators.

Some agencies have also begun to hire more civilians to help. Civilians can respond to low-level incidents that don’t require an officer, take reports over the phone and aid investigators in solving cases. Civilians are easier and cheaper to hire than officers. They reduce officers’ workloads, allowing agencies to dedicate more time to improving investigations.

An unsolved crime cuts twice: It erodes people’s trust in law enforcement and could encourage others to commit similar offenses. It should be in the interest of all Americans for as many crimes as possible — especially heinous violent crimes — to be solved. It’s unclear whether the recent decline in clearance rates will be permanent, but we should consider the drop to be an early warning sign that police effectiveness nationwide may be in decline.

To read more CLICK HERE

U.S. among the worst in industrial world at solving murders

More murders across America are going unsolved, exacerbating the grief of families already reeling and worsening the largely cracked trust between police and the public, especially communities of color most affected by gun violence, reported NPR.

"I haven't had any word," says Mark Legaspi about the murder of his cousin, friend and business partner Artgel Anabo Jr., 39, who was known as Jun. He was shot just outside their popular Filipino fast-food restaurant Lucky Three Seven in East Oakland, Calif., May 18, 2022. "It's still emotional every day coming in here, you know?" Legaspi says nodding toward the street where Jun was murdered.

Oakland detectives released security camera footage and the license plate number of the suspected get-away car. Anabo's family believes the suspect is a man who sold Anabo a truck that turned out to be stolen. Still, there's been no break in the case and no word.

"It's definitely frustrating. Justice hasn't been served," Legaspi says. "I mean it's almost a year. I would like to know something. I don't get no answers," he says noting that he and his family haven't heard from Oakland homicide detectives for months. "You know, if there's anything, you know, even if they didn't do anything, that'd be nice to know. Instead of us hoping."

The U.S. among the worst at solving murders in the industrialized world

Legaspi's frustration and pain are shared by hundreds of families of murder victims in Oakland – and across the country – whose cases remain unsolved.

While the rate at which murders are solved or "cleared" has been declining for decades, it has now dropped to slightly below 50% in 2020 - a new historic low. And several big cities, including Chicago, have seen the number of murder cases resulting in at least one arrest dip into the low to mid-30% range.

"We saw a sharp drop in the national clearance rate in 2020," says Prof. Philip Cook, a public policy researcher and professor emeritus at Duke University and the University of Chicago Urban Labs who has been studying clearance rates for decades. "It reached close to 50% at that time nationwide, which was the lowest ever recorded by the FBI. And it hasn't come up that much since then."

That makes the U.S. among the worst at solving murders in the industrialized world. Germany, for example, consistently clears well over 90% of its murders.

While reasons behind the drop are multi-faceted, Cook and other experts warn that more people getting away with murder in the the U.S. is driving a kind of doom loop of mutual mistrust: low murder clearance rates impede future investigations which in turn potentially drive up killings in some communities where a lack of arrests undermines deterrence and sends a message that the police will not or cannot protect them.

"Communities that are especially impacted by gun violence believe that the police are ineffective or indifferent, and as a result, they're less willing to cooperate and provide information the police need to have successful investigations," says Cook, who has several research articles on the topic coming out.

"It is undermining whatever trust there is in the police. And it's a vicious circle," Cook says.

"I certainly don't believe in anyone getting away with murder"

Oakland, Calif., is a prime example of that vicious circle. The city's per capita homicide rate remains abnormally high and its murder solve rate is among the lowest in the nation, hitting just 36% last year. If you take out the handful of older, "cold" cases that were solved during 2022, the clearance rate in Oakland just 27%, an analysis by the S.F. Chronicle shows.

"Well, I certainly don't believe in anyone getting away with murder. These cases are never closed," says Drennon Lindsey, an Oakland deputy chief who formerly led the department's homicide division. "We never give up, you know. And I also think we can only get better."

Lindsey says the veterans among her 16 detectives are often handing two dozen or more cases at a time, far above the federal recommendation that detectives carry an average of only four to six new homicide cases per year.

In addition, she says, an antiquated case management data system, which the city is working to replace, is another reason behind the painfully low clearance rate. But the biggest one, she says, is too many people are scared to talk with and help the OPD.

"People don't want to cooperate, people don't want to come to court and testify. And they're afraid of retaliation, of being labeled in their communities as a "snitch." And we're often left trying to plea and beg for the community to come forward with information to hold this person accountable for committing murder," she says.

But that mistrust is also bred by the department's chronic dysfunction.

The department remains under federal oversight and has for two decades. In that time the troubled agency has gone through a dozen leaders. And recently veteran Oakland homicide detective Phong Tran was arrested and arraigned after the Alameda County district attorney's office accused him of paying a witness thousands of dollars to lie in a murder case that resulted in two men getting life sentences. Detective Tran faces felony charges of perjury and bribery. Those two murder convictions have been tossed out.

In a statement to NPR, Tran's attorney Andrew M. Ganz called the charges "baseless" and lashed out a District Attorney Pamela Price for treating "murderers like heroes."

Price's office in a statement says it is now reviewing at least 125 murders Tran investigated "to see if we have wrongfully convicted anyone else."

