ShareThisMany police departments around the nation have misreported whether they’ve solved longstanding homicide cases, raising new doubts on how capably America is combating its most serious violent crimes.
Significant flaws in the FBI's Uniform Crime Report system were uncovered in a national reporting project by Scripps Howard News Service and 23 participating newspapers and television stations. Several local police agencies promised to reform their major crime reporting as a result of the "Murder Mysteries" project.
Police nationally reported solving 91 percent of all homicides in 1965 during the earliest days of the Uniform Crime Report. But the clearance rate dropped steadily over the years, dipping to just 64 percent in 2008.
Many major police departments now report that they are clearing less than half of all homicides. But they are also making themselves look even worse than necessary by inaccurately reporting to state and federal authorities when they close homicides by arresting and charging people with the crimes.
"We have reviewed our homicide clearances for the past 10 years and found that some offenses should have been cleared that were not," said Richard Biehl, chief of police in Dayton, Ohio.
Dayton police made arrests in 80 percent of the 423 homicides committed in their jurisdiction during the 1990s. But city officials told the FBI and the Ohio Department of Public Safety that they cleared just 36 percent of the 302 homicides committed from 2000 to 2008 – one of the nation's worst declines in homicide clearance according to a study of murder records by Scripps Howard.
Biehl, in response to the study, ordered a staff review and learned the city had failed to include 24 murder arrests in addition to 109 killings Dayton reported to have cleared. That would have raised the city's clearance rate to about 44 percent.
The city has ordered reforms.
"Reporting errors were human error on our part, in some cases. In others, the cases were solved after the reporting period and beyond the 18-month window to submit an amended report that would be credited to our clearance rates," said Dayton's Lt. Patrick Welsh. "The deficiencies in those reports have been corrected and we are all on the same page for current and proper dispositions on case files."
Police officials were often startled when shown what they had reported to the FBI.
"Sixty-four other counties cannot be that far ahead of this county, I can tell you that right now!" said Kevin Rambosk, sheriff of Florida's Collier County, after learning his jurisdiction had Florida's third worst clearance rate.
But the county failed to report more than 30 arrests out of the 154 reported cold cases since 2000, dropping Collier County's clearance rate to an anemic 57 percent. After his investigation, Rambosk ordered reforms.
"Direction has been given to begin submitting clearance information in the years they occur and we will be sending a letter to (the Florida Department of Law Enforcement) to clarify past clearance information once it is compiled," Rambosk said.
He also organized a team of investigators to review all cold cases and report on the status of each case.
Serious reporting problems were found even in small police departments with a modest caseload of unsolved killings.
"We just didn't do the right paperwork," said Peter Hansen, chief of Redding, Calif., when asked why four murder arrests out of an apparent ten cold cases has not been properly reported to state and federal authorities.
The largest error rate discovered by the reporting project was at the Flint, Mich., Police Department that reported clearing 64 percent of all homicides committed during the 1990s but only 20 percent in recent years.
"I kind of think there is a problem with those numbers," admitted Flint Police Chief Alvern Lock.
Lock instructed his staff to review case files for the last three years and found that the city was making arrests in about 32 percent of their cases. "We had a problem with one of our vendors doing our crime reporting," a city clerk said.
Flint had to out-source its crime reporting services because severe budget cuts in the once-manufacturing-dominated city saw the department drop from 330 sworn officers in 1990 to about 185 today.
The Justice Department requires that local police departments must report the occurrence of crimes – but not whether they've been solved – to be eligible for federal law enforcement grants.
Independent criminologists warn that sloppy accounting of fatal crimes underscores a general failure by many police agencies to address a growing backlog of unsolved homicides.
"This should be a central concern to the public," said University of Maryland criminologist Charles Wellford. "The fact that police leaders do not pay attention to clearance rates indicates they are not considering how well they are playing their central role in crime prevention."
FBI spokesman Stephen Fischer issued a written statement "by appropriate staff" at the Criminal Justice Information Services Division in Clarksburg, W.Va., on how murder clearance reporting could have become so inaccurate in recent years.
The statement said the bureau does not audit homicide clearance reports, although it does check the accuracy of reported crime occurrences. The Scripps study found that occurrence reports are generally, but not always, more accurate than homicide clearance claims.
"The FBI relies on the good faith reporting of law enforcement agencies who voluntarily participate in the program," bureau authorities said in a prepared statement responding to the discoveries.
The statement said that the FBI's Quality Assurance Review "does not conduct audits of clearance information" but does instruct local police on the "general clearance procedures at local agencies to determine compliance to Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program guidelines."
The bureau has never conducted a study into the quality of homicide clearance data. But the FBI said there has been no decline in the quality of training it provides for state and local agencies reporting to UCR program.
"There has been no reduction in federal funding for training or in the quality or content of training provided," the statement said.
