Clearing homicides

• Date: 01 August 2019
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/1745-9133.12449
• Published date: 01 August 2019

DOI: 10.1111/1745-9133.12449

RESEARCH ARTICLE

CLEARING HOMICIDES

Clearing homicides

Role of organizational, case, and investigative dimensions

Charles F. Wellford1Cynthia Lum2Thomas Scott1

Heather Vovak2J. Amber Scherer2

1University of Maryland—College Park

2George Mason University

Correspondence

CharlesF. Wellford,University of Maryland—

CollegePark, 2220 LeFrak Hall, College Park,

MD20742-8235.

Email:wellford@umd.edu

Thisar ticle is based on worksuppor ted bythe

Lauraand John Ar nold Foundation (LJAF).

Wethank them for the support and note that

LJAFis not responsible for any of the content or

conclusionsherein.

Research Summary: Since the RAND Corporation stud-

ies on investigations were published, there has been a

widely held belief among scholars that police agencies and

investigative effort matter little to solving crimes. A few

researchers have recently challenged this belief, however,

producing results that show that investigative effort does

play a role in clearing crimes. In this study, we replicate

the methodological approach of the RAND studies and use

multiagency, multimethod, detailed case files, as well as

organizational analysis, to examine the association among

investigative effort, case features, organizational factors,

and the clearance of homicide cases. The results show that

variation between the homicide clearances in agencies can

be explained by case attributes, investigativepractices, and

organizational differences. Future researchshould be aimed

at building on these results using a similar design with a

larger number of agencies.

Policy Implications: An agency’s ability to clear homi-

cides is a function of the resources it applies to conduct

investigations and how it organizes its effort. Agencies

seeking to increase their ability to clear homicides should

focus on increasing investigative efforts for cases (i.e.,

thoroughness of the initial investigative response) and

Criminology & Public Policy. 2019;18:553–600. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/capp © 2019 American Society of Criminology 553

554 WELLFORD ET AL.

prioritize oversight, management, and evaluation of inves-

tigation work. The results of our study show that providing

justice to the family, friends, and communities of homicide

victims is an achievable goal for law enforcement agencies

when they attend to investigative efforts.

KEYWORDS

evidence-based policing, homicide clearances, investigations, role of

police

In 1975, Greenwood, Petersilia, Chaiken, and colleagues, in a series of reports for the RAND Corpo-

ration (see Chaiken, 1975; Chaiken, Greenwood, & Petersilia, 1977; Greenwood & Petersilia, 1975;

Greenwood et al., 1975), came to a surprising conclusion about law enforcement criminal investiga-

tions. After examining investigative practices in multiple agencies, they concluded that investigators

spent only a small amount of time on activities related to solving crimes. Most of their efforts were

focused on postarrest case processing. Often these activities were not helpful to the prosecution of those

crimes. Many crimes were never investigated, and those that were had been solved quickly as a result

of circumstances about the case or because of efforts of uniformed patrol officers. They also found that

evidence collected at crime scenes only helps to solve crimes when that evidence is processed well.

Greenwood and colleagues asserted that “arrest and clearance rates reflect activities of patrol officers

and members of the public more than they reflect activities of investigators” (1975, p. 192). In the

end, they concluded that there is “enough information about the effectiveness of each [investigative]

function to begin asking whether the function should be performed at all and, if so, who should do

it” (Chaiken et al., 1977, p. 209). Even though they acknowledged that their research findings led to

the implication that resources should be shifted away from investigative units to other units, they also

advocated for more evaluationof t heir recommendations beforesuch a fundamental change in policing

was undertaken.

For many years, the conclusions from the RAND research remained widely believed (see Bayley,

1994; see also discussion by Eck, 1992). Although Eck (1983) presented more optimistic findings of

the role investigations could playin case clearance, the belief t hat investigations did not matter as much

as other factors in case clearance persisted among the research community.This was certainly the case

with homicides investigations, and studies on homicide clearance since the RAND report have been

focused more on crime-related factors and have generally ignored the role of investigative effort.

