TONI STEVENSON had just arrived at her home in St Louis when two masked men with assault rifles ran up, shot her and fled. Just 15 years old, she died at the scene. Four years have gone by, and her murderers have not yet been apprehended.A daily email with the best of our journalismThey are in good company. The year Ms Stevenson was killed, the homicide clearance rate in St Louis—generally the ratio of number of arrests for murder to the number of murders—was 53%. It has since fallen further.
The situation may be even more dire than these statistics suggest, because some police departments’ clearance rates may be overstated. Cases can be considered cleared not only when an arrest is made, but also when suspects die, when witnesses are unavailable, or when police say they’ve identified a suspect but decline to arrest them. In some jurisdictions, these nuances can be used to exaggerate clearance figures.
Why do so many American killers escape justice? In gang- and drug-related murders, witnesses may be afraid to co-operate. Some departments say that failures to make headway in such cases, which account for a sizable share of killings in some American cities, are largely responsible for low clearance rates. Research has found that this is one of several factors outside the control of investigators that help to determine whether a case will be solved.
Homicide clearance rates are not just chronically low, but chronically unequal as well. In some cities, such as Boston, the murder of a white victim is twice as likely to be solved as the murder of a black victim. Researchers such as Jill Leovy, a sociologist who wrote a book on the topic, argue that this failure builds distrust of the police—and that this distrust will result in even more murders.
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