St. Louis police have failed to solve nearly 60% of homicides committed since 2017

I mean if someone murders you ANYWHERE you're SOL. Your family might get justice somewhere else though.

I get we love this narrative on reddit/lemmy that cops are just out killing everyone. But that's simply not true, being hyperbolic about it doesn't help us address the actual issue - insane violent crime rates in this country. If we had a 'normal' amount of violent crimes, how much less police interactions would people have?

We need to clean up the PD's, but lets not act like our country makes it easy to be a police officer.

For major cities in the Midwest?

Pretty middle of the road.

The reason people say "most murders are by a spouse/partner" is because those are the easiest to solve, and cops are pretty shit at solving crimes.

It's waaaaay more accurate to say "most murders who are caught killed a spouse/partner"

Hard to say since news organizations had to sue this department to get these numbers and pretty much every department is always trying to sweep dirt under the rug like that

According to the FBI, around 51% of murders in 2021 were solved. So this is just a bit lower than the federal numbers. The number doesn’t shock me, I think solving a murder is very hard and technology can only offer so much more info. Proving murder beyond a doubt is also very difficult, like OJ. We all know he killed his ex wife and her boyfriend, but prosecutors couldn’t prove he did it within the court context. An “unsolved” murder that has a solution.

Well theoretically 100% of the unsolved could be, they haven't solved them after all.

If you had to guess right now, how many would you guess? since 2017 - so we'll say over a 5 year span, what's the total?

Japan has on the order of a 99.9% conviction rate, which a number of people would say is problematic itself.

I've read that Japan police often rule things a suicide if they don't immediately think they know they can convict someone in order to keep their solve rate above 99%

Even if it's obviously a murder

Japan doesn’t have guns freely available for purchase from gun shops every couple miles do they? I live in St. Louis and drive past half a dozen gun stores and ranges on my way to work daily, I can stop in every single one of those every day and buy a gun and ammo if I so desired. 20 minutes and a couple hundred could see me easily capable of wiping groups of people off the earth, and the couple hundred dollars is easy to get because the gun stores are always conveniently placed near payday loan shops and pawn shops

I had to read that a few times before I realized you didn't mean 87.83% homicide rate.