A Historical Perspective on Distortions in Homicide Rates and Clearances

• In Event: Presidential Thematic Session: The New Detective: Rethinking Criminal Investigations

Abstract

The role of history, particularly the period from 1900 to 1970, is important for understanding where we are now with homicides and their investigations. Murder statistics, supposedly our best measures of crime, are much shakier than most scholars assume. There is a blurred line involving many unrecorded cases which distorts the counts far more than is usually acknowledged. Standards have changed for the classification of justifiable homicides and those written off as “excusable;” when these are added back into the total, the crime count looks quite different. This challenges many orthodoxies about crime based on the idea that there was an urban explosion associated with the social and political upheavals of the 1960s. The common beliefs about homicide clearance rate trends are similarly wrong. What looks like high clearance rates in the 1970s and earlier is more a reflection of lower thresholds for charging suspects, paired with much weaker prosecution practices. Homicide clearance rates have always been low in America – whatever the official counts might have claimed – and a weak response to murder seems baked into our institutions. These counting problems have also distorted our perceptions of the lack of a relationship between unsolved murders and high homicide rates.

Author

• Jill Leovy, LA Times Reporter / University of Southern California