{"id":15850,"date":"2015-10-23T12:56:36","date_gmt":"2015-10-23T16:56:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=15850"},"modified":"2015-10-23T13:41:28","modified_gmt":"2015-10-23T17:41:28","slug":"does-the-falling-homicide-clearance-rate-in-big-cities-promotes-violence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=15850","title":{"rendered":"does the falling homicide clearance rate in big cities promotes violence?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>At Tufts on Wednesday, <a href=\"http:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=15774\">Danielle Allen<\/a> made the following argument: the war on drugs lowers the chance that the police will solve any given murder by flooding a\u00a0city with drug-related homicides. Once the homicide closure rate falls, there is a low chance that anyone who commits a murder will be caught. Under those circumstances, if you think someone might shoot you, you &#8220;shoot first,&#8221; as Allen said.<\/p>\n<p>Right on cue, the New York Times <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2015\/10\/21\/us\/a-fragile-baltimore-struggles-to-heal-itself.html\">reports<\/a> from Baltimore: &#8220;as more people are being killed here, fewer killers are being caught. The homicide &#8216;clearance rate,&#8217; the percentage of killings solved by the police, was 45.5 percent last year; today it is 32.8 percent, the police said. Nationally, the rate was 64 percent in 2013, the most recent year for which the Justice Department has statistics.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>I also found\u00a0this trend line for Chicago:<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/crimeresearch.org\/2014\/07\/discussion-of-chicagos-crime-problems-ignore-what-rahm-emanuel-has-done-to-the-police-department\/\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-15874\" src=\"http:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/images\/Homicide-Clearance-Rate-Chicago-2.png\" alt=\"Homicide-Clearance-Rate-Chicago-2\" width=\"643\" height=\"385\" srcset=\"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/images\/Homicide-Clearance-Rate-Chicago-2.png 643w, https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/images\/Homicide-Clearance-Rate-Chicago-2-300x180.png 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 643px) 100vw, 643px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>These are big declines. In 1992, if you committed homicide in Chicago, the odds were you were going to be prosecuted. In 2012-14, the odds\u00a0were you would get away with it. That could plausibly change violence rates. If the police can&#8217;t protect you against murder, you may feel you have to do it\u00a0yourself.<\/p>\n<p>Two caveats, however. First, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.governing.com\/topics\/public-justice-safety\/gov-murder-clearance-rates-misleading.html\">clearance rates are imperfect statistics<\/a>, subject to being gamed by police departments. Second, even while homicide clearance rates were falling in Chicago, <a href=\"https:\/\/commons.wikimedia.org\/wiki\/File:Homicide_Rate_in_Chicago.png\">so were homicide rates<\/a>. So that is not really evidence of a vicious cycle of declining clearance rate leading\u00a0to growth in violence.<\/p>\n<p>But despite those two caveats, there certainly seems to be a vicious cycle in the last few years in Baltimore and perhaps other big cities, and that is a really serious concern.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>At Tufts on Wednesday, Danielle Allen made the following argument: the war on drugs lowers the chance that the police will solve any given murder by flooding a\u00a0city with drug-related homicides. Once the homicide closure rate falls, there is a low chance that anyone who commits a murder will be caught. Under those circumstances, if [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":15874,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15850","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15850","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15850"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15850\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15876,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15850\/revisions\/15876"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/15874"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15850"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15850"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15850"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}