One of the most disturbing stories in recent weeks — besides all of the terrible things that are expected to happen to the country’s safety net after passage of the federal budget megabill — is how almost half of murderers get away with their killings.
According to a July 6 story in The New York Times, “Most crimes go unsolved, emboldening criminals and potentially leading to more violence.” In 2023, just 58% of more than 18,000 murders in the United States were solved or an arrest was made, according to FBI data in the story.
“A murderer’s chance of getting caught within a year essentially comes down to a coin flip,” the story noted. “For other crimes, clearance rates are even lower. Only 8% of car thefts result in an arrest.”
In other first-world countries, such as Australia or Great Britain, clearance rates are often 70% or more — up to 90% in some places.
Fortunately, in this instance, South Carolina is more like these other countries — perhaps because we’re more rural or smaller or because communities are knit together more closely. According to the Murder Accountability Project, South Carolina authorities closed 77.2% of murder cases between 1965 and 2013. That number dropped in recent years — 72% in 2023 and 62% the year before — but the Palmetto State outstrips national murder clearance rates routinely.
The same can be said for two area counties — Berkeley and Dorchester. While they have few murders comparatively, they solve cases. In 2023, Berkeley County authorities made arrests or closed 19 cases in 23 murders, while Dorchester County law enforcement officers closed nine of 11 murder cases.
Charleston County, which has a 73.3% clearance rate since 1965, has seen lower clearance rates in recent years as growth exploded. In 2023, police cleared 39 cases in 71 murders (54.9%) and 24 cases in 48 murders the year before.
Interestingly, while South Carolina authorities are above average in clearing murder cases, the state isn’t too good in preventing murders. The Palmetto State has the nation’s seventh highest murder rate — 9 killings per 100,000 people. That’s two to three times higher than states like California, Florida and New York, according to data from Statista.com.
So while we apparently do a pretty good job of figuring out who killed whom, we still have a ways to go in preventing someone from killing someone else.
Experts say ways to curb killings include investing more in police resources to add investigators. Why? Because if people know they’re going to get caught, they might not do the crime and get the time. It wouldn’t hurt, either, if there were better control of guns — or bullet — so that it wasn’t so easy to pick up a weapon when miffed. (Those countries that have good clearance rates often have tough laws on getting guns.)
Others point to increased use of cameras and technology to generate more information for authorities to do their jobs. But those tools also can be perceived as overly intrusive in a society that values privacy.
Bottom line: Let’s try to bring down murder rates by investing more in police resources to grow how many murderers are jailed and also wisely spend more on technology to aid investigations to get the bad guys.
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