John Lamparski/NurPhoto via AP
The inaction in the case of the Uvalde school shooter is the most egregious example in a string of police incompetence in high-profile shootings.
For all the panic about a burgeoning nationwide crime wave, only a few types of crime are actually up during the two-plus years since the pandemic began. Murders have increased since 2019, and violent crime, broadly defined, has also inched up slightly over the same period. Property crimes, on the other hand, are down, contrary to what a new wave of lurid videos of “smash and grab” events might indicate. And while all crime, including the murder rate, remains well below 1990 levels, crime today is happening in a more distributed manner across the country. It used to be that Los Angeles and New York accounted for 13.5 percent of all murders nationally; now it’s only 4 percent.
People have every right to be concerned about rising murder rates. But another concerning statistic involves the fact that the nationwide “crime wave,” in both its real and imagined components, has been met with a similar nationwide collapse in “clearance rates,” the rate at which those crimes are “solved” via an arrest and a charge being brought (there are, of course, plenty of reasons to take issue with equating an arrest to a crime being solved—more on that later). According to the most recent data published by the FBI, the rates at which police forces are solving crimes have plunged to historic lows. In the case of murders and violent crime, clearance rates have dipped to just 50 percent, a startling decline from the 1980s, when police cleared 70 percent of all homicides.
It’s not just murder. Manslaughter is down to 69 percent clearance from 90 percent forty years ago. Clearances in assault and rape cases have dropped to 47 percent and 30 percent, respectively. Nonviolent property crimes like burglary (which involves illegally entering a property), theft (which involves taking property from another person), and motor vehicle theft are getting solved at a microscopic 14 percent, 15 percent, and 12 percent, respectively. According to “Crime and the Mythology of Police,” a recent article published in the Washington University Law Review by University of Utah law professor Shima Baradaran Baughman, “on a good year, police solve less than a quarter of reported cases.” And we haven’t seen good years lately.
On a city-by-city basis, these figures look even more galling. In San Francisco, supposedly in the midst of a historic crime spree that has been blamed on progressive district attorney Chesa Boudin (who faces a recall election next Tuesday), the Department of Police Accountability last year opened 595 cases looking into alleged police wrongdoing. By far, the largest percentage of those cases, 42.6 percent, were found to be related to “neglect of duty.” In 2016, neglect of duty counted for less than a third of cases. And according to city supervisor Hillary Ronen, of all the crimes reported in San Francisco in 2021, just 8.1 percent led to arrests, the lowest rate in a decade. In cities across the country, police forces are proving historically unwilling or unable to solve crimes.
According to the most recent data published by the FBI, the rates at which police forces are solving crimes have plunged to historic lows.
Not for nothing, clearance rates have dropped to all-time lows at the same time that police budgets have swollen to all-time highs, suggesting that more funding has actually resulted in police being less effective. “It is a great public mismatch in understanding, training, and expectations,” Baughman told me. “Increases in police officers or police budgets have not been shown to reduce crime or make us safer.”
To make matters worse, clearance rates can be easily manipulated and are not synonymous with actually solving crimes, just with making arrests. That means that those rock-bottom numbers are actually skewing reality in favor of cops, who are arresting the rightful perpetrator of a crime at rates even lower than those at which they’re clearing cases. “All they tell us is whether there has been an arrest made in a case,” Baughman said, “not whether that person is actually the one that committed the crime or is eventually convicted of the crime … That’s why I think convictions are a better measure of whether the crime was actually cleared.”
Conviction rates, which still account for wrongful convictions, are much lower than clearance rates.
Since the 2020 Black Lives Matter demonstrations called for police budgets to be defunded, not a single major American city has slashed its police funding. In fact, almost all of them have ballooned spending on police forces. Repeatedly, President Biden has encouraged increased spending on police, recently calling on municipalities to direct their unspent COVID aid toward adding even more cops. The Biden administration requested $388 million in grant funding for police hiring in its 2022 budget proposal, more than double the top figure requested by the Trump administration. New York City even elected a former cop as its mayor, who just a few days ago announced a new PR campaign in support of cops and against the “defund the police” movement.
None of those moves have grappled with the historical ineffectiveness of current-day policing, or why police forces have been unable to convert generous budgets into effective crime-solving activities. There are a number of factors that go into explaining the collapse in clearance rates, including a lack of trust among communities with the police forces that serve them. Since the murder of George Floyd, police in the U.S. have killed Americans at record rates. In 2021, officers killed 1,136 people, making it one of the deadliest years ever, according to Mapping Police Violence, and The Guardian reported that 249 people had been killed as of late March. Those figures indicate that police forces nationwide continue to kill about three people a day in 2022.
In other words, heavily policed communities have good reason to mistrust police involvement. Failing to solve crimes only adds to that; why would communities respect a police force that doesn’t do its job particularly well?
COVID has also hindered law enforcement, but so have the added responsibilities placed upon officers that have nothing to do with solving crimes. “Modern-day police are glorified social workers armed with weapons, who are obligated to respond to many community concerns without much training in counseling and are not left a lot of time to spend on crime solving—which is actually what the public thinks that they are and should be doing,” Baughman said. A core priority for police reformers is to move more funding and responsibilities into the hands of social workers and mental-health specialists, precisely because it allows police officers to focus on what is supposed to be their mission. Resisting these efforts just makes for less effective cops.
Meanwhile, the horrific tragedy in Uvalde, Texas, where 19 children and two teachers were murdered, has underscored police forces’ inability to prevent crime from happening and stop it in progress. As details continue to trickle out despite a series of duplicitous statements from the Texas Department of Public Safety, the department’s inaction during the 78 minutes between the shooter walking into the school and the Border Patrol finally shooting him make for the most egregious example in a string of police incompetence in high-profile shootings.
This has occurred twice in New York City in just a handful of weeks. In April, a shooter in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, injured more than two dozen New Yorkers in a staged attack before escaping on the train from a comparatively tiny station. He wasn’t caught until he called himself in to a tip line, and even then, police were slower to respond to his self-report than a local worker at a Manhattan vape shop, who spotted him and also called the cops. That pattern repeated itself in May, after a man shot and killed another man on the subway going over the Manhattan Bridge. When the train finally pulled into the station, the shooter simply escaped at the Canal Street station, and remained at large for multiple days.
It’s clear that those record police budgets aren’t keeping crime from happening, or else the alleged record crime wave that has been covered breathlessly by local and national media would not be happening. There is evidence that more resources specifically for investigative work can improve clearance rates, but that’s far different from what today’s police budgets prioritize—mostly presence on the streets.
Advocates for those record police budgets, both Democrats and Republicans, have offered virtually no answers as to how they actually intend to solve these crises of policing, and make policing more effective. And while progressives have been harshly criticized and scapegoated for their attitudes toward policing, they’re the only political group not calling for a proven failure of a solution, throwing even more good money after bad.