At the same time, interest about homicides and what police can do about them has grown. As the

most serious crime, the public often judges the performance of the police by the resolution of homicide

cases. There has been increasing public concern about the dramatic declines in recent years in homicide

clearance in cities such as Baltimore, Chicago, and New Orleans (see Madhani, 2018; Valcourt,2015).

The notable and steady decline in homicide clearances since 1970 and the popular press coverage of

the problem of low clearances and its concentration in economically disadvantaged communities (see

Leovy, 2015; The Murder Accountability Project1) has resulted in a renewed focus by policy makers

on what can be done to improve homicide clearance rates.

In a small body of research that has emerged since the RAND research was published, scholars have

challenged the notion that investigators (and police agencies more generally) do not matter in solving

crimes. In this article, we review the research on criminal investigations—focusing specifically on

WELLFORD ET AL.555

homicide investigations—to assess the role that investigators play in solving homicides. Unfortunately,

in much of the existing research, scholars failed to meet the holistic approach set forth by Chaiken

et al. (1977) who devised what is still today the most complete conceptual design to test what factors,

both police and nonpolice related, contribute to clearing a crime. They observed that to understand

the role of police in crime clearances, researchers needed to study the investigative activities of the

police directly. That is, researchers needed access to the investigative files to understand aspects of

the crime itself (i.e., participants and modus operandi) and to determine what investigative effort was

undertaken. Researchers also needed to understand that investigations occurred within organizations

that could influence how they are conducted (a point also made by Eck, 1983, 1992). In sum, all three

sources of information—investigativeactions, organizational context, and aspects of the crime itself—

were needed to understand why any given crime would be resolved and cleared. Estimating such a

model also requires examining multiple organizations selected by variations in their clearance rates.

In this article, we analyze homicide clearances within the holistic conceptual model developed by

Greenwood et al. (1975) by analyzing specific clearance patterns across case files nested in differ-

ent agencies, taking into account information about the case, investigative effort, and organizational

context.

1LITERATURE REVIEW

We begin by reviewing 46 research studies (shown in Table 1) in which aspects of homicide cases or

agencies and their contributions to homicide clearances were examined. Table 1 shows information

from each of these studies, including the unit of analysis, how the sample and agency were chosen,

and the dependent variable used. We also recorded whether the authors collected information about

the three types of factors that might influence case clearances—crime event information, investigative

effort, and organizational context—and whether the analysis specifically showed that investigative or

agency factors mattered in the clearance of homicides.2

After a review of the literature on criminal investigations, we found that in none of the research

projects was the full conceptual model envisioned by Greenwoodand colleagues (1975) in t he RAND

studies for homicide examined. In other words, case-level information about homicides, the investiga-

tive effort from those cases, and organizational data for multiple agencies represented by those cases

has not been linked in any of these studies to determine how aspects of the crime, investigative effort,

and agency contextual factors collectivelymatter in homicide clearance. Without a full model of clear-

ance that reflects Greenwood et al.’s initial call for research, it is hard to assert with any degree of

confidence that investigative efforts do not matter to case clearance.

There are many reasons for this current state of research. Perhaps the main reason for the dearth of

studies in which investigative effort on case clearance is examined is that a large proportion—almost

half (21 studies)—of studies on homicide clearance has not been focused on investigative effort at all

(as indicated by “Not Measured” in the last column of Table 1). Instead, many researchers have used

a more limited model of homicide clearance in which the role that aspects of the crime itself play

in homicide case clearance is primarily explored (this could be the result of persistent beliefs about

the nature of homicide clearances, as discussed earlier). Almost all of these were studies in which

electronic data sets of homicide cases were employed rather than detailed case files (except Regoeczi

& Jarvis, 2011). The focus of these studies was primarily on specific aspects of the crime, such as where

the homicide occurred, the circumstances or motives of the crime, or the characteristics of the people