The percentage of homicides that remained unsolved was sitting barely above 50% last I checked. That number goes up and down a bit but has overall been getting higher over time (worse) since the 1960s.
Your chances of getting away with being a serial killer have never been better. Especially if you target a poor urbanized area and/or minorities.
Could well be, I’m sure there were lots of poisonings and whatnot that earlier forensic science misattributed to natural causes.
But it could also be that murderers are getting more savvy too. There have been so many CSI-style shows, police procedurals, and so forth that it doesn’t take a great genius to know how to make it a lot harder for police to identify you. Like, if you made an untraceable “ghost gun” to shoot someone with, don’t carry it around in your backpack for days after shooting the guy. Sheesh, basic stuff.
They blame a lot of it on the shift to gang violence and detectives having less time allocated for crimes of that nature. Supposedly forensics only comes into play at all in 10-15% of cases. Hard to decode everything as someone not in that world though.
The percentage of homicides that remained unsolved was sitting barely above 50% last I checked. That number goes up and down a bit but has overall been getting higher over time (worse) since the 1960s.
Your chances of getting away with being a serial killer have never been better. Especially if you target a poor urbanized area and/or minorities.
I’d guess that trend is more homicides being caught and recorded as such, even if they remain unsolved.
Could well be, I’m sure there were lots of poisonings and whatnot that earlier forensic science misattributed to natural causes.
But it could also be that murderers are getting more savvy too. There have been so many CSI-style shows, police procedurals, and so forth that it doesn’t take a great genius to know how to make it a lot harder for police to identify you. Like, if you made an untraceable “ghost gun” to shoot someone with, don’t carry it around in your backpack for days after shooting the guy. Sheesh, basic stuff.
They blame a lot of it on the shift to gang violence and detectives having less time allocated for crimes of that nature. Supposedly forensics only comes into play at all in 10-15% of cases. Hard to decode everything as someone not in that world though.