QUESTIONING US ARREST STATISTICS

SAND LAKE, N.Y. -- Policing in the United States has changed a lot
during the past 50 years. Higher education and training requirements
have led to greater police professionalism, and most departments'
ranks have benefited from huge increases of personnel, stunning
technological advancements, forensics breakthroughs, and affirmative
action policies that presumably have led to a more representative
workforce sensitive to civil rights. Policing's academic side has
also prospered from decades of ample government research grants.

Many observers credit the police because reported crime in the nation
has generally been going down for nearly a decade. Reported homicides
in New York City and other jurisdictions recently hit their lowest
level in more than 40 years.

But discussions of police performance often fail to note another
important but overlooked trend, apparently unrelated to the falling
crime rate: Federal statistics reveal that the nation's "clearance
rate" - the percentage of cases for which police arrest or identify a
suspect - has fallen dramatically. And this shift is fraught with implications.

The arrest clearance rate for reported homicides recently dropped to
about 60 percent compared with about 90 percent 50 years ago. This
means that a murderer today has about a 40 percent chance of avoiding
arrest compared with less than 10 percent in 1950. The record for
other FBI Index Crimes is even more dismal: The clearance rates have
sunk to 42 percent for forcible rape, 26 percent for robbery, and 13
percent for burglary and motor vehicle theft, all way down from earlier eras.

In Boston, the homicide clearance rate plummeted to only 28 percent
in 2004 - a shocking development for a city that gained lavish praise
for crime reductions in the 1990s.

Judging a police department or the criminal justice system as a whole
based simply on arrest statistics wouldn't be wise, for the police
can and do fulfill many crucial functions in our society, such as
maintaining public order and helping to protect citizens from
terrorist attack. But ignoring measures of how the police deal with
reported serious crime isn't smart either.

It's not that America's cops haven't been making arrests - in fact,
their total annual arrests jumped from 3.3 million in the nation in
1960 to 14 million in 2004, a staggering number that helps to explain
why the United States imprisons more of its citizens than any other
country in the world.

So, if reported crime has been going down and arrests have gone up,
what accounts for the plummeting arrest clearance rates for murder,
robbery, rape, burglary, larceny, and motor vehicle theft?

Part of the answer must involve drug law enforcement - victimless
offenses that aren't reported to the police or included as FBI Index
Crimes. Instead of arresting suspects for burglaries and other
serious reported crimes, cops today spend much of their energy going
after illegal drugs. Their arrest rate for drug possession
(especially marijuana) has shot up more than 500 times from what it
was in 1965.

And what are some possible implications of this shift?

For one thing, it may give criminals the impression they can get away
with nondrug related crimes.

For another, it may lessen public support for the police. Polls show
those who live in "high crime" neighborhoods are generally the most
dissatisfied with the police. Maybe this is because they have
reported to the police that they have been victimized by robbery and
other serious crimes, then witnessed that the police are not
arresting anyone for it but are instead aggressively waging a "war on
drugs" in the community.

Nevertheless, the matter of falling arrest clearance rates hasn't
received much scrutiny from the police or the public.

Asked why the arrest clearance rate has dropped so much, one leading
police scholar, Professor David Bayley of the State University of New
York at Albany, said, "I haven't a clue. I've been involved in the
field for 40 years and best as I can tell, nobody has even raised
this stuff. Hearing about it now is like being hit by a bus."

One interpretation might be that the changing statistics actually
indicate that today's police are acting more judiciously, for as one
former New York Police Department homicide detective, now a private
investigator, put it, "Just because cops were more likely to arrest
somebody in the old days than they are today doesn't mean they didn't
make a lot of mistakes back then, by beating false confessions out of
innocent people and such."

Whatever the reasons, this significant trend in the police response
to reported crime should prompt some serious discussion about
contemporary law enforcement's priorities and effectiveness.