"Lying and manipulating a witness are serious violations of the public trust and a threat to the integrity of the judicial system," Price says. "When the integrity of a conviction is at issue in one case, it raises questions in every other case that the detective has investigated."

The "exceptional means" clause and chronic police staffing affect murder clearance rates

The FBI defines a murder "cleared" if a suspect has been identified and arrested. But a murder can also be declared cleared through what's known as an "exceptional means." For example, if a suspect is dead, can't be extradited or prosecutors refuse to press charges.

So, criminologists note, even some cities now touting modestly improved murder clearance rates, such as Chicago, are really just artificially boosting their clearance numbers through that "exceptional means" clause.

The arrest rate per murder if is often a better indicator of how police departments are actually doing at holding killers accountable. Prof. Cook's research, for example, shows that from 2016 to 2020 the percentage of murders in Chicago with any type of weapon resulting in at least one arrest was just 33%. And in Durham, North Carolina, between 2017 and 2021 just 41% of gun homicide cases resulted in at least one arrest.

Other reasons for the further decline in murder clearance rates, experts say, include chronic police staffing and recruiting problems, and the fact that more murders are committed with firearms, which can result in fewer witnesses and less physical evidence. In addition, judges, prosecutors and juries have higher evidence and procedure standards than in the 1960s when 90-plus% of homicides were listed as solved.

Researchers say key ways cities can to try to stop the downward spiral is simply investing more in homicide investigations: improving crime labs, training, DNA testing, computer modeling systems.

White crosses with the names and ages of the dead grows with every killing

In front yard of Oakland's Saint Columba Catholic Church along bustling San Pablo Ave, a garden of simple, wooden, white crosses with the names and ages of the dead grows with every killing.

Every Jan. 1 "that garden is a garden for about a minute," says Fr. Aidan McAleenan, St Columba's pastor looking at the roughly two dozen crosses already posted in the yard. "And then is just gets grows and grows" all year. "My biggest concern, and I prayed about this, there are about 100 people walking around Oakland now who will not be walking around Oakland at the end of the year," McAleenan says.

Parishioner Rich Laufenberg makes the wooden crosses and dutifully "plants" them every week or two. "I do it as some kind of service work, I hope, and to let people know that we have a major violence problem here in Oakland," he says. Regularly, Laufenberg says when placing the crosses he'll find family or friends of a victim praying or just gazing in stunned silence at the lives cut short

"They'll stop and look and strike up a conversation and they mention not infrequently that the relative whose cross they're looking at, that case, hasn't been solved yet."

At Oakland's Lucky Three Seven Filipino restaurant, owner Mark Legaspi says he doesn't blame Oakland detectives, per se, for not solving his cousin's murder. They're overworked and overwhelmed, he says. But he wants answer. And so does his murdered cousin's son, Kiah, now 12 who was super tight with his dad. Kiah was right next to his dad when the gunman attacked.

"He saw everything. I'm just glad he ran the other way instead of following his dad. You know, because he could have got caught in the line of fire," Legaspi says. "Obviously, as a kid, seeing that, your superhero dad, you know, that will always have problem with you know, like inside," he says.

Anabo's son is doing OK, given the circumstances, he says. He's making the Honor Roll and trying to stay positive. "Just got to keep that love with him every day, you know."

The family plans to honor Anabo with a gathering at the restaurant on the upcoming May 18 anniversary of his murder.

But they'd rather celebrate a break in his case.

To read more CLICK HERE

Police are solving only about 1 in 2 murders

Why are police only solving 1 in 2 murders? Many scholars and police department officials say murders are becoming more difficult to investigate, while some victims’ families say police spend too much energy on things other than solving crimes, reports The Marshall Project.

Philip Cook, a public policy researcher at the University of Chicago Urban Labs, has been studying clearance rates since the 1970s. He cautioned that fewer clearances than in the 1960s and ‘70s may not necessarily be a bad thing. “It also could be that the standards for making an arrest have gone up and some of the tricks they were using in 1965 are no longer available,” Cook said of law enforcement. Every story about a person convicted of murder on shoddy evidence and later exonerated was once counted as a “successful” homicide clearance.

Cook, and other experts, mostly pin the long, steady decline in clearance rates onto the kinds of homicides police are being asked to solve. Data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics shows that over time, a growing proportion of killings are being committed by strangers and unknown assailants, as opposed to people the victim knew. The data also shows that unknown assailants are increasingly using firearms rather than knives, fists or other close-quarter weapons. As the social and physical distance between killers and victims increases, detectives say they have fewer leads to follow.

But the changes in the nature of homicides — which some criminologists call case mix — are not destiny. Some cities routinely solve two or three times more homicides than others, even after accounting for case mix. Within departments, some detectives solve many more homicides than others.

“That variation tells us something important,” said Charles Wellford, emeritus professor in the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Maryland-College Park. “It says that it's not inevitable that there will be low clearance rates.”

To read more CLICK HERE

Less than 1 in 2 murders solved as clearance rates drop to historic lows

The "clearance rate", the percentage of homicides in which an arrest is made, is down to an historic low, according to The Marshall Project. The clearance in 2020 dropped a little below 50 percent. In the early 1980s, police were clearing about 70 percent of homicides.

