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Comment by paulpauper | Hacker News Reader

This is why stats that purport a low clearance rate for murders in the US are misleading. Cases never expire until either someone is convicted or the perp can be presumed dead. The file is always open, someone is always investigating.

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Just this morning, there was a story on CNN about a cold case hit and run from 1989 being solved because of DNA on a joint left in the stolen car.

It wasn't even solved because detectives were actively looking at it - they received an (incorrect) tip, and decided to just check out what else was in the case, and ended up sequencing some DNA left in the vehicle. I imagine there are hundreds of thousands of such cases out there like that.

https://www.cnn.com/2024/08/25/us/charlotte-nc-cold-case-sol...

If it takes over thirty years to clear a homicide case, that’s a failure by any reasonable standard.

...or a success for a serial killer.

i mention this becaues the golden state killer was a police officer _and_ serial killer, and took advantage of the delay to kill over a great span of time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_James_DeAngelo

Almost all of these cases are being cleared because DNA got shoved into a large enough private database that practically everybody now coughs up a correlation.

This has very little to do with diligence and more with technology advancing.

And, while clearing murders is nice, wait until the equivalent RealPage gets hold of that database and starts discriminating based on your DNA.

It's only a failure if you imagine every murder can be solved.

Sometimes, there's just not enough available information to go on.

How would you solve the case if you knew there was a lady dead on the street, and then a few miles away there is an abandoned stolen car with a half smoked joint. No fingerprints.

Where do you go from there in 1989?

You’re not going to clear 100% of homicides but you should be clearing a reasonably high percentage of them within a reasonable span of time, and pointing out that sometimes you solve a 34 year old cold case is a red herring.

I doubt it would feel like a failure for the person caught and finally sentenced to years in prison after having their whole daily life upturned in a criminal trial. No matter how long they'd been free, they probably would have loved to continue enjoying their ordinary freedom, and suddenly losing it even decades after would probably have hurt much more than just a shrug of "Ah, well at least I only got caught now. cuff me gents".

What about all the other people he probably committed violence against in the decades that he was free? Would it feel like a failure to them?

Possibly it would, but criminal investigation is imperfect by default and can't just be compared to an ideal of justice done exactly right and swiftly. Instead it has to manage with the reality of its difficulty and a killer being imprisoned decades later, the families of his victims being able to confront him vs. never having known anything at all.

You can make whatever excuses you want about any individual case, but this discussion is about clearance rates, and it’s obviously preferable for a larger proportion of homicide cases to be cleared within a reasonable time span.

The moment you mandate fast clearance you get into a state where people game the system, which can have bad side effects in criminal justice. You would likely find that either the wrong person is charged more frequently or else cases are rubber stamped closed to keep number up.

Murder clearance rate in Czechia is between 93 and 100 per cent depending on the year, but it is likely easier to solve murders in a relatively small language community. Although we are part of the Schengen free movement area, which means that at least some murderers will try to escape.

Is the low clearance rate really misleading? Seem representative of reality.

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