Michael Tae Sweeney: ya weirdly gets spun as like "the first 48 hours are critical!" vs like "they solve the obvious murders right away and never solve the hard ones"

maybe a hot take but cops in the united states have never been good at "solving murders" - they solve the ones that have obvious culprits and are helpless in the cases that don't - and the clearance rate is mostly a function of the composition of homicides between those two categories.

it seems unfortunate that murders are now getting solved at record-low rates in the US www.npr.org/2023/04/29/1...

More people are getting away with murder. Unsolved killings reach a record highwww.npr.org U.S. murder clearance or solve rates have hit an all-time low. Experts say mutual mistrust between police and some communities is creating a vicious cycle where unsolved killings breed more mistrust.

the abusive boyfriend who kills his girlfriend is gonna get solved every single time, the armed robber who shoots the liquor store clerk is gonna get solved most of the time and the drug dealer who got killed by another drug dealer is basically never gonna get solved.

Yep. Vast majority of murders that are solved are solved and arrest of suspect made within 24 hours. Because most people, with the exceptions of robbery and hate crimes, are killed by someone close to them and it becomes obvious fast.

ya weirdly gets spun as like "the first 48 hours are critical!" vs like "they solve the obvious murders right away and never solve the hard ones"

Exactly.

But also people’s memories fade over time, or memories come back. Or people think of something that they thought was irrelevant before but now realize it may not be.

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