Dear reader,
We’ve talked about the significant decline in U.S. murders. This week, we want to talk about their aftermath.
In 2015, the journalist Jill Leovy published the book “Ghettoside,” a chronicle of what she witnessed while embedding with the Los Angeles Police Department’s homicide bureau for several years. Leovy states her thesis at the book’s outset: “Where the criminal justice system fails to respond vigorously to violent injury and death, homicide becomes endemic.”
If a life can be taken without accountability, Leovy argues, then life will be treated as cheap.
Leovy’s book painted a vivid picture of what it takes for a detective to investigate a homicide, to gather enough evidence to hold someone accountable. Our best proxy for how often this happens is the homicide clearance rate.
So we asked our reporter, Shayla Colon, to follow up on last week’s look at the declining murder rate by explaining what we can learn about the recent trajectory of the clearance rate, and why it’s not as straightforward a measure as it may seem.
— Matt Thompson
How many murders are solved?
In 2024, the national clearance rate for homicides was just above 61 percent, rising from nearly 58 percent the previous year. The modest improvement signals a return to a threshold the rate has hovered around for more than 30 years, said Jeff Asher, a crime analyst.
To calculate the rate, the F.B.I. collects data from police departments around the country. A clearance is counted for the year the homicide is solved, which is not necessarily the year it happened. The death must also meet the definition of criminal homicide or non-negligent manslaughter to be counted in the rate.
One likely reason the rate has risen in recent years is that murders have declined. Experts have long observed a sort of inverse relationship between murders and clearance rates: More cases strain resources and create more work for detectives, so solving those crimes can be more challenging. In 2022, after a surge in homicides that accompanied the coronavirus pandemic, the rate was 52 percent — the lowest the F.B.I. had ever recorded.
But the impact of a murder doesn’t end when the case is closed.
“Families go on with this forever, even if there’s an arrest made,” said Joe Giacalone, a retired sergeant with the New York Police Department and an adjunct professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. “People talk about closure, but it’s really never closed for victims’ families.”
What does it mean to ‘clear’ a murder?
There is a lot of variability in how different police departments tally their clearance rates.
Homicide cases can be closed two ways: by arrest or by exceptional means. Cleared by arrest is when someone has been arrested, charged and sent to court for prosecution. But an “exceptional” clearance applies to an array of circumstances where the person responsible for a homicide has not been charged. These include when an offender is dead or when prosecutors have decided not to bring charges. Different departments can use widely varying standards for deeming a homicide cleared without an arrest.
Also, a homicide is considered cleared when the case is solved, not when the murder happens. This is why, for example, the Los Angeles Police Department reported a 101 percent clearance rate for 2025, after clearing dozens of homicides from past years.
Until the 1980s, clearance rates were often falsely inflated by coercive interrogation techniques and racial bias, which led to many false confessions and unjust arrests, according to Nick Wilson, the senior director for public safety at the Center for American Progress. The homicide clearance rate was 91 percent in 1965, but that didn’t necessarily mean more crimes were being solved.
Today’s clearance rates, despite the complexities, are generally thought to be more accurate than those from several decades ago.
What are states doing to clear homicides?
Soon after homicides surged and clearance rates plunged during the pandemic, several cities and states took aggressive approaches to address crime and improve how they report data.
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Boston: After using funds from the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 to hire additional detectives and purchase technology to help solve crimes, the city’s clearance rate rose by 19 percentage points.
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Albuquerque: The city used federal money to invest in real-time crime centers with technology like license plate readers and gunshot detection systems, and investigative teams that monitor social media. In 2024, its homicide clearance rate was 126 percent.
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Illinois: The state passed a law that requires law enforcement agencies to release clearance data for homicides and shootings.
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Texas: Two counties are using rapid DNA-testing centers, which can help provide DNA test results within two hours. This helps investigators quickly determine if a detained suspect’s DNA is connected with any unsolved cases.
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Pennsylvania: Law enforcement agencies are receiving annual grants to expand investigative abilities and reporting systems.
What can I check out next?
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German Lopez chronicled how an unsolved murder affected a family in Louisville, Ky., and how the city’s low solve rate pointed to a larger, national issue.
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When murders increased in New York during the pandemic, Ali Watkins asked if they had also become harder to solve. The answer was complicated.
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In 2018, The Washington Post analyzed more than 52,000 homicides to find “pockets of impunity” — where murders were common but arrests were rare.
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Homicide clearance rates can be confusing and misleading. Amanda Watford, a reporter for Stateline, explains the complexity and nuance surrounding the statistic.
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In 2021, Jeff Asher wrote for The Upshot about what improves the chances of solving a murder.
— Shayla Colon
Your turn
Test your knowledge: In August, the genealogy site Ancestry limited the use of its service for law enforcement purposes without a legal order or warrant, dismaying many investigators. How many cases have been solved using “genetic genealogy investigations”?
Tell us your thoughts: Have you experienced the loss of a loved one through homicide? How did the outcome, whether the case was closed or not, change your understanding of this issue? Do you have ideas about what the country — at the local, state and federal levels — could be doing to solve murders? Please email your thoughts to [email protected].
Following up: In response to last week’s newsletter, several of you offered potential solutions for what we’ve called the great American murder mystery: why the nation’s homicides have fallen significantly from their peak. You asked whether demographic trends might explain the decline, such as a particularly crime-prone generation aging out of committing homicides.
But so far, experts have concluded that no single answer can fully explain the reduction in murders. And there is persistent worry about whether the trend will hold.
The Headway initiative is funded through grants from the Ford Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF), with Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors serving as a fiscal sponsor. The Woodcock Foundation is a funder of Headway’s public square. Funders have no control over the selection, focus of stories or the editing process and do not review stories before publication. The Times retains full editorial control of the Headway initiative.
The post What Does It Mean to Solve a Murder? appeared first on New York Times.
