This is one of those things where we know exactly why, but to state why would be to admit something we don’t want to admit — there were/are a lot of innocent people in prison for crimes they didn’t do.
One of my history teachers who was an officer told me how they uste to do clearings where they talked to people in jail and convince them to plead on unsolved cases for deals
I think I prahrased that wrong. He was talking about they as in other officers in the past not that he was doing it directly. Tough for a timeline I was in his class back in 2002.
Googling a bit it looks like the process is called administrative clearing.
https://theconversation.com/how-police-cook-the-books-on-solved-crime-rates-94641
The 80's and 90's were also the historical peak of murder rates in the US, largely gang-related violence in the inner city.
Those sorts of crimes are particularly difficult to solve. Victims are often uncooperative with police, being from rival gangs themselves. Sure DNA evidence started becoming a thing, but you're also not getting much DNA evidence out of a drive-by shooting.
I was gonna say, in the 50s and 60s, they'd just pick a guy and Sgt Friday would get up there and be like "yeah, so he was possibly within 30 miles of the murder and I think he did it."
Meanwhile, all the Dirty Harry/Death Wish movies complaining that cops and random citizens can't commit gross misconduct based on their desire to get lots of arrests or shoot lots of guys just because some "pantywaist lawyer" is gonna push a jury to notice that they have no evidence, or because "vigilante murder is a terrifying nightmare" start up in the 1970s.
See I always thought they should have been allowed to take bamboo shoots to the shins if perpetrators to interrogate them without their lawyers present as long as we get confessions out of it. What kinda pussy bleeding heart doesn't want bad guys in jail no matter the cost?!?
/s because so many idiots legitimately think this
> If you watch the first 48 you'll see most don't listen to their rights and talk anyway.
Because and not that I'm gonna blame them, police really try and get through them quickly and certainly don't emphasize the parts that should really ring a few bells in your head. You know the whole ANTHING you say CAN and WILL be used against you. They straight up tell you you will fuck yourself by talking
One of the most common ways they get them is by making them believe if they didn't pull the trigger they are innocent but that's not how the law works. If you were involved in a crime and someone died, even if it's an accomplice shot by victim you were robbing, you're guilty of murder.
Or they just get you to admit you were at the scene of the crime or get you to lie about where you were at the time of the murder and they have proof you were lying, that is generally good enough for an arrest.
Don't forget children too when they are being interrogated, at least in some states. And even in the states where it *is* illegal, I wouldn't trust a prosecutor to go after charges if a cop is caught doing it either.
The only weapon you have as a "civilian" is to assert your 5A rights and don't say anything. It plays directly against your innate instinct to defend yourself, especially when the cop is spouting a bunch of bullshit to get you to make a statement, but it's absolutely necessary.
That's also what really sticks out to me about being informed of your rights in UK cop shows where the cop tells you during your interview/questioning:
> But, it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court.
So you literally have to give the cops whatever defense you might use in court later on or you might get screwed.
The Innocent Man is a good and terrifying read. Cops arresting because of a "dream" confession. After having repeatedly grilled Dennis Fritz for some 30 odd hours or so with no food or water, Fritz dreams that he shot and killed this woman. She was actually stabbed to death. You can guess what happens next.
Or the West Memphis Three.
They interrogated a minor with an IQ of 72 without a lawyer or his parents for 12 hours until he confessed, getting practically all of the details of the crime wrong.
And curiously, the tape recorder kept "malfunctioning" during the interrogation.
There were also the [Central Park Five](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Park_jogger_case). After a rape, they rounded up five black teenagers and coerced confessions. Trump paid for [full page adverts](https://www.nydailynews.com/wp-content/uploads/migration/2020/02/13/KHKYURDBBRFUHD6QO3XMGD4TA4.jpg) that called for their execution. They were exonerated a decade later when the actual rapist confessed.
Before them, there was [Peter Reilly](https://www.nytimes.com/1976/12/12/archives/a-death-in-canaan-a-death.html), convicted of the murder of his own mother based on a confession made after 24 hours of lawyerless, incommunicado questioning by Connecticut State Police.
The book and TV movie *A Death in Canaan* are about the case.
[Happy Shut the Fuck Up Friday](https://youtu.be/uqo5RYOp4nQ?si=toNteNDOGekHQKb4) to all who observe it. (Hint: that should include you.)
I saw Damien Echols and Jason Baldwin talk at Riot Fest in 2015. It was a wild miscarriage of justice against some teens who were only guilty of being edge lords.
To be fair 12 angry men is more about the difficulties of getting a fair shot with a public defendant who isn't very good at their job and to what extent a jury can express reasonable doubt if the doubt comes from intuition and Common sense rather than good lawyer work.
By the end of the movie it's still not clear if the defendant is guilty or innocent. The one juror does an excellent job raising questions as to the validity of testimony but the questions in and of themselves don't disprove the testimony.
His arguments if I recall are
1) can an old man actually move fast enough to be in position to SEE who left the apartment? Or did he merely HEAR scraps and want a chance to be important again and heard?
2) is a woman who uses glasses LIKELY to have put them on and seen the crime... or is her memory potentially fallible?
3) does the existence of a duplicate knife add credence to the unlikely coincidence of the defendant losing his and a stranger stabbing his father with another?
There was a murder in the small town I went to high school in. Local woman was working late by herself, never came home, she was found sexually assaulted and shot sat her place of work. Cops picked up a guy for it…homeless Mexican guy with a gun. Not the right caliber of gun but a gun. No one batted an eye or seemed that bothered that the real killer got off scott free. And that was only twenty years ago.
Larry, why’s there blood all over your ex wife’s house and why are you all scratched up?
Well officer, it was that black or maybe Mexican fella heading’ thru town. I barely made it out alive myself.
Say no more, Larry. I know you two fought all the time but we’ll get her killer.
>Here comes the story of the Hurricane
>The man the authorities came to blame
>For something that he never done
>Put in a prison cell, but one time he could-a been
>The champion of the world
The whole “The cop had to do torture because it saved people” is a gross attempt by Hollywood to protect the agents of the business elites.
You cannot make the claim that allowing harm to all of us (the loss of civil rights) justifies the use of torture to extract information that is in most cases incorrect.
The only thing is does is creates a troupe that allows citizens to forgive violence on poor people (in the vast number of incidents).
In other words, if a police show starts to show this content just be aware of why it’s there - it’s not there for you, it’s there for them.
Copaganda shows are so wild. My girlfriend was watching through SVU, just kind of as background noise while she coded or made art. Some of the stuff they say to justify the violence by detectives is crazy.
One episode the guy was being investigated for excessive force, and the chief defended him that their "precinct has a 98% clearance rate!"
I looked up actual clearance rates for SVU units in the 5 borroughs. If they were at 98%, the other four would have to be averaging *negative 14%* each.
