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Comment by Jkvngt | Hacker News Reader

Police barely ever solve crimes. Murder, the most serious crime, is hardly ever solved. There is no fixing the situation with talking to police, how would you fix the system? It would take decades of action on the part of the police to regain the public’s trust. One wrong move by one cop, one time would reset that back to zero.

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That’s overstating things. Most murder cases in the US are solved. 40% aren’t, though.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/194213/crime-clearance-r...

To be fair, solving a great many murders is probably a simple matter of finding the family member with literal blood on his hands and a history of domestic abuse. It doesn't take Sherlock Holmes to figure that out.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3566383

Seems it’s only about 22% of serious crimes which are solved. Of course the beauty of these “facts” is they differ wildly.

Yeah solved with the real killer still out there.

Imagine a life insurance broker that moonlights as a serial killer offing someone's spouse soon after the policy is open. The remaining spouse is going to prison for a very long time every single time.

I can imagine that, but I'm having a harder time imagining it to be common.

just non-negligible

60% of murder cases result in someone getting arrested. So we still have to ask: a) how many of those arrests result in a conviction? b) how many of those convictions are of the right person? c) and how many murders result in murder cases?

A murder case basically starts with police opening a file saying "X has been murdered" and goes on from there. So if the death looks enough like accident or natural causes or suicide, no murder case is opened and it doesn't count as an uncleared murder.

Therefore it wouldn't surprise me if the majority of murders (51%, anyway) are unsolved.

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