Why are police only solving 1 in 2 murders? Many scholars and police department officials say murders are becoming more difficult to investigate, while some victims’ families say police spend too much energy on things other than solving crimes.

Philip Cook, a public policy researcher at the University of Chicago Urban Labs, has been studying clearance rates since the 1970s. He cautioned that fewer clearances than in the 1960s and ‘70s may not necessarily be a bad thing. “It also could be that the standards for making an arrest have gone up and some of the tricks they were using in 1965 are no longer available,” Cook said of law enforcement. Every story about a person convicted of murder on shoddy evidence and later exonerated was once counted as a “successful” homicide clearance.

Cook, and other experts, mostly pin the long, steady decline in clearance rates onto the kinds of homicides police are being asked to solve. Data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics shows that over time, a growing proportion of killings are being committed by strangers and unknown assailants, as opposed to people the victim knew. The data also shows that unknown assailants are increasingly using firearms rather than knives, fists or other close-quarter weapons. As the social and physical distance between killers and victims increases, detectives say they have fewer leads to follow.

But the changes in the nature of homicides — which some criminologists call case mix — are not destiny. Some cities routinely solve two or three times more homicides than others, even after accounting for case mix. Within departments, some detectives solve many more homicides than others.

“That variation tells us something important,” said Charles Wellford, emeritus professor in the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Maryland-College Park. “It says that it's not inevitable that there will be low clearance rates.”

Meanwhile, in communities where trust in law enforcement is low — often communities of color — homicide detectives have a hard time getting witnesses to talk to them, said Peter Moskos, a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

“If people criticize the police constantly, it is natural that people would be less willing to talk to police,” Moskos said. Without useful leads, police solve fewer murders, and the perception that they are ineffective leaves witnesses and victims skeptical that talking to the police will do any good. In other words, Moskos said, it’s a vicious cycle.

There are many reasons people avoid speaking to the police, from the lack of confidence Moskos raised, to a fear of violent reprisals. According to Melina Abdullah, co-director for the national community organizing group Black Lives Matter Grassroots, another important reason is that police often criminalize crime victims — specifically in Black communities — treating them as suspects rather than survivors.

A police and prison abolitionist, Abdullah said that clearance rates are not useful measures for addressing violence in communities.

“Clearance rates, especially when we talk about acts of community violence, might give some kind of temporary sense of relief. But it's not justice,” Abdullah said. “I don't know anybody who's felt like, ‘OK, now I can rest because this murder has been cleared by the police.’”

Clearances don’t necessarily lead to criminal penalties like incarceration. In the nation’s 70 largest counties, nearly one-third of people accused of murder were acquitted or had their charges dismissed, according to a 2009 report from the Bureau of Justice Statistics. That’s the most recent year with local prosecution and conviction data available on the national level.

Shari O'Loughlin, chief executive officer at The Compassionate Friends, a national organization of support groups for families that have lost a child, says that an arrest or conviction “closes the information gap.”

“For most parents, siblings and grandparents who experience the loss, it’s critical for them to know what had happened,” O'Loughlin said. “But it’s not as if [an arrest] makes the loss, or the pain, better because nothing makes up for the loss of a child.”

And not knowing who killed their loved ones often means the family continues living in fear, said Jessica Pizzano, the director of victim services at Survivors of Homicide, Inc., a nonprofit organization that provides service to families of homicide victims in Connecticut.

“Is the murderer in my neighborhood? Will I run into them at the grocery store? Or when I’m pumping gas?” Pizzano said. “These are real fears that families live through.”

To read more CLICK HERE

The clearance rate for homicide fell below 50 percent in 2020

 The number of murder cases that go unsolved by police hit a new high in 2020, according to an analysis of recent FBI data by the Council on Criminal Justice (CCJ), reported The Crime Report

Number-crunching by the CCJ revealed that the murder  “clearance rate”―the proportion of resolved cases―fell to 50 percent last year, in tandem with an historic single-year increase in homicides.

That represented a five percent drop from the previous year, amounting to “the largest decrease in clearance rates since 1989,” the CCJ analysis said.

Clearance rates in fact have been dropping steadily since the 1970s. In 1976, according to FBI figures, police were able to solve 82 percent of murders.

The lowering clearance rates may be driven by the fact that police didn’t know the specific relationships between victims and perpetrators in more than half the cases, with over 56 percent of the circumstances  recorded as “unknown” ― a rise of 10 percent since 2010.

“When fewer cases are solved, authorities know less about them,” the CCJ report said.

The CCJ noted that ”some media reports, and some elected officials and candidates for elected office have suggested that homicides have become more random and brazen,”  but added there isn’t enough data to support those characterizations.

The latest load of unsolved murders has added to the accumulating number of “cold cases” languishing in precincts around the country. At the end of 2019, the number of unsolved homicides in the U.S. exceeded 269,205 cases, James M. Adcock, founder of the Mid-South Cold Case Initiative, wrote earlier this year in The Crime Report.

Few observers expect the number of cleared cases to improve any time soon, particularly as police departments around the country grapple with staffing shortages and eroding community trust.

