Getting Away With Murder

By Cernig

ABC reports that the clear-up rate for homicides in the US has plummeted.

FBI figures obtained by The Associated Press show that the homicide clearance rate, as detectives call it, dropped from 91 percent in 1963 — the first year records were kept in the manner they are now — to 61 percent in 2007.

Law enforcement officials say the chief reason is a rise in drug- and gang-related killings, which are often impersonal and anonymous, and thus harder to solve than slayings among family members or friends. As a result, police departments are carrying an ever-growing number of "cold-case" murders on their books.

... The number of criminal homicides committed in the U.S. climbed from 4,566 in 1963 to 14,811 in 2007, according to the FBI. The clearance rate has been dropping pretty steadily over the past four decades, slipping under 80 percent in the early 1970s and below 70 percent in the late 1980s. In cities with populations over 1 million, the 2007 clearance rate was 59 percent, down from 89 percent in 1963.

Gang killings may well be the major cause of this climb in unsolved murders, but the way in which the FBI has elevated counter-terrorism over law enforcement on the Bush administration's orders cannot be helping, not when FBI offices are left with up to a third shortfall in law-enforcement agents. Homicide isn't the only crime going unpunished, as the SeattlePI reported last year.

Overall, the number of criminal cases investigated by the FBI nationally has steadily declined. In 2005, the bureau brought slightly more than 20,000 cases to federal prosecutors, compared with about 31,000 in 2000 -- a 34 percent drop...White-collar crime investigations by the bureau have plummeted in recent years. In 2005, the FBI sent prosecutors 3,500 cases -- a fraction of the more than 10,000 cases assigned to agents in 2000... Civil rights investigations, which include hate crimes and police abuse, have continued a steady decline since the late 1990s. FBI agents pursued 65 percent fewer cases in 2005 than they did in 2000.

A report in September 2005 by the department's inspector general asserted that in addition to the 1,143 agents transferred away from traditional crime programs, the FBI used 1,279 agents on counterterrorism work, even though they were on the books as criminal-program agents. The inspector general concluded that the FBI "reduced its investigative efforts related to traditional crimes by more than 2,400 agents."

In all, estimates have it that over 20,000 crimes go uninvestigated by the FBI every year in return for the handful of counter-terrorism cases arising out of over 100,000 false leads it takes these thousands of agents to pursue. Cases like chasing tourists ,framing idiots and then going to costly mistrials and botching drugs busts by insisting on terror connections that don't exist.

Heccuva job, Mueller.

Comments

[anderson]

Cernig,

I don't think you can pin the collapse of policing all on Mueller and the push to counterterrorism. Former Baltimore journalist, David Simon, a scathing critic of the war on drugs, argues that the decades-long drug war has destroyed policing in general, because the metric of success has turned toward "production" of arrests, especially drug-related arrests, and moved away from solving violent crime.

This country as a whole has the highest incarceration rate ever in the world, five times greater than it was just 30 years ago, and only 8 percent of these imprisonments are for violent crimes. "The drug war has destroyed policing," Simon mentioned emphatically. When police have to chase after drug-related arrests they ignore other – potentially more important – cases. If one policeman, Simon explained, has 30 arrests in one month, all drug-related, then he's going to look more successful than the other policeman who solved one homicide case. Arrests for major felonies have decreased 50 percent; drug arrests have increased 300%. The clearance rate for homicide has gone from 70 percent to 38 percent, and similarly the clearance rate for armed robberies has gone from 40 percent to 17 percent."