Chicago's Murder Clearance Rate Hit Its Lowest Point In Decades. Why?

By Stephen Gossett in News on Jan 27, 2017 9:03PM



Getty Images / Photo: Scott Olson

More than 80 percent of murders committed in 2016 were not solved, according to police figures obtained by WBEZ. The drop is representative of a larger, general decline over the last 20 or so years.

The department cleared only 19.8 percent of last year’s murders: 151 of 763 committed, WBEZ reports. The rate improves by about 10 percentage points, to 29.4 percent, if one includes murders that were cleared in 2016 but occurred before that year. Either way, both numbers are far below the most recent available national average, roughly 62 percent.

Low clearance rates in turn tend to fuel more violent crime, according to Thomas Hargrove of the Murder Accountability Project.

The reason for Chicago’s paltry clearance number is likely twofold, according to John Hagedorn, a criminology professor at UIC who has extensively studied gangs: the continuing fracture of formerly structured gang culture, and mistrust of police among communities, stemming from police misconduct.

The murder clearance rate was around 60 percent in Chicago throughout parts of the 1990s—even near 70 percent in 1991. But those rates have seen an overall decline since that time. “It speaks to the different nature of homicides,” Hagedorn told Chicagoist. “In the '90s, homicides stemmed from citywide drug wars” rather than today’s “neighborhood disputes between smaller gangs,” which tend to leave fewer witnesses and fewer oppositional gang members who might be convinced to testify.

Many witnesses are also less likely to cooperate with police. Hagedorn cited the case of Laquan McDonald, the teenager who was fatally shot by police. Officer testimony differed wildly from footage captured on dashcam video, the release of which sparked waves of protest in Chicago. “Why would people want to trust [police] when every single cop lied about what they saw?” Hagedorn said. “People think, ‘do they protect neighborhood or protect themselves?’”

The Department of Justice’s investigation into the Chicago Police Department came to a similar conclusion in terms of police/community relations. The DOJ was fiercely critical of the track record of police oversight agencies, be they internal department agencies or the city’s review authority.