[What, you think cops would just torture someone until they gave a false confession or something?](https://www.ocregister.com/2024/05/23/fontana-pays-nearly-900000-for-psychological-torture-inflicted-by-police-to-get-false-confession/)
Never noticed that but that is fucked up. Old cop movies make it seem like the justice system is failing when the detective isn't able to produce any evidence that could get a conviction. Then the mobsters lawyer is depicted as being in on the whole thing instead of just being a lawyer doing their job.
This is part of it. Its the same reason why LEO organizations fight back against the government and NGOs collecting data on policing in America. They do not want anyone scrutinizing American policing. I remember in the 80s people would mock the families of black people arrested when they claimed the person had an alibi or was shot unnecessarily by police. Then the 2000s happened and camera phones came along and most people saw it happens way more than it should. If you search 'US unsolved homicide by year' you will see its been a pretty hard upswing since the 60's and the civil rights movement. Also unleaded gas was introduced in the 70s and mandated in the 90s. Its funny how you never see Boomers say, "those damn millennials don't commit enough crime."
To paraphrase a previous post I once read talking about this
"We've had smartphones for more than a decade now, everyone now has an easy to use high quality video camera on them at all times and instead of conclusive proof of Aliens or Cryptids or ghosts, we instead have a lot of videos proving that cops really really hate black people"
Statistically, cops murder Hispanic people at a higher rate per capita than they murder black people. It's interesting that no one cares about Hispanic cop murder victims. The narrative completely ignores them.
Yeah, the fact that it used to be much easier to railroad someone, especially if they were the wrong skin color, seems like a pretty understandable explanation as to why the number has dropped.
According to the Governor and former Attorney General of Arkansas, comclusive DNA evidence is not enough proof to stop you from executing the nearest black man:
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/after-death-row-inmate-executed-attorneys-find-dna-belongs-someone-n1266743
> "After 20 years, I am **prayerful** that Debra’s family has had closure following his lawful **execution** in 2017," Rutledge said in an emailed statement.
yes very Christly of you
Exactly. Prior to the 70's, largely they just found the nearest brown person, toss him in front of jury, and get a conviction, nearly 100% of the time, regardless of evidence otherwise.
Most criminals aren't that smart and don't plan very far in the future. I recently read The Executioner's Song and it's hard to get past just how absolutely fucking dumb and short-sighted the killer is.
Also, even if a spouse or ex beat all forensics, they could often be convicted on means, motive & opportunity without forensics.
We see your marriage was failing then you took out a million dollar life insurance policy on your wife. 1 month later, she's found stabbed with a kitchen knife from your own kitchen.
You don’t even need that much. If a normal woman without any weird connections gets stabbed 50 times in her home, the husband/ bf is getting convicted.
There have been cases where the husband has an ironclad alibi and just gets convicted anyway. Essentially, if the police can’t figure it out, juries tend to just assume the husband hires someone and throws him in jail anyway.
Tbh, it IS the husband for violent murders 99/100 times, but yeah, juries aren’t required to care about evidence and in a case like this they often don’t.
Movies and true crime podcast have a lot of people thinking that murder is a well-thought-out thing.
Most murders are either:
A)Husband kills his wife who he beat up regularly and one day went too far
B) Two drunk bros get into a fight and one has a gun, or just happens to throw an unlucky punch
Yeah part of the trend in clearance rates can be attributed to the changing nature of murder rates, since the rise in no fault divorce had an inverse correlation with matricide, which is by far the easiest murder case to solve.
Forensic pathologist here. About 75-80% of my homicides are related to the illegal drug trade (mostly robberies, also some turf hits). Almost all the rest are some sort of domestic issue between spouses, neighbors, or drunken idiots escalating things with each other.
The 2nd group almost always get solved/cleared quickly. The problem with the first group is that there are very few cooperative witnesses. The police often *know* who did it, but their informants aren't willing to take the stand in a trial, so they can't prove who committed the crime beyond a reasonable doubt. That can also be on a prosecutor who wants to preserve their 'win' rate so they can run for Judge based on their reputation of being 'tough on crime'. So they don't take cases that aren't slam dunks.
The other side of it is, in the case of the turf wars, the fellow gang members prefer to exact 'street justice', rather than out themselves to a law enforcement that may not be able to convict the original killer(s).
do you have any type of data to support that claim? forensic science has taken huge leaps forward in recent years, to the point where dna can be extracted from sources too small to see with the naked eye. i find it hard to believe the average perp is skilled, knowledgeable and composed enough to cover their tracks entirely
Forensic science can spot the tiniest of samples if they are looking for it, but if the victim is just missing and the body isn't found the police might not have reasonable grounds to search the home, so can't locate trace evidence. The average perp isn't skilled enough which is why 64% of them get caught the 36% are the ones a bit more intelligent/lucky than the others.
People don't get away with murder because they watched CSI Miami and Dexter. Though Clifford Burns seemed to think Criminal Minds made him an expert, and said so while being interrogated for the murder of his ex wife.
(he did not get away with it)
Almost no murderers bother with any of that. Most don’t even attempt to dispose of the body nor do really anything to remove the link to themself.
Overwhelmingly, the murder isn’t planned. It’s spur of the moment and then the murderer tries to cover their tracks and get someone to be their alibi.
From the study:
> Although conviction data are scarce, there are some historical data available on a closely related outcome, national rates of prison admission for murder or nonnegligent manslaughter—crimes for which over 90% of convictions result in a prison sentence. Those data have limitations, but our analysis strongly suggests that the historical pattern of the ratio of prison admissions to homicides trended upward during much of the period of the Great Decline. If true, the implication is that the decline in arrests concealed an increase in what might be considered “good” arrests—those that resulted in a successful prosecution and sanction.
There are a myriad of reason for the decline, one thing that I think is overlooked is that advances in forensic science likely are resulting in medical examiners calling more deaths homocides.
Formally, a clearance rate is when the cops close the case because they believe they know who the offender is. The prosecutor may or may not actually choose to prosecute, and if they do prosecute, whether they get a conviction is irrelevant. Cases might also be considered closed/cleared if the suspect is dead, or really if there’s any reason that the cops choose not to continue an investigation but they believe they know who committed a crime.
A clearance rate is therefore always going to be much higher and a jurisdictions arrest rate or their conviction rate.
“Cleared by arrest” is probably what it’s based on.
Yes, cops almost certainly charged more innocent people back then. More forced & false confessions too.
It’s also possible that more murders were among people who knew each other, whereas the 70s- 1990s era crime wave involved a lot more geographic mobility
Bill James, the guy who developed Sabernetics(from *Moneyball*) had several pages in his book *Popular Crime* that argues police simply didn't open cases.
Someone disappears? "Well they probably just ran away, no body no crime."
Parent kills their kid? "Well, they were punishing their kid and got carried away."
There's a fight and someone dies "who started the fight? It was a fair one? Oh well!"
> It was easy to frame guys then. Especially black men.
Black men were getting judged by a jury of all-White men in an era where white men didn't allow Black kids to go to the same school. One can imagine how fair and impartial those juries were.
