Homicide clearance rates improved again in 2024, rising above the all-time low rate recorded two years before.
The FBI's Criminal Justice Information Services division estimated that 61.4 percent of homicides in 2024 were either cleared through the arrest of offenders or through special circumstances such as the death of offenders during the process of arrest. This was an improvement that built on the 57.8 percent clearance rate reported in 2023.
Homicide clearance rates in the United States are considerably lower than in most other industrialized nations. Clearance rates also vary dramatically from state to state and among police departments within each state. See the "Clearance Rate" tab to determine homicide occurrences and clearances in your community.
The improvement in homicide clearances occurred during a simultaneous decline in the total number of murders, allowing over-burdened homicide units to make headway in the nation's large backlog of unsolved killings. Homicides have declined by more than 5,000 annual murders since 2021.
This drop followed the nearly 30-percent spike in killings that began the week that George Floyd was murdered by a Minneapolis police officer in 2020, prompting thousands of anti-police protests. That spike in fatal violence lasted three years but, finally, subsided in 2023 and 2024.
