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A retired NYPD homicide detective told Fox News Digital that significant cultural and policy shifts in 2020, including bail reform and George Floyd backlash, are contributing to low homicide case clearance rates across the United States.
According to the Murder Accountability Project, which tracks unsolved homicides, the homicide case clearances – that is, the percentage of homicides where a perpetrator is identified, arrested and referred for prosecution – plummeted to an all-time low of 52.3% in 2022. Clearance rates were above 60% before 2020, according to the organization, which cites data from the FBI.
“So there was a seismic change in law enforcement in 2020,” Teresa Leto told Fox News Digital.
NYPD officers respond to the scene of a shooting that left multiple people injured in the Flatbush neighborhood of the Brooklyn borough on April 6, 2021, in New York City. (Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)
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Leto is a 30-year NYPD veteran who tackled gang crime and worked as a homicide detective, among other roles.
The first 2020 event that altered the way streets are policed, and helped cause a decline in homicide clearance rates, was the COVID-19 pandemic, according to Leto.
“So the courts then became remote. Everything slowed down within the courts,” she said. “A lot of trials didn’t take place. People were let out of jail for safety reasons. Many officers and support staff got sick. There was a high rate of people being out sick. There was a decrease in people in the squads, in detective squads to investigate crimes. So that really affected everything.”
In March of that year, she said, the situation spiraled even further out of control after George Floyd was killed by Minneapolis police, driving an anti-police sentiment that halted recruiting and caused officers to retire early, among other consequences.
Protesters in Austin, Texas on June 5, 2020, following the death of George Floyd. (Lola Gomez/Austin American-Statesman via AP, File)
“There was a lot of protests going on,” Leto said. “To deal with the protests, they took a lot of the investigators, the detectives out of the squads, out of, like investigating terrorism, investigating homicides and rapes and murders to deal with the unrest in the streets throughout the United States.”
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According to Leto, that led to a dramatic decline in arrests.
“There was an issue of recruiting in most of the police departments,” she said. “Because of the George Floyd … backlash, people didn’t want to join the police department. So people didn’t want to join the police department, and then you had less people coming in and less people going into a detective unit.”
Consequently, existing detectives began working more overtime. In what Leto described as an “overtime bubble,” some detectives worked so much that they were forced to retire, further depleting detective units.
A George Floyd mural in Minneapolis, Minnesota. (AP)
“So you had a recruitment issue, you had retention issue. So now, like, if you’re looking at New York City, which I know about, you have a lot of detective squads that are really low in manpower,” she said. “So they doubled their caseload.”
Born out of the Floyd fallout were new social justice initiatives like “bail reform,” which made matters worse.
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“They made it easier for people to get out of jail without posting bail, because a lot of people didn’t afford bail,” Leto said. “And they deemed certain crimes as nonviolent. So, for example, [third-degree robbery], which is forcibly taking property from a person, which is violent, that’s deemed as a nonviolent crime.”
When violent offenders are let out on bail, they go right back to committing crimes, possibly even escalating their levels of violence.
“So, that all added to the fact that less cases are being handled, and less cases are being cleared,” Leto said.
Washington Metropolitan Police officers investigate a shooting at the Potomac Avenue Metro Station in Southeast Washington, Wednesday, Feb. 1, 2023. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta)
By their very nature, homicides also require more investigative work than they did several years ago, Leto explained.
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With security cameras now ubiquitous on both public and on private property, and with cellphone data becoming crucial to prosecutions, it simply takes more time for detectives to gather relevant evidence and present that evidence for prosecution.
“So, even if you know in your heart … who the suspect is, you have to have the evidence, you have to have DNA evidence, you have to have technology, you have to have video, you have to have cellphone data to be able to solve it,” Leto said.