Preliminary Data Points to Small Improvements in Clearance Rates Nationally in 2024

It’s Mardi Gras season where I am which for some lucky few of us readers means parades, bands, and no kids in school for 10 days. It also means consecutive posts about clearance rates in the newsletter!

Last week’s post took a deep dive into a very specific type of crime clearance, and this week is going to take a bigger picture glance at guesstimating what happened nationally in 2024. This can be accomplished by grabbing statewide clearance data from the 18 states that have already published all or nearly all of their 2024 data.

First, some caveats! The reporting is incomplete and will undoubtedly change between now and when it is published by the FBI later this year. I also couldn’t grab data through December for every state, so the crime counts are likely undercounts in terms of the number of crimes (data was available through at least November in each state). That’s okay for these purposes because I assume agencies that haven’t reported full crime counts also haven’t reported full clearances, so their clearance rates should be accurate.

The sample of 18 states has traditionally done a good job in terms of predicting changes in national clearance rates from year to year. Below is the graph of property crimes in this sample since 2015 compared t the national property crime clearance rate over that span. The sample has tended to trail the national rate, but it matched the same trends: big drop since 2020 with a rebound in 2023.

So what does the state data suggest happened in 2024? Well, if you read the title of this post then you’d know that it probably points to a small increase in murder, violent crime, and property crime clearance rates.

Murder was the only individual crime type I gathered data for, and that showed a small increase from 57.4 percent to 58.6 percent. Murder clearance rates fell in 10 of the sample states and rose in 8 of them with Texas (+2.7 percent) accounting for a good chunk of the sample’s increase.

This result was a bit surprising to me. Clearance rates tend to rise a good deal when crime counts fall so I expected a big increase in clearance rates last year, but that did not quite show up in the data. Still, another increase in national murder clearance rates would put them closer to (but likely still below) the pre-COVID rates.

Violent crime clearance rates similarly rose just over 1 percent in the sample with 9 states seeing a decline and 8 seeing an increase (Maryland doesn’t report SRS data so I couldn’t quite match that state’s data with violent crime and property crime).

Clearance rates for murder specifically and violent crime overall both rose 1.2 percent in the sample of states, but property crime clearance rates behaved completely differently with a much larger 1.4 percent increase in that sample.

This was again a somewhat surprising result as I expected a bigger increase in property crime clearances given the large drop in motor vehicle thefts reported this year. In Pennsylvania, for example, motor vehicle theft fell 24 percent from 2023 to 2024, but the motor vehicle clearance rate only rose from 9.9 percent to 11 percent. In Texas there were 22,000 fewer motor vehicle thefts in 2024 compared to 2023 and 650 fewer clearances reported.

All of this data is preliminary and it covers fewer than 40 percent of the states in our union, but the available data points to small-ish increases in clearance rates nationally last year. That does not mean that every state or agency is seeing an increase, and it also does not mean that there is not tons of room for improvement in clearance rates. But it does point to the continued reversal of a trend that had gotten severely worse between 2020 and 2022.