NEW YORK — A new research brief from the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation finds that tens of thousands of shootings in the United States go unsolved each year, raising concerns about public safety and calling for urgent reforms to police investigative practices.
The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation (HFG) released a new research brief finding that approximately 75,000 people in the United States were shot by a criminal assailant in 2024, yet police failed to arrest the shooter in almost two-thirds of those shootings, calling for urgent reforms to how law enforcement investigates gun violence.
The brief, titled Unsolved Shootings: Why and How to Boost Clearance Rates, was written by Philip J. Cook, ITT/Sanford Professor Emeritus of Public Policy and professor emeritus of economics at Duke University, according to the HFG Foundation.
“Effective police investigation of violent crime is an important service to victims and the larger community,” Cook writes in the brief.
“Too often, learned discussions of gun-violence prevention simply ignore the role of police investigation or minimize it,” he adds.
The report underscores the racial dimensions of the crisis. In 2023, more than half — 58 percent — of gun homicide victims were Black, and adjusted for population, the Black victimization rate was 8.4 times as high as for white people, the HFG Foundation reported.
For young men, the disparity was even starker — Black people made up fully two-thirds of victims ages 15 to 29, according to the HFG Foundation.
Cook cites author and journalist Jill Leovy’s assertion in her book Ghettoside that “the system’s failure to catch killers effectively made black lives cheap,” as outlined in the brief.
The report identifies strategies for solving a larger share of reported shootings, including upgrading police investigation capacity, building better relationships with victims and improving coordination between police and prosecutors, the HFG Foundation reported.
Cook places particular emphasis on nonfatal shootings — a category of gun violence that has historically received far less investigative attention than homicides, according to the HFG Foundation.
In 2024, fatal shootings had a 50 percent higher arrest rate than nonfatal shootings, the brief states.
The report also traces the long decline in homicide clearance rates. The FBI’s homicide clearance rate stood at more than 90 percent in the early 1960s, dropping steadily through the 1970s and 1980s before plateauing around 60 percent in the 1990s, according to the HFG Foundation.
It dropped further — from 61 percent in 2014 to 50 percent in 2021 during the COVID-19 surge and the period following George Floyd’s murder — before rebounding to 60 percent by 2024, with another increase projected for 2025, the brief notes.
“With this brief, Cook, a preeminent scholar on the role of guns in American violence, argues that identifying and prosecuting shooters is an indispensable approach to crime prevention and that nonfatal shootings should be investigated as vigorously as fatal ones,” said HFG Foundation Director of Research Joel Wallman, as quoted by the HFG Foundation.
The broader picture remains troubling. Nationally, 56 percent of violent crimes known to law enforcement went unsolved in 2024, according to the CSG Justice Center.
Rape was the violent crime least frequently solved in 2024, with 73 percent of incidents reported to police going unsolved, the CSG Justice Center reported.
Homicide clearance rates did see modest improvement — the FBI estimated that 61.4 percent of homicides in 2024 were cleared through arrest or special circumstances, according to the Murder Accountability Project.
That figure built on the 57.8 percent rate in 2023, and both represent welcomed improvements over the 52.3 percent clearance rate in 2022 — the lowest national clearance rate ever reported by the FBI, the Murder Accountability Project reported.
The HFG Foundation report points to specific cities as models for reform. Cook cites criminologist Anthony Braga’s evaluation of the Boston Police Department’s investment in improving homicide clearances beginning in 2011, as outlined in the brief.
“The Boston Homicide Clearance Project provides rigorous evidence that enhanced investigative resources, improved management structures and oversight processes can increase homicide clearance rates and improve the chances that murderers are apprehended in even the most difficult cases to clear,” Braga concluded, as quoted in the brief.
Denver’s FAST program — a specialized Firearm Assault Shoot Team created in 2019 to investigate nonfatal shootings with the same rigor as homicides — is also cited as a model for other departments, the HFG Foundation reported.
Cities that have followed similar approaches have seen measurable results, with Boston increasing its homicide clearance rate by 19 percentage points and Denver increasing its nonfatal shooting clearance rate from 39 percent to 65 percent in the first seven months after establishing its specialized unit, according to the Center for American Progress.
“Selling at-risk youths on abstaining from gun violence is always going to be more difficult if shooting someone is unlikely to result in arrest and conviction,” Cook writes in the brief.
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The “urgent reform” needed has nothing to do with law enforcement. They’re in a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” scenario in these areas.
That’s also the reason that the housing prices are relatively cheap in these areas, there’s “food deserts”, and the reason that the school systems suck. (The school district in Davis sucks for an entirely different reason.)
The “reform” that’s needed consists of the communities themselves, and no one is going to do that for them. Never have, never will.
This is also the same reason that police and teachers (and everyone else) don’t want to work in places like Oakland.