When President Trump talks about sending the feds to Chicago to work on the city’s uniquely violent culture and apparently intractable murder problem, hopefully he won’t just unthinkingly send troops and tanks to occupy the West Side at night.
An insightful piece at Bloomberg from last week offers some hints about at least one way the feds actually could help reduce murder rates in the handful of cities where they have spiked over the last few years: Make it easier for beleaguered police departments to share and use data in finding serial killers — the ones whose killings tend to form patterns in the data, if anyone bothers to look closely. Unfortunately, many police departments don’t do this at all.
Thomas Hargrove, a retired journalist who made his living as a data guy, began putting together a database on all the unsolved killings in the U.S., and discovered that there may well be dozens of serial killers at work even now. In many cases, there are patterns in many killings that the police have failed to recognize because they aren’t necessarily inclined or well-equipped to crunch the data themselves. Part of the problem is that many police departments find themselves unable or unwilling to devote the man-hours it takes to sharing data on unsolved crimes. The sole federal attempt to facilitate this — a database called ViCAP — failed because it was voluntary.
In the 1990s the FBI created another voluntary reporting database, this one specifically for violent and sexual crimes, called the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program, or ViCAP. It never succeeded, either, primarily because it’s voluntary, making it easy for police departments to ignore. “Most law enforcement agencies don’t have a real solid understanding of what the purpose of ViCAP is,” says Gregory Cooper, who ran the program for three years. “The frustration is, I’ve got a car, but no one’s putting any gas in it.” Hargrove calls ViCAP “an experiment that was never properly funded, and most police departments never really bought into the idea.”
If Congress were to fund and assign federal law enforcement officers to do this tedious data filing and analysis on a comprehensive basis in real time, it would provide a massive service to the police and the public all over the country. Just imagine the effect that even a staff of just 100 specialists could have if their sole job was to handle this task for a group of police departments in a specific state or region. This might accomplish more than funding for extra cops or the other gimmicks that often prove popular in crime bills. It would truly advance the cause of making America safe again, and it would be something Trump could be rightly proud to sign.
One thing that cities with high crime rates have in common is that a larger share of murders go unsolved — a problem that has actually gotten worse over time, despite the advent of DNA technology and other modern crime-solving techniques. The failure to solve murders makes them more likely in two ways: First, the appearance of weakness by law enforcement creates a culture of impunity, in which would-be killers feel like they have a serious chance of getting away with it. The second is that the same killers who committed the unsolved crimes remain on the streets to keep killing.
Pulling up information from 218 metropolitan jurisdictions in the 2014 Uniform Crime Report, he found that in the places with poor clearance rates, the homicide rate was almost double that of places where the clearance rate was better—from 9.6 homicides to 17.9 per 100,000 people.
Unsurprisingly, Chicago is at the bottom of the barrel when it comes to clearing murder cases. If Trump wants to help there, there’s a smart and constitutional way to have a real impact, and it could draw bipartisan support in Congress.
