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.
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Well… that is kind of their job. They can only find the pieces and it is up to the judicial system to establish guilt.
Unless you want to live in the world of Judge Dredd.
Your question makes very little sense. How do you think prosecutors work, exactly?
The order of operations for going to prison is:
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Cop wants to arrest you. If the cop has no genuine excuse to do so, this arrest won’t go anywhere (they can still lock you up for up to 24 hours at will). If you’ve just committed a crime in front of the cop, well, that’s easy, the cop just puts you away; skip to step 3. If this is an investigation, the cop goes to step 2.
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Cop gets permission from a judge to arrest you. This is called an arrest warrant.
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Cop arrests you and puts you in jail. At this point you should lawyer up, but as that is not compulsory, it is not a distinct step in this list.
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Cop gives evidence to prosecutor. Because there is a time delay between 3 and 4, the cop may do additional investigating before this step.
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Prosecutor decides to prosecute (they may choose to dismiss instead).
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You go to court. Judge asks you how you plead. You plead not guilty. The media pretends this is notable, even though no-one pleads guilty ar this step (it is called arraignment).
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The evidence against you is shown to you. The judge again asks you how you plead. This time you have a genuine choice in your answer.
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Optional: if you pled not guilty, go to trial. Jury convicts you.
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Judge sentences you to prison.
That’s the basic pipeline.
Note that cops don’t have to do their jobs at all, which is most likely why, as the article discusses, they don’t. Why get paid to work when you can get paid to not work?
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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.
Due to the extensive publicity the case received, and because the murder charge carried a potential death sentence, the prosecution hired Lentini and John DeHaan, who had coauthored a fire investigation textbook, to evaluate other theories of how the fire may have started. One possible explanation was that one of the children, playing with matches, had ignited a sofa.
Fortunately, two doors down from the Lewis’ residence was an almost identical house. Lentini and DeHaan received funds and permission to furnish that house with the same type of furniture and carpeting as in Lewis’. Then they wired the structure with sensors, lit the sofa on fire and recorded the results. Within minutes the house was an inferno, due to a flashover. A flashover occurs when a burning object generates hot combustible gasses that ignite and engulf an entire area in flames.
To the general amazement of everyone involved, Lentini and DeHaan discovered the same burn marks on the floor of the test house that prosecutors thought indicated arson. But rather than having resulted from a liquid accelerant, the marks were caused by flashover. Prosecutors quickly dropped the charges. “That case opened my eyes,” Lentini said. “There were all these rules of thumb you can find in the literature at the National Fire Academy that are just wrong.”
Don’t credulously accept the testimonies of expert witnesses. Examples of “the science” proving years later to have been pseudoscience abound.
Ding ding ding ding ding! This is exactly the case.
The police are merely getting away with less corruption and misconduct. The metric “solving crimes” has ALWAYS been a red herring.
While this certainly sounds plausible, even rational and perfectly logical, it’s also the exact sort of argument that could easily be spurious. Now, i’m not making that accusation (nor do mean to imply it), but do you happen to have any data backing up this assertion?
Eh?
I said that it’s “not necessarily the case that” one thing and “it could be that” something else.
Logic and plausibilty are all that’s necessary.
when asking for evidence, i didn’t expect equivocation and, “it’s just a guess, bro,” hand-waving in response-- see, this is why i was skeptical and asked.
Logic and plausibilty [sic] are all that’s necessary.
no. evidence is necessary. otherwise, it’s just speculation, and that’s just not good enough.
What the fuck are you on about?
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 everything I said, right there. What part of it are you not understanding?
evidence is necessary. otherwise, it’s just speculation
Of course it’s fucking speculation! What the fuck else did you think it was?!
i didn’t expect equivocation
It would be equivocation if there was a disjunct between the intended meaning of what I said at one point and the intended meaning of the same thing at some other point.
But I’ve been entirely consistent in what I’ve said. The disjunct is between what YOU thought I meant and what I actually said, and that’s your fucking problem - not mine.
Yeah, I’m not reading that hissy fit. When you make assertions, back it up with evidence. If it’s just a guess, say so.
They did say so, from the start.
Then it should be easy for you to show me the quote where they said it was just guess.
Portland Police collects 1/4 of a billion dollars every year.
For that:
They don’t respond to 911 calls:
They don’t do traffic enforcement:
They don’t have a gang/gun violence taskforce:
Even the bike theft team is gone (after having one of their own bikes stolen).
So what are they doing with 1/4 billion a year?
Stockpiling tear gas in case people complain.
I dunno, it looks like it’s pretty much in line with the long-term trend for the past 60 years. It’s also interesting that crime has been generally declining over those same periods (both long-term and short-term), suggesting that catching and punishing offenders isn’t as big a factor in reducing crime as most people assume.
It has always been a question of fulfilling the needs of people. Crime is so often caused by desperation.
Often it is greed
They’re also making up crimes. First hand account here.
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Why solve when you could shoot
Why do actual work when you can collect overtime by hanging out at a crime scene with your buddies for an hour or two?
Best warning I have ever had. More of this please. Pigs don’t solve crimes anyway.
The point of police isn’t to stop crimes, they’re an occupying force to control their own citizens. Militarization isn’t a bug, it’s a feature.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The exact causes of the decline in arrests are difficult to pinpoint, but the timing is clearly tied to the summer of 2020, suggesting that changes in policing and America’s dwindling confidence in law enforcement since the killing of George Floyd played a role.
Low morale and extreme stresses in the departments have led to high levels of resignations among older and more experienced officers and significantly fewer recruits to replace them.
It also means significantly longer response times, leaving clues to grow stale and witnesses to disappear before officers arrive.
For a long time, conventional wisdom pointed to factors beyond the control of law enforcement — such as whether a witness was present or whether physical evidence was left behind — as the primary drivers of solving crimes.
But newer research from a criminologist, Anthony A. Braga, presents a clear connection between the amount of investigative resources dedicated to a crime and the likelihood of its being solved.
Civilians can respond to low-level incidents that don’t require an officer, take reports over the phone and aid investigators in solving cases.
The original article contains 1,069 words, the summary contains 181 words. Saved 83%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
The comments here should be good. All well thought out and reasonable. munching popcorn
“Early” warning that we’ve got some issues with policing, eh.
“Early”
The solve rate for rape is 25%? That’s horrifying. What the fuck? We have more tools available to solve crimes now than ever before in history. Get off your asses and give people some justice!
Justice is something that you tell children to help sleep at night along with tales of Santa and the tooth fairy.
I mean no, that is the solve rate for rape that police are willing to investigate, which is basically “the victim is a pure innocent white woman and there is a lot of actual physical evidence unlike 99 percent of rapes”
This is by percent, but not by total volume.
This could easily mean that crime is on an incline.
They directly say that this is not the case.
