Closing more murder cases although no one was arrested pumped up the high clearance rate the Chicago Police Department has touted, a Chicago Sun-Times analysis finds. The police department cleared more murder cases in 2019 that didn’t result in an arrest than it has done in years. Faced with turmoil at the top, a new mayor and criticism that its clearance rate was lower than the national average, the department made a surprising announcement Dec. 31. Police brass boasted that the department had “cleared more murders than in any of the past 10 years.” They touted a 53 percent homicide clearance rate for 2019 — a huge turnaround after years of clearing fewer than one of every three murder investigations. They credited investments in more officers and in technology.
Of the 261 murders that the police signed off on as having been cleared last year, 152 were closed “exceptionally,” meaning no one was charged. That means there was no arrest in 58 percent of the cleared homicide investigations. The number of murder cases that were cleared that way has gone up every year since 2016. The vaunted improvement in the murder clearance rate obscures an important fact: The number of murder cases in Chicago that result in an arrest has gone down. Last year, prosecutors approved charges in 220 murder cases brought to them by police Department. That compared with 267 murder cases in 2016 in which charges were approved. Police spokesman Anthony Guglielmi says prosecutors are rejecting murder charges more frequently. Prosecutors rejected 25 percent of murder cases the Chicago police presented in 2019, compared with 14 percent in 2015. A 2017 court ruling involving DNA testing of semen in a murder investigation has sharply limited the circumstances in which prosecutors can pursue murder charges. They’re now requiring more than just DNA evidence to file a murder case.