FBI Data Show Disturbing Rate of Police Solving Murder Cases

Just three years after the left-wing “defund the police” movement swept across the United States, the FBI reports, only about 58% of murders and nonnegligent manslaughters were cleared by the police in 2023 in the United States.

The clearance rate is the total number of arrests or exceptional clearances made for a given crime in a particular year (e.g., 2023) divided by the total incidences of that crime that were reported to police that same year.

A case is considered cleared if there has been an arrest of the alleged perpetrator of the crime, or the investigation has been concluded through exceptional means. The term “exceptional means” is used when the police have identified a potential offender, his exact location, and have enough evidence to arrest and charge him, but are unable to do so because of circumstances outside of their control (for example, the alleged perpetrator has died).

According to The New York Times, by contrast, Australia, Britain, and Germany have murder clearance rates in the 70, 80, and 90 percentages.

Despite close to half of killers in the U.S. “getting away” with their crime for at least a year, murder actually has one of the higher clearance rates, at least compared with other major crimes.

Vehicle theft had just an 8% clearance rate in 2023, while rape, robbery, and assault had 27%, 28%, and 46% clearance rates, respectively.

Those problematically low clearance rates come just a few years after there was a significant spike in the number of black Americans being killed in the U.S.

“Between 2010 and 2019, there was an average of 5,954 white murders, which is roughly 16% lower than the 10-year average of black murders. During that same time period, an average of 6,927 black Americans were murdered each year; meaning, black murders shot up by 43% in 2020, compared to the previous 10-year average,” The Daily Signal explained a few months after those FBI crime statistics were released in September 2021. 

The Black Lives Matter and “defund the police” movements contributed to the rise in crime in 2020, according to Heather Mac Donald, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, an urban policy think tank. Mac Donald wrote about the rise in crime after the killing of George Floyd, a repeat offender, while in Minneapolis police custody on Memorial Day weekend in 2020. 

Some Democratic politicians embraced the “defund the police” movement in the weeks after Floyd’s death. 

“The ‘defund the police’ movement, is one of reimagining the current police system to build an entity that does not violate us, while relocating funds to invest in community services. Let’s be clear: The people who now oppose this have always opposed calls for systematic change,” Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., wrote on the social media platform X in June 2020. 

Omar was joined that month by Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., who wrote, “When we say #DefundPolice, what we mean is, people are dying, and we need to invest in people’s livelihoods instead. EXAMPLE: Detroit spent $294 million on police last year, and $9 million on health. This is systemic oppression in numbers.”

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., weighed in on about the New York City Police Department budget in June as well writing on social media, “It truly boggles my mind how anyone can see a $6 billion policing budget in ONE city alone—which is more than we spend on health, youth, housing, and homelessness services here *combined*—and say, “You know what will fix police brutality? More money.”

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