What a clearance is, and what it is not

The FBI publishes how many reported offenses police agencies closed. It is the closest thing in this data to a measure of whether anything happened after a crime was reported, and it is routinely read as something it is not.

An offense is cleared by arrest when three conditions are met: at least one person has been arrested, charged with the offense, and turned over to a court for prosecution. That is where the record ends. It carries no information about whether the case was tried, or won, or dropped. On our reading that makes a clearance rate a measure of cases closed, not of cases that ended in a conviction — the FBI does not put it that way itself, and we draw the inference rather than attributing it.

An offense can also be cleared by exceptional means, where the offender is identified and located but something outside the agency's control prevents an arrest.

The rates moved in both directions

Offense	1990	2025
Homicide	65.7%	66.5%
Robbery	24.7%	35.9%
Arson	14.9%	31.8%
Rape	51.4%	27.8%
Motor vehicle theft	14.5%	10.5%

Robbery and arson are cleared far more often than they were. Rape and motor vehicle theft are cleared far less often. Homicide is close to where it started. There is no single direction here, which is worth saying because "clearance rates are falling" is the usual summary and it is not what the data shows.

Homicide dipped and came back

Homicide is the offense cleared most often. It was 65.7% in 1990 and 66.5% in 2025 — but it did not stay level in between. In 2020 agencies cleared 51.7% of the 21,588 homicides reported to them. By 2025 both numbers had moved — 14,380 offenses reported, and the share cleared back above where it was in 1990.

Read that pair together rather than separately. A clearance share rises when clearances rise, and it also rises when offenses fall. Both happened here, and this data cannot apportion the change between them.

The rape series, and a trap in it

Rape is the largest fall in the table, from 51.4% to 27.8%. The obvious explanation is that the FBI revised its definition of rape in 2013 — widening it, so more offenses entered the count.

The data does not support that explanation. Across the change the count did step up, from 83,439 offenses in 2012 to 108,388 in 2014 — but the share cleared barely moved, from 37.1% to 36.6%. The definition change is plainly visible in one series and not in the other. Three years before the revision, in 2010 the share cleared had already fallen to 37.1%.

So the fall is long and predates the definition change. What caused it is not something this data can answer.

What these figures cannot tell you

A clearance is recorded by the agency that closed the case, under its own reading of the three conditions. A clearance counted in one year may close an offense reported in an earlier one, so the numerator and the denominator are not always about the same offenses. And every figure here is a share of offenses reported to police: the offenses never reported are absent from both halves of the fraction.

Property offenses are cleared least often — burglary at 17.4% and motor vehicle theft at 10.5% in 2025. Nothing here says why, and the comparison between a violent offense and a property offense is not a comparison of how hard agencies tried.