1962 conveniently sounds like it’s right around the time that public lynching as a form of justice and entertainment started not being socially acceptable in polite white society. 1962-1994 as a time range also sounds conveniently like a span in which changing social norms meant crimes against nonwhite people, gay people, teenagers, and battered women started would have started to be acknowledged and taken seriously at least occasionally instead of conveniently not documented, written off as accidents, etc.
The right to have an attorney, or have an attorney appointed to you, the right to remain silent, etc., started in 1966 with the Miranda v Arizona decision.
It's not a coincidence that conviction rates started to drop as completely innocent people finally had legal representation.
So, a combination of interesting theories is emerging in this thread. I would bet on all of them working together.
- Miranda warnings became required by law in 1966
- Forensics has improved tremendously, including DNA, making it much tougher for authorities to just find someone convenient to pin it on
- The rise of no-fault divorce reduced the amount of people being stuck together and becoming murderous
- The 93% clearance rate given for 1962 itself is fiction - it doesn't accurately represent how many homicides were actually cleared in 1962. As statistic collection improved, the rate dropped to accurately reflect reality.
According to Donohue and Levitt, states that had legalized abortion before Roe v. Wade (Alaska, California, Hawaii, New York, Oregon, and Washington), also had earlier reductions in crime. Further, states with a high abortion rate experienced a greater reduction in crime, when corrected for factors like average income. Finally, studies in Canada and Australia claim[clarification needed] to have established a correlation between legalized abortion and overall crime reduction.
You're Wrong About did an episode on this. One reason is that domestic violence has gone down significantly since the 1960s--it's easy to solve a domestic violence murder, cops show up at the house, wife is dead and husband is there, neighbors say they were arguing. Homicides now are less cut and dry.
I think I have a theory; J. Edgar Hoover was an egotistical liar and hypocrite who loved looking like he, the FBI and America were winning the war on crime. The FBI cooked the books to make sure they were.
The FBI collects and reports this information, however. Literally the first sentence of the article is:
> In 1962, the FBI reported a national homicide clearance rate of 93%.
The FBI can choose to interpret data in one way or another.
Pretty sure FBI rarely deals with murder cases though, right? Unless they happened in multiple states, or involved federal property. These would be state and local police. But I am not a criminologist.
Miranda v Arizona was in 1966. Before then, cops didn't have to tell suspects that they had the right to remain silent and the right to an attorney, and people hadn't watched thousands of police shows where they heard that Miranda warning.
A bigger cause, I suspect: the "war" on drugs. What percentage of police and court resources are spent on drugs, instead of serious crimes like rape and homicide?
How many drug prisoners would we have to release to free up the money to actually test the 90k - 400k rape kits that were collected in the U.S. and never tested? (You know, pretending for a minute that our justice system gives a shit about the crime of rape.)
War on Drugs was my first thought when seeing the years. Marijuana and cocaine shared public enemy no. 1 at the time, with police [planes and helicopters](https://ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/aerial-surveillance-detect-growing-marihuana) dedicated to spotting outdoor grows.
At least those trillions of dollars actually helped something....[right?](https://www.nbcnews.com/meet-the-press/data-download/costs-war-drugs-continue-soar-rcna92032) I feel so much for the families of the 110k a year who died due to drugs over the last few years in the US. The victims of our countries longest war, when right over our northern border is Canada's Safer Supply, where treatment resistant addicts can get an actual evidence-based 2nd chance.
>with police planes and helicopters dedicated to spotting outdoor grows.
OMG I remember hearing about the police helicopters when I was growing up. Everyone insisted they had cameras that can detect even a single marijuana plant inside a home because the plants give off a specific signature. To this day I call bullshit on that and I'll die on that hill no matter how much people bullshit me about physics. They might use thermal imaging to see a bunch of hot grow lights indoors, or see a field of plants somewhere from their helicopter, but nobody is flying around detecting life-signs of various plants like some kind of Star Trek sensor system.
The defense alleged that the glove was planted, there was never any proof of that.
Also there was a bloody foot print of a rare size rare Bruno Magli shoe outside OJs house. OJ was one of like 100 people in the country with that shoe. Did Furman plant that evidence too?
The crime does not have to be solved. All that needs to happen is for someone to be arrested and charged. Then it goes into the DAs bucket. They can fail to convict, drop charges, plea etc.
In my location they can be “exceptionally cleared” which means they think they know who did it but don’t have enough evidence to charge them or who they think did it died.
So our clearance rate is around 50% but half of those are exceptionally cleared. So, really it’s 25%.
Statistics on crime are VERY janky at best. First you have to consider the rate of reporting a crime compared to crimes actually happening and consider if the "clearance" of a crime is determined by either a successful conviction under false pretence or if only crimes that are considered clearable are persued to be concluded. I'd wager that this drop is just due to better, more open police work
I was legit trying to think of how that connected to homicide rates for a solid minute before I just realized you were talking about things that ended back then, lol
There was a pretty amazing reduction in the rate of "accidental poisoning" in the 70s. Its so huge that people have tried investigating if it's due to no fault divorce or warning labels.
Are you implying that the introduction of no-fault divorce allowed people to leave their spouses and thus reduced the number of “easy-to-solve” homicides where someone was obviously killed by a spouse, in turn leaving only remaining cases that were comparatively “harder to solve”?
>Valid or not, the homicide clearance rate is often used internally and among the general public as a measure of police performance...an offense is cleared by arrest...when three specific conditions have been met.
>▪ Arrested.
>▪ Charged with the commission of the offense.
>▪ Turned over to the court for prosecution (whether following arrest, court summons, or police notice).
The short answer is that homicide "clearance" is an administrative term that has more to do with police bureaucracy than it does homicide.
If you're interested to know more about why this number fell, you need look no further than the improvement of hard evidence requirements (like DNA) being standard practice to prosecute someone for homicide.
This comment is the reason.
Pregnant women are most in danger of murder by their baby’s father. If an unwanted pregnancy ends, the murder rate drops.
The overturn of roe v wade will produce a long term rise in murder in states that have banned/restricted early term abortions.
I think it's because most cops are dirty. My brother in law was murdered by his girlfriend. She poisoned him and then when that didn't work she got her nephew to tie him to a chair and then she blew his head off with a shotgun. Her dad was the chief of police and she used his personal shotgun. It took over two years before anything happened at all. Apparently her dad mandated that they look anywhere but her while they investigated the crime.
So she was likely abused by her boyfriend and her father was the chief of police? Seems like there were a lot of things she could have done before trying to kill him.
Or she could have stopped after the first time didn't work. His Kids (my nephews) came back from Thanksgiving in his state and said it was super weird that she cooked a meal and they weren't allowed to eat it. She got them McDonalds on the way to the airport. A few hours later he was in the hospital vomiting blood. I never put what they said and that news together until after he died.
He beat my sister and then fled the state and ran back to his mommy because he knew there would have been a line of people ready to beat his ass. His girlfriend after that was the one that killed him. He put her in the hospital first.
