Declining homicide clearance rates for African-American
victims accounted for all of the nation’s alarming decline in law enforcement’s
ability to clear murders through the arrest of criminal offenders, according to a new study of data compiled by the nonprofit Murder Accountability Project (MAP).
Reported clearance rates for the other three
races counted in the Supplementary Homicide Report – whites (which includes ethnic Hispanics), Asians and Native Americans – actually improved slightly over
the period from 1976 through 2017.The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Criminal Justice Information Services Division in Clarksburg, West Virginia, has estimated the nation’s homicide clearance rate for many years and found up to 90 percent of murders were cleared through the arrest of offenders in the mid 1960s, a rate that steadily declined until reaching 61 percent in 2017. This decline in clearance rates has been widely observed for many years.
But the Murder Accountability Project's study found declining clearance rates exclusively occurred among homicides of black victims based upon offender-identification data found in the Supplementary Homicide Report (SHR) from 1976 through 2017. Clearance rates for all other races improved.
This racial divide occurred in every region of the nation and in most communities, regardless of size. Major urban centers, suburban neighborhoods, rural counties and tiny cities all generally experienced a large decline in the rate at which black homicides are solved through arrest.
Click here to download MAP's six-page report on this trend. The Murder Accountability Project's augmented SHR data, which includes more than 27,000 homicide cases not reported to the FBI, can be downloaded at no cost at the "Data & Docs" tab at this website.