The analysis comes against the background of an historic spike of nearly 30 percent in the homicide rate in 2020―“the largest in 100 years,” according to a report released this week by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

But the CCJ cautioned against drawing any conclusion about the 2020 surge, noting that the rate of increase in homicide had already begun to slow during 2021, to about 16 percent. While that still represents a significant rise, fears about a “crime wave” are likely misplaced.

Even the 2020 homicide rate remains 33 percent lower than its most recent peak in 1991.

Other public safety indicators such as property crimes have continued on a downward slope since the high-crime 1990s.

Nevertheless, CCJ noted that the FBI figures show an increase in the percentage of homicides involving firearms to 77 percent in 2020, from 73 percent in 2019 and 67 percent in 2010.

And in another troubling data point identified by CCJ analysts, the percentage of Black victims increased by 6 percent in 2020, while the percentage of white and Latinx victims has decreased, by 6 percent and 9 percent respectively.

Although recent headlines have focused on gang killings, the percentage of offenders and victims aged between 30 and 39 has been “steadily increasing over the past decade” to a current level of 24 percent, while the number of  victims 19 and younger dropped slightly from 17 percent in 2019 to 15 percent in 2020.

The complete CCJ analysis can be downloaded here.

To read more CLICK HERE

Louisville under siege and under protected

 LOUISVILLE, Ky. NBC NEWS— This is a city under siege.

Homicides — particularly deadly shootings — have piled up with no clear end in sight.

The city had reported 125 homicides as of Sunday and is in danger of breaking its homicide record for a second consecutive year.

Roughly 65 percent of this year’s killings have gone unsolved, a sharp change from just three years ago when about 39 percent of killings were not resolved.

Louisville's current 34 percent solve rate falls far short of the 61.4 percent national average in 2019, the last year for which FBI data is available.

Louisville is one of several major U.S. cities grappling with a surge of violent crime over the past year and a half.202102:14

City officials and the Louisville Metro Police Department say they are working to find solutions and trying to regain control of the climbing homicide numbers and the woeful case-closure rate.

The city, for instance, has nearly quadrupled its investment in efforts to tackle violent crime by pumping money into officer recruitment, community outreach and social service programs.

But the mayor and others say progress, so far, has been stymied by myriad factors including easy access to guns, a shrinking police force and officers reluctant to carry out their duties because of increased scrutiny.

What’s more, the police killing of Breonna Taylor in March 2020 exacerbated issues of community mistrust of police, and a pending Justice Department investigation suggests there may be long-standing problems within the department.

Louisville Metro Police Chief Erika Shields, through her communications team, declined several requests for interviews.

During the inaugural episode of the police department’s podcast “On the Record,” she acknowledged the crime surge and said shootings “have to stop.”

“The pace at which we’re seeing these shootings is absolutely unacceptable,” Shields said.

Citywide slayings pierced the life of Marcus Collins, whose 17-year-old stepson, LaMaurie Gathings, was killed June 4.

"It’s really taken a toll on my wife. I’m here trying to hold it together," Collins said.

Sometime past 2 a.m., Gathings snuck out of the house to meet with his cousin.

A short while later, possibly after leaving a party, relatives said, Gathings was fatally shot. His cousin was shot three times, once in the neck, but survived.

“I still haven’t heard nothing. I haven’t heard anything about what happened or from the detective at all. It’s been a month,” Collins, 43, said.

Louisville police haven't arrested or charged anyone for Gathings’ killing.

“The police aren’t doing a good job investigating,” Collins said, adding that officers have told the family they don’t have enough resources to adequately investigate.

This points to a larger hurdle for the city: solving homicides.

Louisville is among several U.S. cities experiencing a high volume of homicides recently. The nation’s murder rate was up nearly 15 percent last year, according to a preliminary FBI report released in September.

It’s difficult to pinpoint the cause of the killings nationwide.

Some experts have said existing issues like rising gun ownership, poor relationships between police and citizens and socioeconomic inequality became worse during the pandemic and the 2020 calls for racial justice.

In Louisville, Mayor Greg Fischer attributes the number of homicides to easy gun access, social media beefs morphing into deadly street violence and a culture of retaliation.

“Anyone can walk down the street with an assault rifle. Guns are everywhere,” the mayor said.

Shields has stopped short of criticizing her officers but said on the department's podcast that officers could help prevent homicides by being more confident while on duty.

“It’s getting officers to feeling confident and knowing they can be proactive. I need them to be proactive. I need them to be making arrests,” the chief said on the podcast, which was posted to the police department’s YouTube page in June.

A January report commissioned by the Louisville-Jefferson County Metro Government said Louisville officers may be experiencing low morale.

Officers who responded to a survey expressed concern about a lack of support and leadership from upper management and the community, resulting in many of them wanting to leave the department, according to the report, which was conducted by Hillard Heintze, a Chicago consulting firm.

Shawn Butler, executive director of the Kentucky Association of Chiefs of Police, said low morale doesn’t incentivize officers to do more than bare-minimum work.

“I think low morale is an occupational hazard. You aren’t going to do your job as effective,” Butler said. “It doesn’t help when we’ve had the civil unrest that we’ve had.”

