“Things are getting so bad out there financially that the mayors are wondering, ‘Does it make sense for me to spend my resources on solving crimes against the dead when I’ve got the living who need help, too?’ ” Why not just grab the easy cases—the cases with witnesses, ballistics, and DNA—and put the hard ones on the back burner?
The answer, at least intuitively, would seem to be that at least some of these murderers will kill again. But if that were true, it ought to affect the murder rate. Sure enough, using his database, Hargrove has confirmed that this is the case. Pulling up information from 218 metropolitan jurisdictions in the 2014 Uniform Crime Report, he found that in the places with poor clearance rates, the homicide rate was almost double that of places where the clearance rate was better—from 9.6 homicides to 17.9 per 100,000 people.
“It makes perfect sense,” Hargrove says. “If you leave the killers to walk the street, why wouldn’t that cause more killings? The answer is, it does.”