Investigating Complaints and Solving Crimes
Victims who report crimes expect their local police and sheriff’s departments to launch investigations that successfully culminate with the apprehension of suspects and the seizure of solid evidence point- ing to their guilt (Brandl and Horvath, 1991).
The FBI’s annual UCR calculates and publishes average clearance rates for each of the seven index crimes for police departments across the country. In general, clearing crimes means making arrests. FBI guidelines instruct police departments to consider cases to be solved when they are closed by taking suspects into custody, lodging charges against them, and turning them over to courts for prosecution. Exceptional clearances take place
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when situations beyond the control of law enforce- ment agencies prevent them from arresting and for- mally charging someone, even though sufficient evidence has been gathered and the exact where- abouts of the suspect are known. For example, the suspect cannot be arrested because he has died or is otherwise beyond reach (such as, he can’t be extra- dited) or the victim refuses to further cooperate with the prosecution. Old cases that are closed by an arrest count toward the current year’s clearance rate. In calculating clearance rates, the UCR pro- gram counts the number of reported offenses that have been closed and not the number of persons charged with these crimes. The arrest of just one person may clear several crimes, and yet the arrest of several accomplices may close only one reported incident (FBI, 2011). Note that the police consider the crime solved even if the sole arrestee is not ultimately convicted of the original charge or even any lesser charge. If the accused is found not guilty after a trial, the case usually is not reopened. In other words, there is no “case tracking” or follow-up, and once clearance rates are calculated and published in the UCR, they are not later corrected or updated to reflect what ultimately happened in court. Therefore, clearance rates tend to be overestimates of the proportion of criminals who are brought to justice and made to pay for their crimes because the FBI and local departments do not monitor what eventually happens to these cases at later stages of the criminal justice process. Some charges are dropped by prosecutors or dis- missed by judges, freeing those arrestees. Of those who are prosecuted, many engage in negotiations via their defense attorneys and plead guilty to lesser charges in order to get milder punishments, or are not convicted by a jury after a trial (see the leaky net diagram in Chapter 12).
Police departments routinely compile the per- centages of cases that are closed by arrests because this indicator of effectiveness ought to be calculated and submitted to the FBI’s UCR division. These clearance rates are used to evaluate the performance of individual detectives, specialized squads (such as those concentrating on homicide, burglary, and sex crimes), and the department as a whole.
But these same statistics can be interpreted from a different angle and for a different purpose. From a victim’s point of view, the police have successfully completed their mission when, acting on sufficient evidence, all the wrongdoers in a particular incident have been charged with what they really did. The proportion of cases that are solved can indicate the percentage of complai- nants who have a solid basis for being satisfied or dissatisfied with the investigatory services pro- vided by local police forces. Victims want suspects to be taken into custody because it symbolizes that justice has been served. An arrest means that their misfortunes have been considered sig- nificant enough to warrant official action, and their request for assistance has been taken seri- ously by those in authority. Victims who report crimes and cooperate with investigations want someone to be held directly accountable for the injuries and losses they have suffered. That person might be ordered by the judge to make restitution to repay losses and expenses. Besides restitution, injured parties might demand retribution in order to gain solace from the knowledge that the gov- ernment is punishing the wrongdoer in their behalf. Also, those with a sense of civic responsi- bility might want to see the offender removed from society and incapacitated behind bars in order to make the streets safer for others. For all these reasons, solving cases by making arrests can be considered a high-priority issue and a crucial performance measure from the standpoint of vic- tims who report crimes and cooperate with law enforcement authorities.
By the conclusion of most movies and televi- sion shows, the wrongdoer has been captured, rein- forcing the message that crime doesn’t pay. But victimologists need to ask, “In real life, how often do law enforcement agencies figure out (and also, fail to figure out) who did it?” Data from selected years over the past five decades appear in Table 6.2. These statistics summarize the overall accomplish- ments of roughly 17,000 law enforcement agencies during the second half of the twentieth century and the first 13 years of the twenty-first. The most recent solution rates appear in the last column.
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Accentuating the positive, the figures for 2013 reveal that police forces nationwide had greater suc- cess at solving violent crimes, which are more serious and threatening to public safety than property crimes. Accentuating the negative and looking at these numbers from the victims’ point of view, it is obvious that the vast majority of people who go to the trouble to report thefts to the police will not be pleased with the outcome of their cases: The inves- tigations will be discontinued before any arrests are made. Put another way, 87 percent of burglary com- plainants, 86 percent of persons reporting that their vehicle was stolen, and 78 percent of theft victims had good reasons to be frustrated in 2013—their offenders had escaped detection and arrest.
Similarly, many victims of interpersonal vio- lence did not gain the satisfaction of knowing that someone got in trouble for harming them. Of those who reported robberies, 71 percent endured the aggravation of learning that no one was appre- hended for accosting them. Of all those who had the courage to tell the authorities in 2013 that they had been raped or otherwise sexually assaulted, 60 percent did not experience the relief of knowing that their attackers had been arrested. Presumably, these assailants who remained at large were mostly strangers and not the perpetrators of acquaintance rapes. Of all those who were subjected to an aggra- vated assault like a shooting or stabbing, 42 percent were disturbed to find out that no arrests were made in their cases (FBI, 2014).
The highest clearance rates of all are achieved by homicide squads. But even these seasoned detec- tives who devoted considerable time and effort to
these important cases were not able to figure out who did it in a little more than 35 percent of the slayings that took place in 2013. To put it dramati- cally, that means that more than one out of every three killers got away with murder that year. Thou- sands of dangerous assailants annually join the ranks of murderers who are still roaming the streets unpunished for their heinous crimes.
As for changes over time, the UCR clearance rates compiled in Table 6.2 reveal a disturbing national trend. For six of the seven index crimes (except for larcenies, the least damaging but the only bright spot) a general downward drift is evi- dent from the early 1950s through the first 13 years of the twenty-first century. During the 1950s, police departments were able to solve prac- tically all murders and most rapes and aggravated assaults. Clearance rates for these three violent crimes as well as for robberies dropped sharply during the crime wave of the late 1960s and never bounced back up. During the 1970s and 1980s, the solution rates for rapes and serious assaults remained stable, while the ability of the police to solve murders continued to decline. Bur- glaries and auto thefts led to arrests roughly twice as often in the 1950s as in the 1990s. Grand and petit larcenies (major and minor thefts of all kinds) have always been difficult to solve (except for shoplifting arrests). During the early 1990s, clear- ance rates hit new lows across the board, but then improved slightly by 1998 (for murders, serious assaults, and robberies), as crime rates and conse- quently detectives’ caseloads fell throughout the nation. Disappointingly, solution rates (especially