Howard Henderson, a nonresident senior fellow at The Brookings Institution, a nonprofit public policy organization based in Washington, D.C., said more focus needs to be placed on why morale is low.

“It’s bad for the system to have officers with low morale. The lower the morale, the worse the job performance,” Henderson said. “The question really needs to be why is morale low? Is it that morale is low because people are being held accountable for the first time? Morale might be low for a good reason.”

The police department is short about 240 police officers, many of whom have retired or taken jobs elsewhere, city officials said.

As it stands, 1,048 officers make up the current Louisville police force, compared with 1,247 at the beginning of 2019, police records show.

That includes the 43 officers added this year either through recruitment or rehiring. That number is lower than in each of the last three years, records show.

Police officials say officers typically investigate four to five homicides per year, but they are now working eight to 10.

“It’s very difficult when you’re catching a homicide case every two weeks,” Lt. Donny Burbrink, the commander of the LMPD homicide unit, said during an LMPD podcast episode. "We’re having a very difficult time right now. If I pick up a homicide today, at the rate we’re on right now, in two weeks I’ll pick up another homicide.”

LMPD has been so short-staffed that last year the department pulled several officers from their regular beats to investigate homicides.

“When you put more cases on a homicide detective, that means there’s only so many interviews and investigations they can do in a 24-hour time,” said Henderson, who is also director of the Center for Justice Research at Texas Southern University. “That means there are cases they aren’t going to even get to or they spend fewer hours working a case.”

Meanwhile, families left to grieve their slain children say the homicides must stop.

 “Living in Louisville is terrible,” said Delisa Love, 44, whose 19-year-old daughter, Kelsie Small, was killed hours before Mother’s Day last year. Small was a sophomore nursing student at Northern Kentucky University.

Love said her 21-year-old nephew survived being shot in June. She said she also lost a 17-year-old nephew to gun violence in 2006. “I’ve never seen so much violence,” Love said.

Louisville police confirmed nobody has been arrested in connection with Small's death.

Collins, whose son was killed earlier this summer, wants to know why more homicides aren’t being solved.

“My son was a good kid, just hard-headed. He didn’t have a criminal record,” Collins said.

Officials and residents say witnesses not bringing forth relevant information regarding homicides has stifled police efforts.

“I’m convinced it’s unusual for a homicide to take place and someone not know who did that,” Fischer said. “There’s going to be zero tolerance for gun crime, violent crime and homicides.”

That would require overcoming the broken relationship between police and members of the community, particularly people of color.

LMPD is currently under investigation by the Justice Department to determine whether officers engage in a “pattern or practice of violations of the Constitution or federal law.”

The investigation was announced in April, more than a year after officers killed Breonna Taylor in her apartment as they served a “no-knock” warrant. No criminal charges were brought in direct connection with Taylor’s death.

The shooting inflamed racial tensions in the city, prompted calls for police reform and led to numerous protests and the hiring of Shields as police chief.

“There’s no trust at some level. And when there’s no trust, you can’t get things accomplished in a collaborative way,” Louisville activist Christopher 2X said. “Most people don’t want to participate in any way or be connected to a violent crime through a judicial process.”

He added that when people think about feeling protected versus giving the police relevant information, they conclude it’s not worth it.

 To read more CLICK HERE

MCN: Homicide rates soar nationwide

Matthew T. Mangino
More Content Now
January 4, 2021

As Americans have come to accept more than 2,500 deaths a day as a result of COVID-19 - it is no wonder that little attention is being paid to the dramatic increase in homicides nationwide.

From the east coast to the west the numbers are astounding. As December drew to a close, New York City’s 447 homicides made 2020 the city’s bloodiest year in nearly a decade, according to The New York Times.

The Chicago Tribune reported that through the last week of 2020, Chicago had recorded 762 homicides, a 55% jump over the same period in 2019. It is one of the largest annual increases in recent city history.

Across the city of Houston, 400 people were murdered as of Dec. 29. That’s a spike of at least 42% over 2019, according to KTRK-TV 13 the ABC affiliate in Houston.

In Los Angeles, 2020 saw killings rise sharply. As of mid-December homicides had risen by 30.4%, their highest level in a decade. According to the Los Angeles Times, in one week this summer, from June 29 to July 5, 29 people were murdered in Los Angeles County.

There are several suggested reasons for increasing violence in big cities - the mounting tension associated with the pandemic, a tumultuous presidential election and the nationwide protests associated with police treatment of blacks.

However, the increase in homicides is not just a big city problem.

According to the Washington Post, FBI data indicates that small cities with fewer than 10,000 residents saw more than a 30% increase in killings in the first nine months of the year.

The nation as a whole has experienced the largest single one-year increase in homicides since the country started keeping records.

Murder is probably the best indicator of crime. Unlike robbery or aggravated assault, homicide cannot be manipulated or negotiated to look like a different offense. Police can charge an individual with felony assault and then plead the charge down to disorderly conduct or a charge of robbery, a felony, can be reduced to a misdemeanor theft.

Murder is murder - investigators cannot ignore a dead body.

Why is murder on the rise? Some suggest that the confluence of the pandemic and social unrest have left police departments depleted.

