Actually, Murder Clearance Rates Probably Rose A Good Bit In 2024

Re-visiting the data on clearances.

Crime data reporting is slow, so the FBI’s Crime in the US report covering 2024 won’t be out for another 3-ish months. But I want to know about the nation’s trends in terms of crime and clearances now.

I’ve talked a lot about how sampling lots of cities can help to show national crime trends. The workaround I use for understanding clearance rate trends is to grab data from cities and states that publish it to garner an understanding of what the trends are well in advance.

I did this exercise a few months ago to get a picture of what murder, violent crime, and property crime clearance rates looked like nationally in states with available data. I grabbed data from 18 states back in March to evaluate the 2024 clearance rate trend without having to wait until September/October when the FBI data comes out.

Sampling those states showed that clearances for murder, violent crime, and property crime increased slightly by just over 1 percent from 2023 to 2024. Not every state had good data through December 2024 when I looked in March, so a few weeks ago I went back to see if those findings hold up.

I was able to get data from an additional five states bringing the total to 23. Re-running clearance rates among this slightly larger sample shows similarly small increases in the violent and property crime clearance rates (though somewhat bigger than initially found) and a substantially larger increase in the murder clearance rate last year than I initially found.

The initial analysis compared 10 or 11 months of data for 2023 vs the same 10 or 11 months in 2024, so clearance rates in both years are impacted by re-running the analysis with a full year of reporting. My initial analysis found a murder clearance rate of 57.4 percent in 2023, but that got bumped up to 58.5 percent in the 18 initial states (it's 58.2 percent in the larger 23 state sample) upon reassessment.

The 2024 sample increased even more. The original sample run early in 2025 found a murder clearance rate of 58.6 percent in 2024, but re-running the states finds a murder clearance rate of 61.3 percent. So, instead of a 1-ish percent increase in clearance rates in 2024, the new sample suggests it was closer to 3 to 4 percent.

I also re-ran the overall violent and property crime clearance rates and found slightly larger but overall more modest increases in clearance rates than initially projected.

The updated figures make sense given that murder is a tiny portion of overall violent crime, murder fell a lot more than overall violent and property crime, and crime drops tend to go with higher clearance rates.

To the latter point, just check out the relationship between DC’s murder clearance rate since 2009 and the reported clearance rate each year. Note that the relationship isn’t always as strongly correlated as it has been in DC.

This sample of states should mimic the national trend suggesting there was a large increase in murder clearance rates in 2024 with lesser increases in overall violent and property crime clearance rates.

A roughly 3 to 4 percent increase in the national murder clearance rate would bring 2024’s rate largely in line with where it stood in 2019. That’s up considerably from 2020’s historic low but still below where it was 15 years ago (to say nothing of the more or less fake numbers from the 1960s). Violent and property crime clearance rates similarly have increased after plunging post-2020 though they too are low by historical standards (violent and property crime clearance rates aren’t available pre-1965).

The below graph shows how clearance rates might look when the FBI's 2024 data comes out, but it's still just an estimate.

National clearance rate figures won't be known until later this Fall when the FBI publishes its 2024 figures. Until then, the state sample gives a strong understanding of how well law enforcement is doing in solving the most serious crimes.