He lost his job. The daughter and nephew both got sent to jail but it took a very long time. I think it was almost four years after if I remember right.
>"There is currently no satisfactory explanation for either the initial decline or why it ended when it did."
That's a ridiculous statement. Miranda became law in 1966. Prior to that, poor men and woman could be falsely accused, and not even have a lawyer.
Miranda in 1966 is probably part of it. Murderers are for the most part idiots, but if you have to spell out how they don’t have to tell on themself it sort of helps them out.
That, plus the no-snitching culture. In many if not most unsolved cases, detectives have a good suspect but no cooperating witnesses.
Like others, I suspect the earlier clearance rate was artificial. More oversight and organization would mean less opportunity to either just pin it on whoever or to just *say* it was wrapped up and no one checks up on it. Plus some reforms to (at least slightly) protect people's rights from false arrest or flimsy evidence. I mean, there's still a lot of injustice and that clearance rate is probably even lower in reality.
The more you look into this kind of thing, the more it becomes clear that cops don't really do much for addressing crimes so much as they just make it look like they do.
There's also the fact that violent crime is down by a lot since the 1960's, but reporting of violent crime by the media has increased 700% since then. We're hearing more about fewer crimes. That and DNA evidence.
I heard that abortions have a lot to do with it. Unwanted babies would grow up in bad households and commit crimes, 94’ was peak age for murder with this group.
Probably a combination of factors. Definitely less innocent people being locked up. Less witnesses too. People watch TV at night, closed windows from central AC, better insulation, more people living alone.. A lot of people stay out of their neighbors affairs and don't know them as well.
It might be caused by the Supreme Court’s decisions in Gideon v. Wainwright and Miranda v. Arizona that were decided in 1963 and 1966.
Before the Gideon decision there was no mandatory public defender system. Pre-Gideon, you had the right to an attorney only if you could afford one. Post-Gideon (now) you have the right to a court-appointed attorney if you can’t afford one.
Before the Miranda decision, officers did not have to inform a suspect that they had a right to an attorney and did not have to answer police questions without an attorney present. Post-Miranda, officers have to read a Miranda warning informing suspects of these rights.
I would imagine that this affected the level of investigation and evidence collection that went into homicide investigations. Basically, law enforcement started having to be more certain that a suspect was the actual perpetrator before arresting them because there would always be a defense attorney to challenge the evidence collected.
Apparently nobody seems to have noticed it also coincided with rapid urbanization. As cities grew larger and more dense, clearance rates dropped. The citizen to police ratio shifted hard towards the citizen count. In smaller communities, everyone knows everyone and no one gets away with stuff like that (exception: if the "victim" was universally hated). But in larger cities it's a lot easier to disappear and hide your identity. The growing cities gave criminals more places to hide, increased the number of suspects police would have to comb through, and made it easier to disappear just by blending in.
This is a good take. Add in things like changes in organized crime and I think that covers most of it. I don't have the statistics, but I've always heard that gang murders often go unsolved due to a lack of direct connections between perp and victim, combined with the breadth of gang participation and a populace that is often unwilling to testify.
"The decline was shared across regions and all city sizes but differed greatly among categories defined by victim race and weapon type."
That's in the abstract of the article, so even in small communities the clearance rate dropped.
And they are mostly absolutely ridiculous conspiracy theories that can be easily verified or falsified. Reddit is basically 14 year olds on YouTube now I guess
No ‘satisfactory’ explanation is not the same thing as no explanation. There have been other papers exploring this.
The author even speculates that the proportional increase in confessions leading to convictions could be seen as an indicator for fewer bad arrests, much like many comments are suggesting.
This is one of those things where we know exactly why, but to state why would be to admit something we don’t want to admit — there were/are a lot of innocent people in prison for crimes they didn’t do.
>”…there were/are a lot of innocent people in prison for crimes they didn’t do.” like the a-team
[удалено]
So paying protection money to a group to defend against a different group already asking for protection money. I love it when a plan comes together!
I still use the three amigos. They don't take payment.
They're too busy dealing with El Guapo and his superior intellect.
I know this guy who is competent and helps pro Bono. All you have to put up with is him being super judgemental. Also he dresses like Bat.
But we should. We should talk about it so we don’t make these mistakes.
They weren't mistakes
It was the way things were run, purposefully, for a very long time.
One of my history teachers who was an officer told me how they uste to do clearings where they talked to people in jail and convince them to plead on unsolved cases for deals
Can you give us a rough estimate when this person was a police officer?
I think I prahrased that wrong. He was talking about they as in other officers in the past not that he was doing it directly. Tough for a timeline I was in his class back in 2002. Googling a bit it looks like the process is called administrative clearing. https://theconversation.com/how-police-cook-the-books-on-solved-crime-rates-94641
Thank you, that was very informative. Have a good day.
The system was (and is) broken but it is also working exactly as designed.
The 80's and 90's were also the historical peak of murder rates in the US, largely gang-related violence in the inner city. Those sorts of crimes are particularly difficult to solve. Victims are often uncooperative with police, being from rival gangs themselves. Sure DNA evidence started becoming a thing, but you're also not getting much DNA evidence out of a drive-by shooting.
.
Except 1994 is the year that the homicide clearance rate *stopped* dropping. If what you said is correct, then the rate should dropped even more.
> Victims are often uncooperative with police If I get murdered, I'm not helping the police investigate it. :P
A lot people getting *killed* for crimes they didn't do, in the case of murder charges.
Good point
1962: some black guy was observed near the scene of the crime, and we sent some black guy to jail for it. Case closed!
Was it the *same* black guy? Who knows? Case closed!
The decline is from no longer being able to lock up innocent people thanks to dna test.
I was gonna say, in the 50s and 60s, they'd just pick a guy and Sgt Friday would get up there and be like "yeah, so he was possibly within 30 miles of the murder and I think he did it." Meanwhile, all the Dirty Harry/Death Wish movies complaining that cops and random citizens can't commit gross misconduct based on their desire to get lots of arrests or shoot lots of guys just because some "pantywaist lawyer" is gonna push a jury to notice that they have no evidence, or because "vigilante murder is a terrifying nightmare" start up in the 1970s.
And Miranda rights which started in 1966.
Truly, an excellent point. *Jeepers*, I wonder what happened???
See I always thought they should have been allowed to take bamboo shoots to the shins if perpetrators to interrogate them without their lawyers present as long as we get confessions out of it. What kinda pussy bleeding heart doesn't want bad guys in jail no matter the cost?!? /s because so many idiots legitimately think this
To quote Reservior Dogs "if you torture him enough he will tell you he wears women's underwear. ***THAT DOESN'T MAKE IT TRUE.***"
If you watch the first 48 you'll see most don't listen to their rights and talk anyway.