Some will argue that as police officers became infected with COVID-19 there were fewer officers on the street. As the public became infected there were fewer witnesses. Some will argue as protests increased more officers were assigned to manage the unrest instead of investigating and fighting crime. Disputes were being settled in the streets.

Have police officers pulled back on their influence with regard to community safety as a result of movements like Black Lives Matter and “Defund the Police?”

The New York Times looked at preliminary reports of violent crime mid-year and found that while murder was soaring, violent crime was generally down. The Times asked, “How often do murder and other types of violent crime move in opposite directions?”

Only four times since 1960. Over the last 30 years the difference nationally between murder and violent crime has been just 2.2%, so a “big increase in murder nationally while violent crime falls is almost unheard of.”

This anomaly points to either underreporting or under-investigating. Another key indicator of police pull back are clearance rates - the number of cases solved by police departments. For instance, in Minneapolis where George Floyd was killed by police, the clearance rate has dropped to about 41% this year - four in ten murders were solved in Minneapolis. New York City’s clearance rate has fallen as has Houston’s, after three years of improvement.

Policymakers will not have a clear picture of the role of policing in the increase in homicides until after the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report and the Department of Justice’s National Crime Victimization Survey are released later this year.

However, the preliminary numbers are a harbinger of difficult times for communities across the country.

Matthew T. Mangino is of counsel with Luxenberg, Garbett, Kelly & George P.C. His book “The Executioner’s Toll, 2010” was released by McFarland Publishing. You can reach him at www.mattmangino.com and follow him on Twitter at @MatthewTMangino.

To visit the column CLICK HERE

Deadliest year in NYC in nearly a decade

As December drew to a close, New York City’s 447 homicides made 2020 the city’s bloodiest year in nearly a decade, reported The New York Times.

Police officials in New York have pointed to gang disputes as a key driver of the violence over the summer, but several bystanders were caught in the cross hairs: a 43-year-old mother, killed by a stray bullet that went through her bedroom window in Queens; a man fatally shot on a handball court in Brooklyn; a 1-year-old boy, dead after a gunman opened fire on a cookout, also in Brooklyn.

But many cases were stalled because the pandemic had forced the courts to operate virtually. Hardly any new trials were conducted, and the progress of many cases was significantly slowed.

“I think we’ve struggled a little bit because of Covid, and how courts were closed, but when things start opening up, we have a lot of great work in the hopper ready to go, to really close some of the violence that we saw in 2020,” said Rodney Harrison, the Police Department’s chief of detectives.

Combating street feuds has become a sort of routine for the police, particularly in the warmer months when turf battles and social media fights can lead to spikes in gun violence in certain neighborhoods. But officials and experts have said that something about the summer’s violence felt less predictable, and that made anticipating trends more difficult. 

 “I think it’s about something more, something out there about the anxiety, and the fact that a lot of our institutions are not functioning the way they usually do,” Mr. Wexler said of the violence. “If it was just New York, I think that would be one thing. But because the crime increase in homicides is widespread, I think it says something bigger about what’s going on.”

Despite the violent summer, crime numbers in the city remained well below the dark days of the 1980s and 1990s, when New York saw more than 2,000 murders a year. Homicides and shootings have plummeted in recent years, even in some of the city’s most notoriously dangerous corners. Had 2020 not been such an anomaly, officials have said, that trend might have continued.

This year, as crime increased, the police solved less of it. Police Department records, for example, showed that officers solved 26.3 percent of serious crimes in the second quarter of the year; department figures show that 35.8 percent of serious crimes were solved over the same period in 2019.

“I think Covid played a role earlier in the year, where we had a significant amount of people out,” Commissioner Shea said, noting that in the early days of the pandemic when many officers became sick, entire teams of detectives filled in for other squads, often in unfamiliar neighborhoods. The clearance rate improved from 26.3 percent later in the year, he said, but still fell well short of 2019’s level.

Critics of the police have questioned whether officers, chafed by the summer’s unrest and the national debate over law enforcement, began responding more slowly to calls. But some experts say much of the department’s low clearance rate is tied to difficulties caused by the pandemic — officers cannot interact as widely with the public, and most people, including criminals, are wearing masks.

To read more CLICK HERE

GateHouse: Less than half of crimes reported, fewer solved

Matthew T. Mangino

GateHouse Media

October 25, 2019

Recently I wrote that crime rates are at a near all-time low. According to the FBI, violent crime in the United States has been cut nearly in half in the last 25 years.

However, a closer look at the data reveals problems. Most crimes are not reported to police, and most reported crimes are not solved.

In its biannual survey, the Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics asks victims of crime whether they reported the crime to police. The National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) is a national survey of approximately 49,000 to 77,400 households, on the frequency of crime victimization, as well as, characteristics and consequences of victimization.

In 2018, only 43% of violent crimes tracked in the NCVS were reported to police. And in the much more common category of property crime, only 34% were reported.

Crimes go unreported for all sorts of reasons, including fear of repercussions, lack of trust in the police, long waits for police to respond to a call or simply disinterest in involving the police in a minor incident.

There are obvious reasons why some crimes are reported more often than others. Homicide, for instance, leaves behind a significant piece of evidence - a body. Sure, there are unreported homicides, victims go missing, and their bodies never recovered, but homicide has an extremely high rate of police involvement.

