Police solved 54% of murder in 2020, the lowest case clearance rate on record
“The nation’s police and sheriff’s departments were overwhelmed and understaffed in 2020 to meet the surging demand for their investigative services,” read sa report by the Murder Accountability Project, who analyzed the latest FBI data . “The challenges to law enforcement were complicated further by the COVID pandemic, by public outrage at the suffocation murder of George Floyd by former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin and by widespread demonstrations on behalf of the Black Lives Matter movement.”
The 2020 drop in case “clearance rates,” the rate of homicides that result in the arrest of the offender, was the largest single year drop since the FBI began tracking the metric in 1965. It also represented the worst case clearance rate during the same time period, falling from a high of above 90% in 1965 to the new low of 54% in 2020.