San Jose has achieved a 100% homicide clearance rate, prompting discussion about what this figure means for public safety and policing. Jillian Snider, a former NYPD officer who is now a Resident Senior Fellow at the R Street Institute in Washington, D.C., and a lecturer at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, provided insight into how such rates should be interpreted.
“I urge people to not think of clearance rates as the … definition of good policing, but it is one of our main metrics in which we quantifiably measure police,” Snider said. “But when you’re in a community that has relatively lower rates of violent crime than the national average, that neighborhood itself will have a higher level of collective efficacy. The neighborhood cares about itself.”
Snider recently published research analyzing case clearances across U.S. police agencies, focusing on challenges that can affect homicide investigations. She identified issues such as lack of community cooperation and insufficient evidence as major obstacles to solving cases. According to Snider, San Jose appears to avoid some of these problems due to stronger relationships between police and residents.
“If you don’t have willing participation, you don’t have enough evidence or corroboration to effect an arrest. And that’s one of the biggest issues that you see in metropolitan areas that are seeing horrible clearance rates because no one wants to talk to police because they don’t trust them,” Snider said. “You have a big difference in the relationship between the police and the community in San Jose than you do in other jurisdictions where there’s more contention…”
Another factor influencing San Jose’s high clearance rate is its manageable number of homicide cases compared with other cities of similar size. As Snider noted, “it’s easier to close 100% of your cases when you don’t have that many cases to begin with…”
Snider emphasized that while clearance rates are often seen as indicators of effective policing, they do not tell the whole story about outcomes for suspects or overall public safety.
“They hear ‘case cleared or ‘case closed,’ and they assume the bad guy got arrested, the prosecutor got it, the judge found them guilty, and they’re going to prison for the rest of their lives,” she said. “In reality, you know that of all arrests made, barely around 10% of them actually see trial. Most of them are pled out way earlier. Homicides, of course, are a little different than your standard crime and those obviously take a lot longer … People just need to understand that 100% clearance does not mean 100% guilty verdicts in court.”
