I think it’s a multifaceted problem. Police data is being scrutinized more heavily, arrests and forced confessions are being broadcasted widely, more and more people have wised up to the golden rule of don’t talk to cops, and police are tasked with so many stupid/useless things like the drug war, stopping abortions, arresting kids in schools whose parent just died of cancer, that they don’t devote enough resources to actual crimes like murders. Plus, you know, people are lazy in general and cop unions are the best at protecting their members.
Police have spent decades destroying any trust in their institution and they’re learning the hard way that they literally can’t do their job when everybody hates their guts. Sure their unions can keep them out of jail, but it’s not going to do anything to make the average citizen be willing to talk to them.
But we have so many Podcasters and suburban moms on the case!
Tonight on Only Murders in the US…
Cops are on strike. If their racism is going to be questioned, they don’t want to do their job.
They’ll gladly keep absorbing all those tax dollars though, and you better give them a COL increase in next year’s budget or else fire and brimstone will rain down from the sky.
Interesting. The murder rate has gone down over the last three decades and the clearance rate went down with it. You would think police could focus more time on solving the fewer number of murders. Or maybe they are just unable to force confessions these days.
I think it’s showing that it was never a problem of not enough time to devote to any particular murder, but a lack of evidence due to the competence of the murderer. Essentially the murderers were more competent than the police for a certain subset of murderers, so even though there are fewer total murders happening the percentage of them being carried out competently remains the same.
Police in general are actually alarmingly bad at solving crimes. The ones they do solve tend to be cases where they either get incredibly lucky, the criminal is incredibly stupid, or both. Most cases are solved because the criminal was caught in the act, caught on camera, or told someone else about their crime and that person turned them in. Winning the case against them might come down to the evidence collected, but that initial arrest usually isn’t because of evidence left at the scene.
Give tickets to car owners instead of drivers, enforce traffic laws with cameras like the rest of the developed world, and move the 80% of cops currently on traffic to working real crimes (with a bit more training, less in the warrior mentality, too.)
Americans are so corrupted by profit mechanisms and resistant to effective change.
I think it’s all the forensic crime TV shows. The layperson now has a pretty clear understanding of how to not get caught.
Graph label is cut off but it goes from 1960 to 2020. Was the clearance rate in 1960 really above 90%? I’m surprised.
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