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I think another big negative here is just the fact that it shifts police org's focus towards crimes where they can "fund" themselves.

I repeat this statistic a lot, but the solved murder rate has fallen from ~90% in the 60s to ~60% in recent years. You'd think with all our new forensic technology and lower overall murder rates it would be opposite.

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That 90% figure isn't reliable given the tendency to force confessions out of "known troublemakers" that was far more rampant in the 60s.

Maybe, but I still doubt that equates to a 30% drop.

I am more a fan of the whole, increase in division between community and its police leading to lack of informants among other things, idea.

There's lots of ways to read the numbers. Total murders is about the same as the high in the 60s, ~14k, but instead of 200 million people, we have well over 300 million[1]. That's over a 33% drop in per-capita murders.

1: http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/uscrime.htm

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