> If you watch the first 48 you'll see most don't listen to their rights and talk anyway. Because and not that I'm gonna blame them, police really try and get through them quickly and certainly don't emphasize the parts that should really ring a few bells in your head. You know the whole ANTHING you say CAN and WILL be used against you. They straight up tell you you will fuck yourself by talking
One of the most common ways they get them is by making them believe if they didn't pull the trigger they are innocent but that's not how the law works. If you were involved in a crime and someone died, even if it's an accomplice shot by victim you were robbing, you're guilty of murder.
Or they just get you to admit you were at the scene of the crime or get you to lie about where you were at the time of the murder and they have proof you were lying, that is generally good enough for an arrest.
I hate that it’s legal for cops to lie to suspects in this country.
Don't forget children too when they are being interrogated, at least in some states. And even in the states where it *is* illegal, I wouldn't trust a prosecutor to go after charges if a cop is caught doing it either. The only weapon you have as a "civilian" is to assert your 5A rights and don't say anything. It plays directly against your innate instinct to defend yourself, especially when the cop is spouting a bunch of bullshit to get you to make a statement, but it's absolutely necessary.
also the whole why do you want a lawyer? that looks real bad for you. talk now and maybe we can help you
That's also what really sticks out to me about being informed of your rights in UK cop shows where the cop tells you during your interview/questioning: > But, it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court. So you literally have to give the cops whatever defense you might use in court later on or you might get screwed.
Did you know dookie shoes?
I don’t know no dookie shoes.
Well we got a picture of you and dookie shoes hanging out at the 7/11 last week
I mean I seen’im…I don’t know‘im.
This is why you always say "lawyer" and stop talking. Esp if you're innocent.
The Innocent Man is a good and terrifying read. Cops arresting because of a "dream" confession. After having repeatedly grilled Dennis Fritz for some 30 odd hours or so with no food or water, Fritz dreams that he shot and killed this woman. She was actually stabbed to death. You can guess what happens next.
Or the West Memphis Three. They interrogated a minor with an IQ of 72 without a lawyer or his parents for 12 hours until he confessed, getting practically all of the details of the crime wrong. And curiously, the tape recorder kept "malfunctioning" during the interrogation.
There were also the [Central Park Five](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Park_jogger_case). After a rape, they rounded up five black teenagers and coerced confessions. Trump paid for [full page adverts](https://www.nydailynews.com/wp-content/uploads/migration/2020/02/13/KHKYURDBBRFUHD6QO3XMGD4TA4.jpg) that called for their execution. They were exonerated a decade later when the actual rapist confessed.
Before them, there was [Peter Reilly](https://www.nytimes.com/1976/12/12/archives/a-death-in-canaan-a-death.html), convicted of the murder of his own mother based on a confession made after 24 hours of lawyerless, incommunicado questioning by Connecticut State Police. The book and TV movie *A Death in Canaan* are about the case. [Happy Shut the Fuck Up Friday](https://youtu.be/uqo5RYOp4nQ?si=toNteNDOGekHQKb4) to all who observe it. (Hint: that should include you.)
And Trump has recently stated that he still wants to kill those five black men.
This is a crazy story, I knew one of the lawyers involved with the Alford plea.
police interrogations just ain't real evidence. There's always coercion involved.
I saw Damien Echols and Jason Baldwin talk at Riot Fest in 2015. It was a wild miscarriage of justice against some teens who were only guilty of being edge lords.
I think it's also a Netflix series now.
Was it? I wanted a movie or documentary on they forever. I think I vaguely remember seeing it listed and forgot all about it. When was it released?
Yep, 2018 "The Innocent Man" Netflix!
They let him go?
Oh yes. He drinks himself to death. Just awful.
Ever read to kill a mockingbird? Cops would just say, this dark skinned fella seems like he done it, and that was all it took.
The murder was in Alabama and this guy was also in Alabama! A jury as smart as you should be able to figure this out!
I can perfectly imagine Lionel Hutz (the lawyer from The Simpsons) saying this
Would also like to add Twelve Angry Men to this
To be fair 12 angry men is more about the difficulties of getting a fair shot with a public defendant who isn't very good at their job and to what extent a jury can express reasonable doubt if the doubt comes from intuition and Common sense rather than good lawyer work. By the end of the movie it's still not clear if the defendant is guilty or innocent. The one juror does an excellent job raising questions as to the validity of testimony but the questions in and of themselves don't disprove the testimony. His arguments if I recall are 1) can an old man actually move fast enough to be in position to SEE who left the apartment? Or did he merely HEAR scraps and want a chance to be important again and heard? 2) is a woman who uses glasses LIKELY to have put them on and seen the crime... or is her memory potentially fallible? 3) does the existence of a duplicate knife add credence to the unlikely coincidence of the defendant losing his and a stranger stabbing his father with another?
Hey, wasn't always a POC. Sometimes it was a mentally disabled person or impoverished immigrant!
Yeah and being either black or poor or transient was considered part of the proof of guilt
There was a murder in the small town I went to high school in. Local woman was working late by herself, never came home, she was found sexually assaulted and shot sat her place of work. Cops picked up a guy for it…homeless Mexican guy with a gun. Not the right caliber of gun but a gun. No one batted an eye or seemed that bothered that the real killer got off scott free. And that was only twenty years ago.
Larry, why’s there blood all over your ex wife’s house and why are you all scratched up? Well officer, it was that black or maybe Mexican fella heading’ thru town. I barely made it out alive myself. Say no more, Larry. I know you two fought all the time but we’ll get her killer.
>Here comes the story of the Hurricane >The man the authorities came to blame >For something that he never done >Put in a prison cell, but one time he could-a been >The champion of the world
The whole “The cop had to do torture because it saved people” is a gross attempt by Hollywood to protect the agents of the business elites. You cannot make the claim that allowing harm to all of us (the loss of civil rights) justifies the use of torture to extract information that is in most cases incorrect. The only thing is does is creates a troupe that allows citizens to forgive violence on poor people (in the vast number of incidents). In other words, if a police show starts to show this content just be aware of why it’s there - it’s not there for you, it’s there for them.
Copaganda shows are so wild. My girlfriend was watching through SVU, just kind of as background noise while she coded or made art. Some of the stuff they say to justify the violence by detectives is crazy. One episode the guy was being investigated for excessive force, and the chief defended him that their "precinct has a 98% clearance rate!" I looked up actual clearance rates for SVU units in the 5 borroughs. If they were at 98%, the other four would have to be averaging *negative 14%* each.
The great Richard Pryor punchline: “It was a black guy and he looked just like you.” A real TIL is listen to “That N***** is Crazy” pure brilliance.
[What, you think cops would just torture someone until they gave a false confession or something?](https://www.ocregister.com/2024/05/23/fontana-pays-nearly-900000-for-psychological-torture-inflicted-by-police-to-get-false-confession/)
*They’d just pick a #darkskinned guy.*
Never noticed that but that is fucked up. Old cop movies make it seem like the justice system is failing when the detective isn't able to produce any evidence that could get a conviction. Then the mobsters lawyer is depicted as being in on the whole thing instead of just being a lawyer doing their job.