Rape, on the other hand, is different. Women are reluctant to report rape and men who have been raped rarely report their victimization to the police. According to the NCVS, less than 1 in 4 sexual assaults are reported to the police.

According to NCVS data, aggravated assault and auto theft are reported to the police at much higher rates. For example, nearly four out of every five auto thefts are reported to the police.

Stolen vehicles are expensive to replace and are more likely to be recovered by police than other stolen items. In addition, the vast majority of cars are insured and most insurance policies require a police report before companies will pay on a claim.

Aggravated assaults involve the intent to inflict serious bodily injury. As such, these crimes are more likely to result in hospitalization and most states require hospitals to report suspicious injuries to law enforcement.

Unfortunately, an even dire problem comes to light after crimes are reported. According to the Pew Research Center, most of the crimes reported to police are never solved. Based on a measure known as the “clearance rate,” the FBI determines the percentage of crimes that are closed or “cleared.” In the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report, law enforcement agencies can clear offenses in one of two ways - arrest or by exceptional means.

Clearance by exceptional means includes the death of a suspect or the reluctance of the victim or witnesses to cooperate in an investigation.

According to Pew, police nationwide cleared 46% of violent crimes that were reported to them last year. Clearance of property crimes was an abysmal 18%.

Clearance rates have declined precipitously over the last 50 years. In 1965, the clearance rate for homicide was just above 90%. Last year, the clearance rate nationwide was 62.3%.

Although homicide has declined dramatically in this country from a high water mark of 24,530 in 1993 to 16,214 last year, solving murders has become more difficult. Even with modern investigative techniques, more homicides than ever remain unsolved.

The scope of the problem is enormous. If you take the total number of murders over the last 10 years and divide that number by the average clearance rate the result is approximately 54,000 unsolved murders. That means there are as many as 50,000 killers walking among us.

Matthew T. Mangino is of counsel with Luxenberg, Garbett, Kelly & George P.C. His book The Executioner’s Toll, 2010 was released by McFarland Publishing. You can reach him at www.mattmangino.com and follow him on Twitter @MatthewTMangino.

To visit the column CLICK HERE

One in three homicides go unsolved

Earlier this week, NPR reported that more than one-third of homicides in America go unsolved and examined why police investigators don’t close more murder cases. The Marshall Project asked Thomas Hargrove, the founder of the Murder Accountability Project and murderdata.org, to talk about what he’s learned in a career of studying data on homicide investigations across the country. After 37 years as an investigative reporter, Hargrove recently retired from journalism, to “spend my remaining time and energy to improve the accountability of unsolved murders.”

In the 1980s, about 27 percent of the killings of both black men and white men were reported to be unsolved at the time of reporting to the FBI. But from 1990 on, 29 percent of white male killings were unsolved compared to 38 percent of black male killings. Why the difference? Some criminologists point to the rise of drug- and gang-related violence in the murder statistics. These kinds of killings are certainly more difficult to solve. But there are many, many police departments where the clearance rates between white and black victims does not show this kind of disparity. It is most likely that the failure of solve homicides is a failure of will by local leadership. Police and community leadership in tandem has demonstrated in many communities that the “no snitching” rule can be overcome by compassionate leaders.

To read more CLICK HERE

Murder clearance rate at lowest point ever

The national murder clearance rate—the percent of cases that end with an arrest or identification of a suspect who can’t be apprehended—fell to 59.4 percent in 2016, the lowest it’s been since the FBI has tracked the issue, reports The Crime Report. “If we don’t address it, the issue is just going to get worse,” said Jim Adcock, a former coroner who started the Mid-South Cold Case Initiative to help police departments looking to bolster their cold case units. Chicago, which cleared only 26 percent of homicides in 2016, is just one among many cities struggling to solve gun crimes. The problem has been exacerbated by politics, fear, a no-snitching philosophy mentality pervasive in some enclaves, diminished resources for law enforcement and discontent with policing in minority communities. Gangs fueling much of the violence have become less hierarchical. They have also become more perplexing for investigators to understand, said Peter Scharf, a Louisiana State University criminologist, reported the The USA Today.

In cities like Baltimore, Chicago and New Orleans—which cleared under 28 percent of its homicide cases in 2016—the fracturing of gangs has added a difficult dimension for detectives. “It’s a national disaster,” said Scharf. “With every one of these weekends where you see multiple killed and even more wounded and few arrested, the gangs become more emboldened and the witnesses weaker in their conviction to step up.” Memphis, where Adcock is based, saw its homicide clearance fall to 38 percent in 2016. Cities like Boston have made headway. Between 2007 and 2011, the city solved 47.1 percent of homicides. After focusing on the issue, police improved the clearance rate to 56.9 percent. The department increased the amount of evidence analyzed by the crime lab and interviewed more witnesses promptly at crime scenes, say Anthony Braga, a Northeastern University criminologist, and Desiree Dusseault, deputy police chief of staff.

To read more CLICK HERE

Homicide arrest rates below 50% in America's 50 largest cities

The Washington Post has identified the places in dozens of American cities where murder is common but arrests are rare. These pockets of impunity were identified by obtaining and analyzing up to a decade of homicide arrest data from 50 of the nation’s largest cities. The analysis of 52,000 criminal homicides goes beyond what is known nationally about the unsolved cases, revealing block by block where police fail to catch killers.

