№ 056 — The Clearance Rate — American Dividend Fund

The problem

The number that matters most in policing is the one almost nobody tracks: of the crimes reported, how many were solved. Criminologists call it the clearance rate, and in the United States it has been falling for sixty years. In 1965, police cleared about 91 percent of murders. By 2020 the figure was 54 percent, and in 2022 it was 52 percent. It recovered to about 61 percent in 2024, a real improvement that still leaves 2 killings in 5 with no one charged. For crimes short of murder, the picture is worse. In 2024, agencies cleared 43.8 percent of reported violent crimes and 15.9 percent of reported property crimes. A burglary in America is solved roughly 1 time in 8. A stolen car, about 1 time in 12.

Other rich countries do not accept this. Germany's police cleared between 91 and 95 percent of murders in every year from 2011 to 2023. Japan's rate is about 95 percent. England and Wales, which have been sliding, are still just under 80 percent. These are not small differences in accounting. They are the difference between a country where killing someone almost always ends in a courtroom and a country where it is close to a coin flip.

The arithmetic compounds. The Murder Accountability Project, which reconciles the FBI's records, counts 352,390 homicides that went unsolved between 1965 and 2024, and estimates that at least 5,000 killers a year are never identified. Every one of them is still in a neighbourhood. Research on deterrence has been consistent for decades on one point: people are deterred by the likelihood of being caught, far more than by the length of the sentence if they are. A low clearance rate is not a paperwork problem. It is the single largest subsidy the country pays to the people who commit violence, and it is paid mostly in the neighbourhoods that can least afford it.

Now look at what the federal government pays local police for. The two largest streams, the COPS Hiring Program at $157 million and the Byrne Justice Assistance Grant at $180 million in fiscal 2025, are awarded for officers hired, equipment bought, and drugs seized. Neither asks whether the department solves crimes. A city can take the money for a decade and close 1 murder in 3, and nothing in the grant would notice.

The proposal

Publish the clearance rate of every police agency, by offence, every quarter, on one federal page. Make improvement in that rate the condition of federal police funding, in place of hiring counts and seizure totals. And fund the three inputs that actually close cases and that departments cut first: detectives, crime laboratories, and the protection of witnesses.

How it would work

One number, one page. The FBI already collects clearance data through the National Incident-Based Reporting System. It publishes it as national aggregates, late, in a format no resident of a city can use. Under this proposal, every agency receiving federal funds reports quarterly, and the Bureau publishes each agency's clearance rate by offence, split honestly between cases cleared by arrest and cases cleared by "exceptional means," the category that covers a dead or unlocatable suspect and that has been used in some cities to make the rate look better than it is. A resident of any city can see, in one place, how likely a burglary or a killing there is to be solved.

Pay for the case, not the hire. COPS and Byrne JAG are rewritten so that the formula rewards the change in an agency's clearance rate over three years, offence by offence, against the agency's own baseline. A department that starts at 35 percent on homicide is not penalised for being at 35 percent; it is paid for reaching 45. The baseline approach matters, because clearance rates track poverty and trust as much as policing, and a formula that simply rewarded high rates would send the money to the suburbs.

Detectives. American departments have spent two decades moving bodies out of investigations and into patrol, because patrol is visible and investigation is not. A homicide detective in a busy city can carry a dozen or more new cases a year; the standard in departments that solve most of their murders is closer to 4 to 6. The federal share funds detective positions specifically, with a floor on the ratio of investigators to violent crimes, and the money cannot be moved to patrol.

Laboratories. Evidence that waits in a queue does not solve anything. Federal money funds state and regional crime laboratories to a published turnaround standard: DNA and ballistics results within 30 days for violent crime, and a public backlog count every quarter. The National Institute of Justice already runs a backlog-reduction programme; this makes it permanent and ties it to the same page.

Witnesses. The largest single reason a murder in a poor neighbourhood goes unsolved is that people who saw it will not say so, because the person who did it lives nearby and the police cannot promise them anything. The federal witness security programme protects a few hundred people a year, almost all in federal cases. This proposal funds a local version: relocation, a stipend, and a new address for a witness in a state homicide case, administered through the U.S. Marshals, who already know how. It is the cheapest input on this list and the one no city funds.

A national backstop for the unsolved. After twelve months, any unsolved homicide may be referred by the local agency to a standing federal cold-case unit, built on the FBI's existing Violent Criminal Apprehension Program and the Bureau's laboratory, at no cost to the city. The referral is recorded on the page. A department that refers nothing while clearing a third of its murders will be asked why.

