Huntsville Police Department vehicle
While police departments across the country struggle to close homicide cases and the national clear rate for cases is at an all-time low, Huntsville is bucking the national trend.
According to FBI crime data, barely half of murder cases in the United States were solved in 2020, the last data available.
Currently, the national homicide clearance rate is hovering around 50%, as first reported by the Marshall Project.
Huntsville Police officials said there’s a reason their city’s open homicide cases are dropping, while elsewhere, like Birmingham, detectives are overwhelmed.
“In a city like Huntsville, where the economy is doing very well, people are happy,” said Huntsville Police Deputy Chief Dewayne McCarver. “We have lots of good things going on, and people can find a job that they need. It is going to naturally bring the crime rate down, and if the crime rate is lower, we then have the resources to work on every single crime.”
McCarver said when other cities were experiencing an increase in crime during the first year of the pandemic, Huntsville saw a decrease. Detectives cleared all homicide cases in 2021 and said they are on track to do the same in 2022.
That review of the FBI report shows in the mid-1960s, more than 90% of murders were solved, usually resulting in an arrest.
By 1990, the percentage fell to about 80%. Then, as homicide cases surged elsewhere in 2020, the national clearance rate dropped to about 50% for the first time ever.
Huntsville police credit the public’s willingness to work with them, providing tips and helping them close these cases. And with the extra time provided by a lack of new homicides, those detectives are able to begin working alongside the cold case squad.
“We have investigators that are assigned to work cold cases specifically, but now the other members of the unit are working with them on some of those older cases,” McCarver said. “Not only do we have 100% clearance rate for 2021, but we cleared almost all of our cases in 2020, so we’re having to go back all very far to take a deeper dive into a lot of older cases. And again, we have new technology, more opportunities to use some of the DNA laboratories out there.”
The Madison County Sheriff’s Office said in 2021 their department saw about 83% of cases cleared, and just one case remains unsolved from last year.
