Murder Clearances Were Near An All-Time Low Nationally in 2022
Evaluating murder clearance data in light of faulty 2021 crime data.
The FBI’s Crime in the United States report provides a handy table which estimates the national clearance rates for reported murders in a given year. Not every agency participates in the Uniform Crime Report each year and some agencies (*cough Chicago *cough) have historically supplied offense data (how many murders) but not clearance data.
The FBI has reported the above linked table — or some version of it — every year since 1960 giving us 60+ years of reported murder clearance trends.
The result is a chart like the one below showing a dramatic decline in reported murder clearances since the 1960s and 1970s. It’s not fully explained why this decline occurred since the 60s, but much of it can probably be traced to improved arrest standards and changes in policing after the Miranda v. Arizona case was decided in 1966.
You may have noticed that the chart stops in 2020, and that is because there was no such clearance table in the Crime in the US data produced for 2021 due to the hectic NIBRS transition.
The FBI reported just 52.3 percent of reported murders were cleared in 2022 including just over half (50.6 percent) in US cities. That’s the lowest share on record and 12 percent lower than the share of murders that were reported cleared just a few years ago in 2014 .
But were clearances lower last year than in 2021? Without a table for 2021 it is difficult to answer that question.
There are three possible workarounds to hopefully provide that answer. Let’s go through them from worst reliability to best.
First is the NIBRS Incidents Cleared table. To get this table you go to the Crime Data Explorer’s Documents and Downloads page, find the “National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) Tables” section (it should be first on the page), scroll down to the Clearances table and download for 2021.
Once you open up that table you should see that there were 15,249 homicide offenses reported to NIBRS in 2021 with 7,295 of them cleared (47.8 percent). These are only from NIBRS agencies though which made up only about two-thirds of murders that were estimated to have occurred in 2021. Going just by NIBRS in 2021 suggests the national murder clearance rate plunged in 2021 before rebounding a bit in 2022. This seems unreliable at best given all of the uncertainties with NIBRS data in 2021 and problems with totally switching reporting methods midstream.
The second way to discern 2021’s murder clearance rate is to use the FBI’s Supplementary Homicide Report (SHR). SHR is a part of the Crime in the United States report and has been reported every year back to the 1960s. SHR has information on nearly every murder committed each year in the US to include the type of weapon used, circumstances of the murder, and victim/offender demographics.
The FBI makes it relatively easy to download the master files for every year going back to 1985. One way to guesstimate 2021’s murder clearance rate would be to count SHR incidents where an offender’s demographics are known in SHR as cleared.
This is a play on how the Murder Accountability Project identifies solved murders and historically it has done a pretty good job of mimicking the national murder clearance rate. The average absolute miss between the SHR implied clearance rate and the FBI reported rate each year between 1985 and 2020 was 2.2 percent and there’s a fairly strong correlation from year to year. Of course, not every instance where the offender’s demographics is known results in a clearance, so this methodology tends to overstate the national murder clearance rate a bit each year. This method shows the 2021 and 2022 murder clearance rates in the mid-50s and doesn'tprovide a particularly reliable figure.
The final and most reliable way to evaluate 2022’s clearance rate in light of 2021 is to use something called the Return A. This is a form filled out monthly by agencies which declares the number of offenses in each UCR Part I (murder, rape, robbery, assault, theft, auto theft, and burglary) category as well as the number of clearances.
These files are available for download back to the 1960s and are a near perfect correlation for the reported murder clearance rate which makes sense because it's the backbone of how the national rate is calculated. The absolute average difference between using the Return A and the table reported by the FBI since the 1960s is 1.6 percent and the average difference between 2010 and 2020 was just 0.2 percent.
This dataset still suffers from 2021 NIBRS underreporting, but it seems to do a better job. Using the Return A data we get a national murder clearance rate of 51.3 percent in 2021 which is still down from 2020 but it would seem to more accurately reflect reality (though there is no way to say for sure).
Plugging in 2021 and 2022 figures produces the below national murder rate from 1960 to 2022.
What’s more, filling in the 2021 and 2022 data allows for updating the chart comparing the US murder clearance rate each year since 1980 with the share of reported murders involving a firearm.
The bottom line is that murder clearances remained near the lowest level over reported in 2022 even if the available evidence suggests a slight increase last year relative to 2021. As with most things crime data, however, there is some uncertainty and we may never know precisely whether they rose or fell in 2022.
I have two questions. The first one is just about the nature of the data we're talking about, the second is more of a prompt for further thought and analysis.
1) How are clearances dated? For example, if a murder occurred in 1996 and was solved in 1998, is that a 1998 clearance or a 1996 clearance? I would expect it to be 1996 but I can imagine it getting displaced. There's also an argument that both dates should be tracked (and potentially further dates tracked, see below), but that leads to a dataset that's difficult to visualize.
2) What happens to clearance data when we start trying to account for incorrect conclusions to cases? For example, was a disappearance or dead body correctly identified as a murder victim? If so, was the case solved correctly? How do we filter out, say, the Shaurn Thomases, Willy Veasys, Pamela Laniers, and Joey Watkinses in the data, and what happens when we do?
Are federal dollars sent to most, if not all, police departments in the US and if so, why aren’t crime statistics reporting requirements attached to each contract?