The numbers

What it costs. Roughly 16,000 murders were reported in 2024, and about 6,000 of them went unsolved. Funding one additional homicide detective for every 8 unsolved murders is about 750 detectives, at a fully loaded cost near $150,000 each: about $115 million a year. A 30-day laboratory standard nationwide is on the order of $300 million a year, based on the current backlog programme. A local witness protection benefit for perhaps 2,000 witnesses a year, at the federal programme's per-head cost, is about $100 million. Add the cold-case unit and the reporting system, and the full programme is about $600 million a year, which is less than the two existing grant streams combined. This proposal is mostly a change in what the money buys, not how much of it there is.

What it is set against. The country spends about $130 billion a year on local policing. Half a billion dollars redirected to the inputs that close cases is less than one half of one percent of that. The point is not the size of the federal share. It is that the federal share is the only lever Washington has, and it is currently pulling on the wrong thing.

What closing the gap would mean. If the national murder clearance rate rose from 61 percent to Germany's floor of 91 percent, about 4,800 more killers a year would be charged. The deterrence literature suggests the number of murders would fall as a result, though by how much is genuinely uncertain and this proposal does not put a figure on it. What it will put a figure on is the count, in public, every quarter.

The honest objections

"Any number you pay for, you will get, whether or not the thing behind it improved." This is the strongest objection and the reason for the honest split in item 1. Clearance rates have been gamed before, by reclassifying crimes downward so they never enter the denominator, and by clearing cases "exceptionally" against a suspect who is never charged. The design answers with three things: the arrest-versus-exceptional split is published; the denominator is checked against the victim surveys the Bureau of Justice Statistics already runs, which catch reclassification; and the reward is for movement against a department's own baseline over three years, which is harder to fake than a single year's number. None of that makes gaming impossible. It makes it visible.

"Pressure to close cases is how you get coerced confessions and the wrong man in prison." True, and the history of some American cities is a warning. The answer is not to stop measuring but to measure the right thing: a clearance is counted only when a charge is filed and survives to disposition, and a conviction later overturned is subtracted, publicly, from the year it was counted. A department cannot improve its rate by charging people it cannot convict.

"Washington has no business setting local police priorities." It already does; it just sets them badly. Every federal police dollar today carries a condition, and the conditions reward things that do not reduce crime. A city that wants no federal conditions may decline the money, exactly as now. This proposal changes the condition from "how many officers did you hire" to "how many crimes did you solve," which is the one question every resident of the city would ask first.

"Clearance rates are low because communities don't trust the police, and no grant fixes that." Partly right, which is why item 5 exists. A witness who will not talk is a trust problem, and the honest way to earn trust is to protect the person who takes the risk. But the causation runs both ways. A neighbourhood where killers are not caught has no reason to trust the police, and the surest way to build that trust is to start catching them. Germany's 95 percent does not come from a more trusting public. It comes from a system that treats an unsolved murder as an emergency.

"The 2024 improvement shows the problem is fixing itself." The rate rose because murders fell sharply and detectives had fewer cases each, not because the system changed. When the next spike comes, the same caseloads will produce the same collapse in clearances, as they did in 2020 and 2021. The point of a standard is to hold when the numbers turn.

Sources

Federal Bureau of Investigation, UCR Summary of Reported Crimes in the Nation, 2024, clearances by arrest or exceptional means, released August 2025, cde.ucr.cjis.gov
Federal Bureau of Investigation, Crime Data Explorer, clearance rates by offence, 2023 and 2024, cde.ucr.cjis.gov
Murder Accountability Project, unsolved homicide counts 1965–2024 derived from FBI Uniform Crime Reports, murderdata.org
Bundeskriminalamt, Polizeiliche Kriminalstatistik, clearance rates for murder and manslaughter 2011–2023, bka.de
Liem et al., "Homicide clearance in Western Europe," European Journal of Criminology 16:1 (2019)
Roberts, "Explaining Differences in Homicide Clearance Rates Between Japan and the United States," Homicide Studies 12:1 (2008)
Daniel S. Nagin, "Deterrence in the Twenty-First Century," Crime and Justice 42 (2013), on certainty versus severity
Congressional Research Service, The Edward Byrne Memorial Justice Assistance Grant (JAG) Program (IF10691), and Department of Justice fiscal 2025 appropriations for the COPS Hiring Program
Urban Institute, state and local police expenditure data, urban.org
Proposals № 051 (The Citizen Card); № 055 (The Warrant Standard); № 058 (The Use-of-Force Register)