via reason:
“It may surprise many that America’s justice system fails to find or punish offenders for the vast majority of serious crimes. Failures of justice are the norm, not the exception. Most killers get away with murder. In 2020, there were 24,576 homicides in America, and police solved just 10,115 of those—41.1%. Even worse, usually less than half of these solved cases result in a homicide conviction. Escaping punishment for rape or assault is trivially easy. Of more than 920,000 aggravated assaults annually, only 8.3% lead to a conviction. Of 463,000 rapes and sexual assaults annually, 99.5% end in no felony conviction. Every year, the justice system allows hundreds of thousands of murderers, assaulters, and rapists to walk free. And this situation is only getting worse. . . . These low clearance and conviction rates are highly damaging to society.”
This is by design. Plus: “While the crisis of unsolved crime has many causes, one oft-overlooked reason is that the most important actors in solving crime—community members and police—are increasingly not acting at all. Such inaction is not irrational but the result of strong incentives against citizen cooperation and against active police intervention.”
These incentives are mediated by the tendency of the press to encourage the mobbing of citizens and police who do act. This is also by design.
h/t Glenn