Clearance Rate "Dips"

The article limits itself to a single mention of the Chicago clearance rate, instead lumping all of Cook County into a single category and comparing it to others:

• In Cook County, only about one third of murders since 1980 have been solved, according to a Scripps Howard News Service study of crime records provided by the FBI. Police solved only 35 percent of the murders in Chicago in 2008, the FBI records show.

  "We'd expect that -- with more police officers, more scientific tools likes DNA analysis and more computerized records -- we'd be clearing more homicides now with more resources," said Bill Hagmaier, executive director of the International Homicide Investigators Association and retired chief of the FBI's Behavioral Analysis Unit. "But the clearance rates have fallen drastically."

"more police officers"? In what fantasy-land is this former feeb living? We're seeing layoffs across the board and hiring freezes to keep manpower down. And in just the past three years, the CPD alone is short around what? 400 detectives? And there hasn't been a class promoted off the existing list in over 2.5 years. We won't even go into the hatchet being taken to overtime budgets.

That clearance rate isn't going anywhere for the foreseeable future.