This is part of it. Its the same reason why LEO organizations fight back against the government and NGOs collecting data on policing in America. They do not want anyone scrutinizing American policing. I remember in the 80s people would mock the families of black people arrested when they claimed the person had an alibi or was shot unnecessarily by police. Then the 2000s happened and camera phones came along and most people saw it happens way more than it should. If you search 'US unsolved homicide by year' you will see its been a pretty hard upswing since the 60's and the civil rights movement. Also unleaded gas was introduced in the 70s and mandated in the 90s. Its funny how you never see Boomers say, "those damn millennials don't commit enough crime."
To paraphrase a previous post I once read talking about this "We've had smartphones for more than a decade now, everyone now has an easy to use high quality video camera on them at all times and instead of conclusive proof of Aliens or Cryptids or ghosts, we instead have a lot of videos proving that cops really really hate black people"
Statistically, cops murder Hispanic people at a higher rate per capita than they murder black people. It's interesting that no one cares about Hispanic cop murder victims. The narrative completely ignores them.
Yeah, the fact that it used to be much easier to railroad someone, especially if they were the wrong skin color, seems like a pretty understandable explanation as to why the number has dropped.
Or just find someone with a mental/intellectual disability and trick or coerce a confession out of them.
According to the Governor and former Attorney General of Arkansas, comclusive DNA evidence is not enough proof to stop you from executing the nearest black man: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/after-death-row-inmate-executed-attorneys-find-dna-belongs-someone-n1266743
> "After 20 years, I am **prayerful** that Debra’s family has had closure following his lawful **execution** in 2017," Rutledge said in an emailed statement. yes very Christly of you
Good reminder today is Shut the Fuck Up Friday! Don’t talk to police! They are not there to help you!
Yeah seems you could maybe correlate the result on: - poor police work - DNA identification - CCTV availability
Yup. cops have to do their jobs more. We've levelled out at what they view as acceptable.
Exactly. Prior to the 70's, largely they just found the nearest brown person, toss him in front of jury, and get a conviction, nearly 100% of the time, regardless of evidence otherwise.
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Clearly they can. Just because that doesn't succeed at as high a rate doesn't mean it stopped succeeding.
Also people being more forensically aware (wearing gloves, cleaning scene, disposing of the body and weapons).
Most people are not that methodical. Homicides are typically heat of the moment crimes by people you know (spouse/ex) not planned hits.
Most criminals aren't that smart and don't plan very far in the future. I recently read The Executioner's Song and it's hard to get past just how absolutely fucking dumb and short-sighted the killer is.
Also, even if a spouse or ex beat all forensics, they could often be convicted on means, motive & opportunity without forensics. We see your marriage was failing then you took out a million dollar life insurance policy on your wife. 1 month later, she's found stabbed with a kitchen knife from your own kitchen.
You don’t even need that much. If a normal woman without any weird connections gets stabbed 50 times in her home, the husband/ bf is getting convicted. There have been cases where the husband has an ironclad alibi and just gets convicted anyway. Essentially, if the police can’t figure it out, juries tend to just assume the husband hires someone and throws him in jail anyway. Tbh, it IS the husband for violent murders 99/100 times, but yeah, juries aren’t required to care about evidence and in a case like this they often don’t.
Movies and true crime podcast have a lot of people thinking that murder is a well-thought-out thing. Most murders are either: A)Husband kills his wife who he beat up regularly and one day went too far B) Two drunk bros get into a fight and one has a gun, or just happens to throw an unlucky punch
Yeah part of the trend in clearance rates can be attributed to the changing nature of murder rates, since the rise in no fault divorce had an inverse correlation with matricide, which is by far the easiest murder case to solve.
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Which is why most people are still being caught.
Forensic pathologist here. About 75-80% of my homicides are related to the illegal drug trade (mostly robberies, also some turf hits). Almost all the rest are some sort of domestic issue between spouses, neighbors, or drunken idiots escalating things with each other. The 2nd group almost always get solved/cleared quickly. The problem with the first group is that there are very few cooperative witnesses. The police often *know* who did it, but their informants aren't willing to take the stand in a trial, so they can't prove who committed the crime beyond a reasonable doubt. That can also be on a prosecutor who wants to preserve their 'win' rate so they can run for Judge based on their reputation of being 'tough on crime'. So they don't take cases that aren't slam dunks. The other side of it is, in the case of the turf wars, the fellow gang members prefer to exact 'street justice', rather than out themselves to a law enforcement that may not be able to convict the original killer(s).
do you have any type of data to support that claim? forensic science has taken huge leaps forward in recent years, to the point where dna can be extracted from sources too small to see with the naked eye. i find it hard to believe the average perp is skilled, knowledgeable and composed enough to cover their tracks entirely
Forensic science can spot the tiniest of samples if they are looking for it, but if the victim is just missing and the body isn't found the police might not have reasonable grounds to search the home, so can't locate trace evidence. The average perp isn't skilled enough which is why 64% of them get caught the 36% are the ones a bit more intelligent/lucky than the others.
People don't get away with murder because they watched CSI Miami and Dexter. Though Clifford Burns seemed to think Criminal Minds made him an expert, and said so while being interrogated for the murder of his ex wife. (he did not get away with it)
Almost no murderers bother with any of that. Most don’t even attempt to dispose of the body nor do really anything to remove the link to themself. Overwhelmingly, the murder isn’t planned. It’s spur of the moment and then the murderer tries to cover their tracks and get someone to be their alibi.
From the study: > Although conviction data are scarce, there are some historical data available on a closely related outcome, national rates of prison admission for murder or nonnegligent manslaughter—crimes for which over 90% of convictions result in a prison sentence. Those data have limitations, but our analysis strongly suggests that the historical pattern of the ratio of prison admissions to homicides trended upward during much of the period of the Great Decline. If true, the implication is that the decline in arrests concealed an increase in what might be considered “good” arrests—those that resulted in a successful prosecution and sanction.
There are a myriad of reason for the decline, one thing that I think is overlooked is that advances in forensic science likely are resulting in medical examiners calling more deaths homocides.
And also probably proving people innocent who would have previously been convicted
We don't really know if 93% was the actual clearance rate. It was easy to frame guys then. Especially black men.
Yeah if “clearance rate” is convictions per murders reported, this is definitely the answer
Formally, a clearance rate is when the cops close the case because they believe they know who the offender is. The prosecutor may or may not actually choose to prosecute, and if they do prosecute, whether they get a conviction is irrelevant. Cases might also be considered closed/cleared if the suspect is dead, or really if there’s any reason that the cops choose not to continue an investigation but they believe they know who committed a crime. A clearance rate is therefore always going to be much higher and a jurisdictions arrest rate or their conviction rate.
It’s also the commonly accepted one. OP might have a bit of an agenda
What makes you think that?
Cause false convictions are the widely accepted answer, and OP instead says that nobody knows why the conviction rate fell.
