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An Early Warning That Policing May Be in Decline | Police departments across the country are solving far fewer crimes than they did before 2020.
(www.nytimes.com)
While headlines tend to focus on falling clearance rates in large liberal cities, the decline occurred nationwide in both red and blue cities, counties and states. The violent crime clearance rate, for example, fell considerably between 2019 to 2022 in big cities, which tend to be led by Democrats, as well as in small cities and suburban and rural counties, which tend to be led by Republicans.
It's not necessarily the case though that fewer crimes are being actually "solved," in the most precise sense of the term.
It could be that the current heightened interest in police oversight and focus on investigation of (and huge lawsuit payouts as a consequence of) wrongdoing by the police has made it less likely that people will be railroaded/framed for crimes they didn't actually commit, so the rate at which crimes are marked as solved has declined, even as the rate at which they actually are solved hasn't.
That's definitely a big chunk of the drop in case clearance rates since the 1960s. It's not as clear that there have been actual changes to police honesty recently though.
It struck me after I posted that that modern technology and investigative techniques would also contribute to such a decline.
It's undoubtedly more difficult to falsely convict someone (whether deliberately or not) in the era of GPS, cell phone records, video surveillance and DNA tests.
There's a famous example of how improvements in understanding of burn patterns resulted in concluding that a bunch of people were falsely convicted for arson:
Don’t credulously accept the testimonies of expert witnesses. Examples of “the science” proving years later to have been pseudoscience abound.