The United States is one of the worst countries in the world at solving murders. “Over the past four decades, homicide clearance rates – the metric used to determine how many homicides police solve – have decreased from about 71% in 1980 to an all-time low of about 50% in 2020…  according to analyses of FBI data by the non-profits the Marshall Project and Murder Accountability Project,” says Guardian.com. The question is, why are so many murders being left unsolved?  

   On Aug. 6, Rachel Morin, a single mother, was killed on the Ma & Pa hiking trail in Maryland  and the murderer still hasn’t been found, despite the sheriff’s office having the suspected killer’s DNA. Two months later, there still hasn’t been any definite answers.  Pava LaPere was murdered on September 22, in Baltimore. She was a rising businesswoman who was the founder and CEO of EcoMap Technologies, and her murderer  was found a day after he killed her. LaPere’s killer, Jason Billingsley, has a criminal record dating back to 2009, but was released due to good behavior in October of 2022.  

     Two different murders.  Two different killers.  But only one was caught.

     And that’s only the beginning of the story.

     Across the country, 51% of  murders went unsolved in 2021. The founder of the Murder Accountability Project, Thomas Hagrove, says, “The reason for the low clearance rate is simple: there aren’t enough people to solve them. We have given inadequate resources to properly fund local police departments. There are not enough homicide detectives, not enough trained detectives, not enough forensic technicians to go to crime scenes, not enough laboratory capacities, we simply lack the necessary resources to properly investigate major crimes.” 

     With all the people in the country, the police departments across the country are still critically understaffed. This is concerning because a murderer could get away without any consequences merely because of not enough people working. 

   Another reason the clearance rate is so low is the type of weapons often used in murders. “Today, almost 80 percent of murders are committed with guns. And the share of murders committed by firearms has crept up at a nearly identical rate to the steady decline of murder clearances. Correlation does not equal causation, but if you plot the two together, you see a very strong correlation in the last 40 years. And the reason is that firearm murders are much harder to solve. They take place from farther away. You often have fewer witnesses. There’s less physical evidence,” says crime analyst Jeff Asher. This is beyond concerning. If the style of killings has changed, then the training the detectives go through needs to change to reflect that. 

     Another thing that negatively impacts the crime clearance rate is the general public. The public is the first to condemn the police for not solving these murders, but they are also the first to not help the police. Many witnesses refuse to go to the police because they don’t trust the police. This creates a double standard that is only hurting everyone in the process. 

    Considering the fact that the murder clearance rate has been on a steady decline for the past 60 years, chances are they’re just going to continue heading downwards. The number of crimes keeps rising and the number of clearances keeps going down. People should watch their backs, because we can’t always rely on the police to catch the criminals living amongst us. 

     This is unacceptable. The police need to step up and find these killers, whether it’s by hiring more detectives or going through more intensive training. It’s their job to find these killers so that families are given justice and killers are held accountable.