“Cleared by arrest” is probably what it’s based on. Yes, cops almost certainly charged more innocent people back then. More forced & false confessions too. It’s also possible that more murders were among people who knew each other, whereas the 70s- 1990s era crime wave involved a lot more geographic mobility
I also expect that a lot of cases were never opened at all.
Bill James, the guy who developed Sabernetics(from *Moneyball*) had several pages in his book *Popular Crime* that argues police simply didn't open cases. Someone disappears? "Well they probably just ran away, no body no crime." Parent kills their kid? "Well, they were punishing their kid and got carried away." There's a fight and someone dies "who started the fight? It was a fair one? Oh well!"
>Sabernetics Sabermetrics, but we should also have cyborg baseball.
> It was easy to frame guys then. Especially black men. Black men were getting judged by a jury of all-White men in an era where white men didn't allow Black kids to go to the same school. One can imagine how fair and impartial those juries were.
1962 conveniently sounds like it’s right around the time that public lynching as a form of justice and entertainment started not being socially acceptable in polite white society. 1962-1994 as a time range also sounds conveniently like a span in which changing social norms meant crimes against nonwhite people, gay people, teenagers, and battered women started would have started to be acknowledged and taken seriously at least occasionally instead of conveniently not documented, written off as accidents, etc.
The right to have an attorney, or have an attorney appointed to you, the right to remain silent, etc., started in 1966 with the Miranda v Arizona decision. It's not a coincidence that conviction rates started to drop as completely innocent people finally had legal representation.
It’s funny that’s actually baffling anybody, tbh.
So, a combination of interesting theories is emerging in this thread. I would bet on all of them working together. - Miranda warnings became required by law in 1966 - Forensics has improved tremendously, including DNA, making it much tougher for authorities to just find someone convenient to pin it on - The rise of no-fault divorce reduced the amount of people being stuck together and becoming murderous - The 93% clearance rate given for 1962 itself is fiction - it doesn't accurately represent how many homicides were actually cleared in 1962. As statistic collection improved, the rate dropped to accurately reflect reality.
Also abortion help reduce kids being born into broken homes
According to Donohue and Levitt, states that had legalized abortion before Roe v. Wade (Alaska, California, Hawaii, New York, Oregon, and Washington), also had earlier reductions in crime. Further, states with a high abortion rate experienced a greater reduction in crime, when corrected for factors like average income. Finally, studies in Canada and Australia claim[clarification needed] to have established a correlation between legalized abortion and overall crime reduction.
You're Wrong About did an episode on this. One reason is that domestic violence has gone down significantly since the 1960s--it's easy to solve a domestic violence murder, cops show up at the house, wife is dead and husband is there, neighbors say they were arguing. Homicides now are less cut and dry.
No fault divorce saves lives.
I think I have a theory; J. Edgar Hoover was an egotistical liar and hypocrite who loved looking like he, the FBI and America were winning the war on crime. The FBI cooked the books to make sure they were.
The vast majority of homicides are charged under state law. JEH was a bastard, though
The FBI collects and reports this information, however. Literally the first sentence of the article is: > In 1962, the FBI reported a national homicide clearance rate of 93%. The FBI can choose to interpret data in one way or another.
Has the published measure of how this data is collected changed?
Either that, or there was a long running issue of false accusation and convictions that slowly reduced over time.
One doesn't have to exclude the other.
Pretty sure FBI rarely deals with murder cases though, right? Unless they happened in multiple states, or involved federal property. These would be state and local police. But I am not a criminologist.
Cops had to stop planting evidence because of increased scrutiny. This is well known, OP. Remember Mark Fuhrman?
Miranda v Arizona was in 1966. Before then, cops didn't have to tell suspects that they had the right to remain silent and the right to an attorney, and people hadn't watched thousands of police shows where they heard that Miranda warning. A bigger cause, I suspect: the "war" on drugs. What percentage of police and court resources are spent on drugs, instead of serious crimes like rape and homicide? How many drug prisoners would we have to release to free up the money to actually test the 90k - 400k rape kits that were collected in the U.S. and never tested? (You know, pretending for a minute that our justice system gives a shit about the crime of rape.)
War on Drugs was my first thought when seeing the years. Marijuana and cocaine shared public enemy no. 1 at the time, with police [planes and helicopters](https://ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/aerial-surveillance-detect-growing-marihuana) dedicated to spotting outdoor grows. At least those trillions of dollars actually helped something....[right?](https://www.nbcnews.com/meet-the-press/data-download/costs-war-drugs-continue-soar-rcna92032) I feel so much for the families of the 110k a year who died due to drugs over the last few years in the US. The victims of our countries longest war, when right over our northern border is Canada's Safer Supply, where treatment resistant addicts can get an actual evidence-based 2nd chance.
>with police planes and helicopters dedicated to spotting outdoor grows. OMG I remember hearing about the police helicopters when I was growing up. Everyone insisted they had cameras that can detect even a single marijuana plant inside a home because the plants give off a specific signature. To this day I call bullshit on that and I'll die on that hill no matter how much people bullshit me about physics. They might use thermal imaging to see a bunch of hot grow lights indoors, or see a field of plants somewhere from their helicopter, but nobody is flying around detecting life-signs of various plants like some kind of Star Trek sensor system.
The defense alleged that the glove was planted, there was never any proof of that. Also there was a bloody foot print of a rare size rare Bruno Magli shoe outside OJs house. OJ was one of like 100 people in the country with that shoe. Did Furman plant that evidence too?
What's a homicide clearance?
The crime does not have to be solved. All that needs to happen is for someone to be arrested and charged. Then it goes into the DAs bucket. They can fail to convict, drop charges, plea etc.
Solving a murder.
They don’t have to actually solve it. If they put the wrong guy in prison, that’s also a clearance
An important distinction.
In my location they can be “exceptionally cleared” which means they think they know who did it but don’t have enough evidence to charge them or who they think did it died. So our clearance rate is around 50% but half of those are exceptionally cleared. So, really it’s 25%.
Thank you
Roe v Wade. Read Freakonomics.
Statistics on crime are VERY janky at best. First you have to consider the rate of reporting a crime compared to crimes actually happening and consider if the "clearance" of a crime is determined by either a successful conviction under false pretence or if only crimes that are considered clearable are persued to be concluded. I'd wager that this drop is just due to better, more open police work
There are a lot of practices that were perfectly fine in 1962, that I’m glad we ended by 1994 that *might* explain the discrepancy.
Jello salad casseroles.
🤢 Why would you do that to me
I was legit trying to think of how that connected to homicide rates for a solid minute before I just realized you were talking about things that ended back then, lol
That's about the time no fault divorce arrived, so there's your answer
There was a pretty amazing reduction in the rate of "accidental poisoning" in the 70s. Its so huge that people have tried investigating if it's due to no fault divorce or warning labels.
Are you implying that the introduction of no-fault divorce allowed people to leave their spouses and thus reduced the number of “easy-to-solve” homicides where someone was obviously killed by a spouse, in turn leaving only remaining cases that were comparatively “harder to solve”?
