I read in the Post that "About 61 percent of the [homicide] cases [in DC] have resulted in an arrest this year." That made me realize that I have no idea whether that's a high number or a low one. So on to Google. Here I learn that in New York City 40.2 percent of murders go unsolved. In 2002, "the clearance rate for murder was 64.0 percent." So DC doesn't seem to be far out of the typical range -- if you kill someone, you've got a bit less than a forty percent chance of getting away with it.
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Getting Away With Murder
18 Nov 2007 04:36 pm
Comments (12)
Both are better than San Francisco, far better.
SF's solve rate is atrocious.
only if you assume that "resulted in an arrest" means both "was convicted" AND "was guilty." Given the number of people exonerated from death row via DNA evidence, which is not available in all cases, that is a very naive assumption. And when someone is executed, the Innocence Project isn't going to spend resources trying to figure out if that was a mistake, because they want to save innocent guys from dying. So if the innocent guy dies, the real murderer is safe unless someone actually runs to the cops with new info. And when someone's been executed, how likely is it that the cops will be on fire to do something with that new info?
In other words: you cannot assume "got away with it" simply because an arrest was made. At all.
What's the rate of false convictions? I can't find anybody brave enough to estimate but it has to be non-trivial.
So you chance to get convicted of murder goes down by that much.
As it happens, I'm reading David Simon's book "Homicide" right now which delves into some of the issues surrounding the "clearance rate". Despite what some commenters are saying about false convictions, I think the far greater error in using this stat is that just because a homicide is "cleared", that doesn't mean that it has been successfully prosecuted in court as a murder. It just means that the case was "solved". So some of these murders may well have resulted in a suspect who is convicted of first or second degree murder and then put away to serve his or her sentence. However, many of them are plead down to manslaughter, or unsuccessfully prosecuted, etc.
Also, understand that the "clearance rate" (at least in Baltimore at the time 'Homicide' was written, late 80s) is virtually the sole measure for success of a homicide division as well as individual detectives and their respective shifts. Naturally, this leads to fudging the numbers. For example, if new evidence leads to an arrest today for an open murder that occurred in 1997, that clearance will count toward today's clearance rate. Using this, homicide divisions can have a number of clearances in their pocket at the beginning of a new year so that they can bolster their stats if they are having a difficult time.
As Simon says in the book: "There are lies, there are damn lies, and then there are statistics."
I won't ever be able to communicate it as well as Simon. And I can't recommend this book enough, especially if you're a fan of The Wire. There are a million true crime books out there, but this one is a true masterpiece.
IIRC from The Wire, the homicide department considers a case cleared as soon as they hand a case off to the prosecutors. If a defendant has a case thrown out or if they are found not guilty, it still counts as a cleared case.
Your chance of getting away with it depends almost entirely on who you kill. The media tends to miss cute white women and those do, I bet, tend to clear at a higher rate.
when someone is executed, the Innocence Project isn't going to spend resources trying to figure out if that was a mistake, because they want to save innocent guys from dying.
They maybe should reconsider that, though - if a number of executed defendants are later proved innocent, we might have a better chance at reform.
"if you kill someone, you've got a bit less than a forty percent chance of getting away with it. "
You omit the possibility of revenge killings. Not getting arrested is not necessarily getting away with it.
The clearance rate for murders in the nearby town of Durham, NC, hit a low of 22% a few years ago, and I believe the average is still somewhere below 30%. NYC and DC sound as if they're doing pretty well.
The 40% is for deaths identified as homicides. It's a lower bound for all homicides, since some bodies are never found and some ingenious homicides are mis-classified as suicides or deaths by accident. The latter is a staple of detective fiction rather than of real life, but there are an awful lot of missing persons - 100,000 currently on file in the USA.
Clearup rates for (recorded) murder were around 90% in Europe vs. 63% in the US in 2000. Here's an idea: catch more murderers and maybe there will be fewer! Why has nobody thought of this before?
Anyone who's seen the British movie "Hot Fuzz" knows that European murders are just classified as "accidents", so it's useless to compare the clearance rates of Europe vs US.
Comments closed December 02, 2007.
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Heads in the Sand
I suspect this is heavily skewed towards property and narcotics-related murders. Shooting a rival dealer, 7-11 clerk, or owner of a desirable automobile is probably fairly safe. Murdering a relative or individual with whom you have a longstanding enmity will likely land you in the pokey. Or rather, as long as you stick to murdering complete strangers, it's difficult to catch you.
Posted by K. Larson | November 18, 2007 9:32 PM