To serve and protect…arrest, intimidate and degrade.

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-06-07/fewer-half-violent-crimes-are-solved-americau

One of the central arguments in favor of the government’s monopoly on police powers is that government police are essential in “keeping us safe.” Without this “thin blue line” between chaos and order, we are told, society will descend into chaos.

How exactly this order is maintained by police, however, is less clear. In recent years, police agencies have insisted they have no legal obligation to directly intervene to protect people from threats posed by criminals. The courts have agreed.

Having abandoned the “protect” part of “to serve and protect,” the police have retreated to the claim that their real role is simply to “enforce the law.” This “enforcement” presumably would include investigation of crimes and arrests of suspects.

So how is that going for them?

According to the most recent FBI “Crime in the United States” report, only 45 percent of violent crime lead to arrest and prosecution. That is, less than half of violent crimes result in what is known as a “clearance” of the crime. Property crime clearances are much worse. Only 17 percent of burglaries, arsons, and car thefts are “cleared.”

Among violent crimes, homicides experience the highest clearance rate by far, at 61 percent. Aggravated assault comes in at 53 percent, and rape at 34 percent.

But these are just cases where arrests are made and prosecutions are initiated. A smaller number of cases actually lead to convictions. A crime may be cleared even when the suspect is later exonerated.

According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the nationwide conviction rate for murders is 70 percent.

So, we may be looking at a situation in which for every 100 homicides, 61 percent are cleared, and then 70 percent of those — 43 cases — lead to conviction. And this assumes that the correct person is convicted. According to some estimates, four percent of inmates on death row are innocent. Wrongful conviction rates are assumed to be higher for lesser crimes since officials are less rigorous in establishing guilt when capital punishment is not on the table.

These are all aggregate estimates, of course, but it’s not outlandish to conclude from the available evidence that at least half of homicides don’t lead to conviction of the guilty party. Convictions for other sorts of crimes are well below that.

Moreover, clearance rates for homicides and other crimes are far below the national average in certain places.According to Peoria, Illinois’ Journal-Star, “the Murder Accountability Project was able to determine the state’s 2015 clearance rate at roughly 37 percent. By comparison, Peoria cleared 47 percent of its cases that same year.”

Meanwhile, Boston’s police department recent increased its clearance rate to slightly above the national average, but this “followed a five-year period, from 2007 to 2011, when homicide detectives had cleared only 148 of 314 killings, with a clearance rate of 47 percent.”

With so few homicides leading to convictions, it’s not surprising that one criminologist has described the situation as “a national disaster.”

Better Police Work Can Lead to Better Outcomes

Part of the reason that low clearance rates are alarming is that they create the conditions that lead to fewer clearances in the future. For example, if witnesses believe the police are unlikely to actually arrest and prosecute the guilty parties, witnesses are more likely to be too frightened to come forward. In the case of lesser crimes, such as sexual assaults and burglaries, many victims may conclude the unlikelihood of a conviction make reporting crimes not even worth the trouble…

Be seeing you