According to the FBI the national "clearance" rate (clearance meaning: solved or arrested or warrant issued or death by offender or no witness cooperation) was once at 90% for all murders in 1965, and has for the most part been in steady decline since then, so that at the present time it is around 64% with an incredibly wide diversity depending upon the city or State that the murder was committed in. For instance, according to anepigone.blogspot.com, States such as Idaho, Wyoming, and North Dakota all have murder clearance rates of over 95 percent, whereas the District of Columbia, and Illinois have murder clearance rates of fewer than 50 percent. In fact, Chicago, according to dnainfo.com, states that: "... gunmen who shot and wounded people escaped charges 94 percent of the time," with an overall anemic murder clearance rate of "…. 26 percent."
All of the above signifies, that despite the fact that police budgets have never been bigger in aggregate, and even though we have DNA analysis, sophisticated forensics, and so forth, with all of these tools never being more readily available than they are today, that somehow police agencies in many communities, can't seem to solve a staggering amount of murder cases, to which eventually, these cases become "cold cases". If you're thinking that perhaps policemen aren't doing all that well with murders, but they are doing very well in solving forcible rapes, robberies, larcenies, burglaries, and motor vehicle theft, you would be wrong, as each of these crime categories are all cleared at less than 50%. This might well lead you to the somewhat disturbing thought that perhaps our police departments are either not very competent or are deliberately selective in their pursuit of crimes or both.
One of the most basic problems that police forces appear to have in the present day, is that they do not often know their communities, do not know the people that make up these communities, and often do not have reliable contacts within those communities. In addition, if police are perceived more often by certain members of communities as a threat, rather than being seen as servants of the community, meant to "protect and serve", than it isn't any wonder that police are nearly completely out of step and sync with their communities, and those people living in them, recognize this, and subsequently have more to fear from criminal elements, with no apparent safe sanctuary to turn to.
So too there is a question of personnel resources within police departments in regards to where and how their monies are spent. If, for instance, a given police department has too few homicide investigators, who are overworked, and undersupplied in the sense of tools, resources, and management, than it isn't any wonder that they cannot resolve and will not resolve numerous murder cases. While one quick answer might be that we need more police officers, or higher police budgets, throwing more money or personnel at a given issue does not necessarily resolve it.
The fact of the matter is for police to do a better job in clearing murder rates, than the police are going to have to do a better job of building bridges and connections to communities, because certainly as the way things stand today, it isn't working acceptably well in many selected communities. The bottom line is that the victims and the families of such, deserve much better, and the perpetrators of these crimes, deserve much worse, and the police can either be a material part of an improving resolution, or we will continue to see as reported by npr.org as written in January of 2014, that in NYC, 86 percentof homicides involving a white victim were solved, whereas just 45 percent with a black victim were solved, indicating that when it comes to solving homicides, that clearly black lives do not matter.