Big cities struggling to solve murders

Homicide clearance rates fall to record low

For years, Jim Adcock, a former coroner living in the South, has been sounding the alarm to police brass and anyone else who will listen: America’s big city police departments are mired in a cold case crisis.

The national murder clearance rate – the calculation of cases that end with an arrest or identification of a suspect who can’t be apprehended – fell to 59.4 percent in 2016, the lowest since the FBI has tracked the issue.

The data tell a grim story of thousands of murders in which no one is held accountable, Adcock said.

“If we don’t address it, the issue is just going to get worse,” said Adcock, who recently started the Mid-South Cold Case Initiative, a nonprofit that aims to provide assistance to departments looking to bolster their cold case units. “The hole we’re in is just going to get deeper and deeper.”

“If we don’t address it, the issue is just going to get worse.”

Jim Adcock

Founder, Mid-South Cold Case Initiative

The issue of murder clearance rates is in the spotlight as Chicago officials struggle to solve gun violence that’s plaguing the city. But the nation’s third-largest city, which only cleared 26 percent of its homicides in 2016, is just one among many big cities struggling to solve gun crimes, according to FBI data and crime experts.

Last weekend in Chicago, more than 70 people were shot, including 12 fatally, but only a single arrest has been made so far.

The frustrating weekend led Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson to decry a culture where too few Chicagoans living in some of the city’s most violenceplagued neighborhoods are willing to cooperate with police.

Politicians and police chiefs in many other cities know the struggle.

It’s one that has been exacerbated in municipalities to varying degrees by politics, fear, a no-snitching philosophy mentality pervasive in some enclaves, diminished resources for law enforcement and discontent with policing in minority communities, experts say.

Gangs fueling much of the violence have become less hierarchical over the

past several decades. As a result, they have also become more perplexing for investigators to understand, said Peter Scharf, a Louisiana State University criminologist who has advised the New Orleans Police Department in the past.

In big cities such as Baltimore, Chicago and New Orleans – which cleared less than 28 percent of its homicide cases in 2016 – the fracturing of gangs has added a difficult dimension for detectives as they try to glean information from the streets.

“It’s a national disaster,” Scharf said of the declining national clearance rate. “With every one of these weekends where you see multiple killed and even more wounded and few arrested, the gangs become more emboldened and the witnesses weaker in their conviction to step up.”

In Memphis, Tennessee, where Adcock is based, the city saw its homicide clearance fall to 38 percent in 2016. The city cleared more than 99 percent of its 126 homicides in 1972. The Memphis Police Department has more than 1,500 cold cases on the books, Adcock said.

Detroit, which last year had the thirdworst per capita homicide rate in the nation, managed to clear less than 15 percent of homicides in 2016, down from about 35 percent the prior year. (Detroit and many other cities include all homicides solved in a calendar year in their annual reporting to the FBI. For example, a homicide committed in 2015 but solved in 2016 would be tallied as a homicide cleared in the more recent year.)

In Indianapolis, where the murder rate has surged, the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police command staff earlier this year called on outside experts to help with the growing number of unsolved homicide cases.

The city has seen its annual clearance rate tumble since 2014, when 66 percent of murders were solved. Last year, about 40 percent of Indianapolis’ cases were solved, according to an analysis by the Indianapolis Star.

Police there believe part of the problem is that witnesses have become increasingly reluctant to speak out because of fear of retaliation. The problem is so acute that half the people who survive gunshots refuse to answer questions about the shootings.

The Indianapolis City Council passed a proposal this year creating a $300,000 witness protection fund in hopes of bolstering the police department’s ability to persuade witnesses to cooperate.

Kelly Robinson, whose son Philip Brown’s 2016 murder went unsolved, told council members it was essential authorities provide witnesses with help from the incident until conviction.

“If y’all don’t handle it, it’ll be handled in the streets,” said Robinson, who says there were at least 30 witnesses to her child’s killing.