Those Falling Crime Rates Have One Big Catch

By Barry Latzer

Saturday, January 18, 2025

 

Crime has continued to slide in 2024. An analysis of 277 cities in the United States found that the murder rate (always the most accurate measure), declined by around 18 percent since 2023. For the ten biggest cities in the United States, the downturn was closer to 19 percent. These impressive numbers tell us that the Covid crime spike of 2020–22 is over. But the quality of policing is not what it ought to be.

 

The Covid years were rough for law enforcement, and this accelerated the crime burst. Police became less proactive and lost manpower because of the pandemic. Officers were demoralized by fierce public criticism (remember “Defund the police”?) and diverted from street crime to riot and protest assignments in the wake of George Floyd’s death. Murders jumped from fewer than 17,000 in 2019 to more than 22,500 in 2020, a 31 percent increase in the per capita rate. The following year was only slightly better, with 21,462 murders at a rate of 6.5 per 100,000 of the U.S. population. While crime spiked in 2020–21, arrests went down — not up. There were 25 percent fewer arrests for serious crimes in 2021 than in 2022.

 

Though most police departments have recovered from the pandemic (some still face serious manpower shortages), crime clearance rates remain low. Clearance rates — the percentage of known crimes that result in arrest — are a standard measure of police performance. For decades these rates have been tumbling. One study found a 29 percent decline in homicide clearances between the 1960s and the 1990s. In the 1960s, more than nine out of ten murders nationwide were solved; by 2019, before the pandemic, only six out of ten were. While some big-city police departments currently report high homicide clearance rates — consider Los Angeles (76 percent) and Houston (87 percent) — the NYPD cleared only 47 percent of murders in 2023, while the Chicago police in early 2024 boasted about its improved rate of 52 percent.

 

Though murder clearance rates are low compared with those of earlier decades, they are still far better than are arrest rates for other reported crimes. In 2023, nationwide, only 28 percent of robbers, 27 percent of rapists, and a mere 14 percent of burglars were nabbed. And if your car is stolen, there is only an 8 percent chance that the cops will catch the thief.

 

The clearance rate decline is part of a long-term trend that has nothing to do with Covid, and it has criminologists puzzled. One possible explanation is that different types of murders make cases more or less solvable, and tougher cases have become more prevalent in recent decades. For instance, cases in which the killer is known to the victim, such as domestic murders or quarrels among acquaintances, are usually easier to solve. Detectives can canvas the victim’s friends and family and more readily produce a suspect. By contrast, killings by strangers, such as the typical robbery-murder, are harder to solve since few witnesses, if there are any, know the perpetrators and can provide credible leads. And with gang killings, cooperation with the authorities is often lacking, especially when witnesses avoid law enforcement or are too scared of reprisals to come forward. DNA evidence is also likely to be unavailable with shootings, which, unlike knifings, don’t usually involve close contact between the perpetrator and the victim.

 

Nationwide police figures show a steep decline since the 1960s in the percentage of total murders that occur within families or among acquaintances. In 1965, according to police data compiled by the FBI, family killings were 31 percent of all homicides, and acquaintance or friend murders constituted 48 percent of the murder count, for a total of 79 percent. By 2015, these types of murders made up only 60 percent of the total. In other words, the easy-to-solve cases had become far less common.

 

But why? One reason is the growth in big cities after World War II. Big cities mean more anonymity and entail regular contact with total strangers, some of whom may be criminals. And eyewitnesses to crimes committed by persons whom those witnesses have never seen before are notoriously unhelpful. In 1940, 57 percent of Americans lived in urban areas. By 1960 the urban population had leaped to 70 percent, and, by 2000, to 79 percent. With more and bigger cities to police, law enforcement officers are now facing a bigger proportion of crimes committed by strangers, few of which are solvable. This is reflected in data on city size and clearance rates. Police in small towns and medium-size cities with fewer than 100,000 people achieve higher homicide clearance rates — 60–70 percent — while police in cities of over 1 million typically clear only 40 percent.

 

So, while the crime rate is much lower than it was 35 years ago, it would be lower still if police were more effective. While urban America undoubtedly is here to stay, there are policy changes that could improve the effectiveness of law enforcement. We could hire more cops and deploy electronic technology, such as cameras in public places. It also would help if we imposed meaningful punishments even on low-level offenders (though this is anathema to some progressive DAs). Such policies would deter crime and help police, who nowadays face an uphill battle in crime-solving.