Clearance Rates Decrease

Introduction

Homicide clearance rates are often used as a yardstick for measuring overall police performance. Investigations constitute only a small share of what the police do, but homicide clearance rates often serve as a proxy for police performance for two reasons. First, most people would agree that murder is the most serious type of crime, and therefore solving murder cases is among the most important of police functions. Bringing a murderer to justice quenches the public’s thirst for the police to do something about violent crime. Second, homicides are the most reliably reported crime. Measurement error in official police data on other crime types is often so severe that it is difficult to know whether increases or decreases represent true changes in crime or are simply an artefact of reporting or recording practices (Hoffman 1971, Nadel 1978, Poggio et al. 1985, Cordner 1989, Alpert and Moore 1993, Riedel and Jarvis 1998). Although homicide clearances are sometimes conceptually ambiguous,.