How often do crimes get solved? That’s a fantastic question and it depends on what your definition of solved is. Is it knowing who did and sending them to jail or is knowing who did it enough. In the Untied States we have something called a Clearance rate when it comes to crimes. Clearance of a crimes is when one of two things happen:

1. At least one person has either been arrested, charged with an offense, or turned over the court for prosecution.
2. Being closed by “exceptional” means. Like dropping the case or law enforcement being unable to arrest the suspect but they know who did it.

All Index Crimes, that are reported, are sent to the FBI. The FBI then keeps track of these crimes and if a crime is “cleared” the FBI has to mark that down too. Unfortunately some Index crimes have a high rate of solving than others.

Violent Index Crimes

Violent Index crimes are when someone believes or is in danger of bodily harm. This is important to remember as it is the deciding factor of certain crimes like Robbery verse Burglary. Robbery is when you unlawfully enter a building and cause threat to someone within the building while removing property. Verse Burglary is the unlawful entering of a building to steal something. Violent crime over all has a 41.7% rate of clearance in 2020.

Murder

Murder and nonnegligent Homicide has a Clearance Rate of 54.4%, the highest of all index crimes. It’s really unfortunate that only 54.5% of all reported murders not meeting clearance. You think that more of them would cleared with someone being arrested for the crime considering all the technology we have.

Assault

Aggravated Assault has a Clearance rate of 46.4%. This makes sense but also doesn’t make sense. Why it doesn’t make sense to me is because it is Aggravated Assault and not murder or Homicide it implies the victim lived which should help lead to the case being close. It also makes sense though as a victim maybe assaulted by someone and then choose to forgive them for some reason or another.

Sexual Assault

I have some feelings about Clearance rate for Rape. The clearance rate for Rape stands at 30.6%. However, given rape is notoriously under reported (stat from 2000 and another from 2015). 2 of 3 Sexual assaults go unreported and that rate is even lower among college aged students. As such this official statistic is wildly incorrect and only 50 out of every 1,000 people will be arrested or have the case meet the requirements to achieve clearance. Of these 50 that are arrested 28% will actually be convicted (at a felony level) and 25% will receive jail time. Using this the more realistic, including estimated unreported ones, is closer to 5% which would makes it the lowest clearance rate of all index crimes.

Robbery

Robbery is kind of a complicated crime. There is a clear difference between a robbery and a burglary but at the same time the line between the is very blurred. In some cases a preparator might enter a house, not know anyone is there, take something and leave while not knowing another person was inside. In some cases if that person believed they were in bodily harm that is robbery and burglary. However they are still different crimes and they have different clearance rates. The clearance rate for Robbery is 28.8%. This is higher than Burglary’s 14% which makes sense. For there to be Robbery there has to be a victim present and that give law enforcement a way to better identify the perpetrator.

Honestly looking at all these rates for Felony level crimes is really depressing. With the violent crimes having the higher clearance rate of the two types of index crimes (violent and non violent index crimes) it’s kind of depressing that it only goes down hill from here. These aren’t even the conviction rates for that crime, theses are either cases reported that were sent to court or cases that were dropped for some reason or another. These are only crimes on the Felony level which is uplifting but also once again depressing as it has to be objectively worse to be a felony but it’s also pretty bad that murder on a felony level only has a Clearance rate of 54.4%.