It's gotten a lot easier to get away with murder
Though violent crime has been trending down for years, there's one crime statistic that isn't so positive: In 1965, 90 percent of murder cases were resolved by police, but today, one out of every three murders sees no arrests. As a result, there's a national backlog of more than 200,000 unsolved murders that have accumulated since 1980.
In some cities, the situation is grimmer still. In New Orleans, for example, only 15 percent of murder cases were resolved in 2012. In Detroit, that figure was just 9 percent.
Some police officers have suggested that the disproportionate diversion of department resources to drug war programs has limited officers' ability to give violent crime the attention it deserves.
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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.
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