The overall homicide arrest rate in the 50 cities is 49 percent, but in these areas of impunity, police make arrests less than 33 percent of the time. Despite a nationwide drop in violence to historic lows, 34 of the 50 cities have a lower homicide arrest rate now than a decade ago.

Some cities, such as Baltimore and Chicago, solve so few homicides that vast areas stretching for miles experience hundreds of homicides with virtually no arrests. In other places, such as Atlanta, police manage to make arrests in a majority of homicides — even those that occur in the city’s most violent areas.

In Pittsburgh, a low-arrest zone occupies a run-down stretch of boarded-up buildings, two-story brick homes and vacant lots. In San Francisco, another one falls within a bustling immigrant neighborhood where day laborers and community college students crowd bus shelters and freeways snake overhead. In the District, yet another sits in the heart of Petworth, a gentrifying neighborhood crowded with construction cranes and the skeletons of future condos.

Police blame the failure to solve homicides in these places on insufficient resources and poor relationships with residents, especially in areas that grapple with drug and gang activity where potential witnesses fear retaliation. But families of those killed, and even some officers, say the fault rests with apathetic police departments. All agree that the unsolved killings perpetuate cycles of violence in low-arrest areas.

Detectives said they cannot solve homicides without community cooperation, which makes it almost impossible to close cases in areas where residents already distrust police. As a result, distrust deepens and killers remain on the street with no deterrent.

“If these cases go unsolved, it has the potential to send the message to our community that we don’t care,” said Oakland police Capt. Roland Holmgren, who leads the department’s criminal investigation division. That city has two zones where unsolved homicides are clustered.

To read more CLICK HERE

GateHouse: Killing without consequences, the rise in unsolved murders

Matthew T. Mangino

GateHouse Media

January 26, 2018

Last week, the Chicago Tribune wrote about the tragic, and unsolved, murders of at least 75 women over the last 17 years on the South and West sides of Chicago. According to the Tribune, the women were either strangled or smothered “and their bodies dumped in vacant buildings, alleys, garbage cans, snow banks.”

Arrests have been made in less than one in three of those murders. According to the Tribune, there is no evidence suggesting a serial killer is at work. The absence of a serial killer means 51 murderers have evaded the police and the consequences of their crimes.

Fifty one killers loose on the streets, of any city, is frightening. However, the killers loose on Chicago’s South and West sides only scratches the surface.

Turn the clock back one year — January 2017 — the same newspaper wrote that “More than 80 percent of murders committed in 2016 were not solved.” There were 763 murders in Chicago in 2016. With a clearance rate of 19.9 percent, Chicago’s streets have 612 murderers walking free from 2016 alone.

In the criminal justice system, clearance rate is used to measure the rate at which law enforcement agencies solve crimes. In the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program, law enforcement agencies can clear, or “close,” offenses in one of two ways: By arrest or by exceptional means.

Clearance by exceptional means could include the death of a suspect or the reluctance of the victim or witnesses to cooperate in an investigation.

Declining clearance rates is not just a Chicago problem. If you’re murdered in America, there’s a one in three chance that the police won’t identify your killer.

Clearance rates have declined precipitously over the last 50 years. In 1965, clearance rates for murder hovered above 90 percent. In 2016, the last year of available data, the clearance rate nationwide was 55 percent.

Although homicide has declined dramatically in this country from a high water-mark of 24,530 in 1993 to 16,891 in 2016, solving murders has become more difficult. Even with modern investigative techniques, more homicides than ever remain unsolved.

The scope of the problem is enormous. If you take the total number of murders over the last 10 years and divide that number by the average clearance rate, the result is approximately 54,000 unsolved murders.

More than half of America’s major police departments are struggling to solve homicides at the same level of success they enjoyed just a decade ago, according to a study of federal crime records by the nonprofit Murder Accountability Project (MAP).

The study focused on the nation’s 160 police departments that investigate at least 10 homicides a year and annually report crime data to the FBI’s UCR. Fifty four percent of those departments reported less success in solving murders committed during the 10-year period, 2006-2015, than in the preceding decade.

The problem is about more than police work. The MAP study found most departments with declining murder clearance rates also experienced an increase in homicides. These departments often are located in areas with declining tax bases or facing other kinds of fiscal challenges.

The “no snitching” culture in many minority communities has been fueled by worsening relationships between the police and the public. The reluctance of witnesses to come forward or cooperate with investigators has had an impact on solving murders.

How can the police earn the trust of the public if the most heinous crimes remain unsolved and the perpetrators of those crimes remain free? The mistrust leads to less cooperation, which leads to more unsolved murders which leads to ever-widening mistrust — a lethal cycle that sucks the life out of neighborhoods and whole communities.

Matthew T. Mangino is of counsel with Luxenberg, Garbett, Kelly & George P.C. His book The Executioner’s Toll, 2010 was released by McFarland Publishing. You can reach him at www.mattmangino.com and follow him on Twitter @MatthewTMangino.

To visit the column CLICK HERE