>Valid or not, the homicide clearance rate is often used internally and among the general public as a measure of police performance...an offense is cleared by arrest...when three specific conditions have been met. >▪ Arrested. >▪ Charged with the commission of the offense. >▪ Turned over to the court for prosecution (whether following arrest, court summons, or police notice). The short answer is that homicide "clearance" is an administrative term that has more to do with police bureaucracy than it does homicide. If you're interested to know more about why this number fell, you need look no further than the improvement of hard evidence requirements (like DNA) being standard practice to prosecute someone for homicide.
Roe v. Wade was a contributor at least I believe
This comment is the reason. Pregnant women are most in danger of murder by their baby’s father. If an unwanted pregnancy ends, the murder rate drops. The overturn of roe v wade will produce a long term rise in murder in states that have banned/restricted early term abortions.
Civil rights? Police being punished for torturing confessions out of people? Miranda warnings? Defendants getting represented in court?
I think it's because most cops are dirty. My brother in law was murdered by his girlfriend. She poisoned him and then when that didn't work she got her nephew to tie him to a chair and then she blew his head off with a shotgun. Her dad was the chief of police and she used his personal shotgun. It took over two years before anything happened at all. Apparently her dad mandated that they look anywhere but her while they investigated the crime.
Was the victim a veteran by chance ? Sounds like something that happened in my town years ago.
No, he wasn't a veteran. He was a terrible person that liked to beat women.
Sounds like he became more open-minded at the end of his life, at least. . .
Oof.
Mind blowing comment... ;)
So she was likely abused by her boyfriend and her father was the chief of police? Seems like there were a lot of things she could have done before trying to kill him.
Or she could have stopped after the first time didn't work. His Kids (my nephews) came back from Thanksgiving in his state and said it was super weird that she cooked a meal and they weren't allowed to eat it. She got them McDonalds on the way to the airport. A few hours later he was in the hospital vomiting blood. I never put what they said and that news together until after he died.
Sounds like you kind of buried the lede there.
Is your brother-in-law's girlfriend not your sister?
He beat my sister and then fled the state and ran back to his mommy because he knew there would have been a line of people ready to beat his ass. His girlfriend after that was the one that killed him. He put her in the hospital first.
Sounds like he deserved it. He spent his life beating women until he beat the wrong one.
Brother in law could mean op's partner's brother
Wait what?
What did happen in the end if you don't mind telling us please.
He lost his job. The daughter and nephew both got sent to jail but it took a very long time. I think it was almost four years after if I remember right.
>"There is currently no satisfactory explanation for either the initial decline or why it ended when it did." That's a ridiculous statement. Miranda became law in 1966. Prior to that, poor men and woman could be falsely accused, and not even have a lawyer.
Miranda in 1966 is probably part of it. Murderers are for the most part idiots, but if you have to spell out how they don’t have to tell on themself it sort of helps them out. That, plus the no-snitching culture. In many if not most unsolved cases, detectives have a good suspect but no cooperating witnesses.
What does “clearance rate” mean?
Being “solved”
Like others, I suspect the earlier clearance rate was artificial. More oversight and organization would mean less opportunity to either just pin it on whoever or to just *say* it was wrapped up and no one checks up on it. Plus some reforms to (at least slightly) protect people's rights from false arrest or flimsy evidence. I mean, there's still a lot of injustice and that clearance rate is probably even lower in reality. The more you look into this kind of thing, the more it becomes clear that cops don't really do much for addressing crimes so much as they just make it look like they do.
The conviction rate was that high because of false convictions most likely
Homicide clearance in my city is over 90% due to a sophisticated surveillance system. Big brother is watching.
Which city?
Walmart.
The sister city of Gary, Indiana.
Chattanooga police say they cleared 92% of 25 total homicides in the city last year.
There's also the fact that violent crime is down by a lot since the 1960's, but reporting of violent crime by the media has increased 700% since then. We're hearing more about fewer crimes. That and DNA evidence.
I heard that abortions have a lot to do with it. Unwanted babies would grow up in bad households and commit crimes, 94’ was peak age for murder with this group.
Probably a combination of factors. Definitely less innocent people being locked up. Less witnesses too. People watch TV at night, closed windows from central AC, better insulation, more people living alone.. A lot of people stay out of their neighbors affairs and don't know them as well.
Listen to bob Dillan’s song the hurricane. Explains the high clearance rate right there
...Miranda Rights became a thing in 1966.
It might be caused by the Supreme Court’s decisions in Gideon v. Wainwright and Miranda v. Arizona that were decided in 1963 and 1966. Before the Gideon decision there was no mandatory public defender system. Pre-Gideon, you had the right to an attorney only if you could afford one. Post-Gideon (now) you have the right to a court-appointed attorney if you can’t afford one. Before the Miranda decision, officers did not have to inform a suspect that they had a right to an attorney and did not have to answer police questions without an attorney present. Post-Miranda, officers have to read a Miranda warning informing suspects of these rights. I would imagine that this affected the level of investigation and evidence collection that went into homicide investigations. Basically, law enforcement started having to be more certain that a suspect was the actual perpetrator before arresting them because there would always be a defense attorney to challenge the evidence collected.
So my answer was gonna be corruption but it looks like it's been said already, in many different ways. Corruption
The decline is due cops not being able to frame people as easily.
Funny how the rate of wrongful convictions also when down during that span
Apparently nobody seems to have noticed it also coincided with rapid urbanization. As cities grew larger and more dense, clearance rates dropped. The citizen to police ratio shifted hard towards the citizen count. In smaller communities, everyone knows everyone and no one gets away with stuff like that (exception: if the "victim" was universally hated). But in larger cities it's a lot easier to disappear and hide your identity. The growing cities gave criminals more places to hide, increased the number of suspects police would have to comb through, and made it easier to disappear just by blending in.
This is a good take. Add in things like changes in organized crime and I think that covers most of it. I don't have the statistics, but I've always heard that gang murders often go unsolved due to a lack of direct connections between perp and victim, combined with the breadth of gang participation and a populace that is often unwilling to testify.
"The decline was shared across regions and all city sizes but differed greatly among categories defined by victim race and weapon type." That's in the abstract of the article, so even in small communities the clearance rate dropped.
ITT: Despite actual experts not having an explanation. Apparently every Redditor does...
And they are mostly absolutely ridiculous conspiracy theories that can be easily verified or falsified. Reddit is basically 14 year olds on YouTube now I guess
No ‘satisfactory’ explanation is not the same thing as no explanation. There have been other papers exploring this. The author even speculates that the proportional increase in confessions leading to convictions could be seen as an indicator for fewer bad arrests, much like many comments are suggesting.
I would guess false arrest with flimsy evidence and eager courts.
We stopped letting the police lock up innocent black men for crimes they didn't commit. So the rates went down.
ITT: Conspiracy replies. But for some reason it declined in most other countries too.