German Lopez heard a similar sentiment when he talked to families who had loved ones murdered in Louisville.
“They feel abandoned,” Lopez told the Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting in a recent interview.
Lopez is a reporter for The New York Times and recently chronicled the lack of arrests that follow killings across the country — specifically in Louisville.
He reviewed data from the Federal Bureau of Investigation that shows nationwide police solve about 58% of homicides. But in Louisville, the rate is lower.
Lopez interviewed victims’ families, police and national experts to understand the factors that contribute to unsolved murders, the ways cities can start addressing the problem, and the impact it has on the communities caught in the middle.
He talked about his findings with KyCIR’s managing editor Jacob Ryan.
This transcript is edited for length and clarity.
Jake Ryan: Anytime The New York Times focuses on Louisville, we're paying close attention. This time you're highlighting an issue that we often hear about here, and that's murders going unsolved. You examined the FBI data that shows just about 58% of murders across the country are getting solved by police. Where did you find Louisville fitting into that trend?
German Lopez: I was interested in Louisville because it isn't too far off from the national story. It's at about 50%, so about half of murders are solved. And to me, that was just an astonishing number. When you can say that half of murderers get away with it, that just seems like a very important story to tell. And I should say too, when we're talking about the national number or Louisville's number, [police] count murders that happened in previous years but were solved that year. So, in that sense, the numbers are actually a little inflated.
JR: What are the contributing factors that lead to that trend?
GL: So, you can think of it in three ways.
One is just the amount of cases. The United States has way more murders than other developed countries. And so when you look at other countries, they have higher clearance rates, but the U.S. just has more murders to solve. If you imagine a detective having a higher caseload it is of course going to make it more difficult to actually solve all those murders.
The second thing is just the types of crimes that we're talking about. So, the U.S. and Louisville, especially when we're talking about cities, have more gun and gang crimes and those are just harder to solve. I mean, if you think of a drive-by shooting right, people legitimately might never see who did that. Whereas, like a domestic violence incident, detectives will tell you those are the easiest crimes to solve.
The last big aspect here is trust in the police and police resources. So, things police are doing. Police could dedicate attention to this, they just haven't, and they could get more resources, but lawmakers haven't allocated that. And they also suffer from distrust in the community. I mean, Louisville certainly knows about this over the past few years, between Black Lives Matter protests and whatnot. And if you don't have witnesses, it's going to be much, much harder to solve a case. And witnesses are not going to cooperate if they don't trust the police and if they don't believe the police will protect them from retaliation.
JR: One of the important elements of the report — and it's something that we see more and more with modern news reporting — is that you're not just highlighting the problem here, but you also spent a good deal of the report focused on what could be a solution to this. So tell us, what did you find that could help reverse the trend?
GL: Police just need to dedicate more time to this, and policy makers need to dedicate more resources. You know, we talk a lot about police departments, but ultimately, they get their funding from higher ups, whether it's city councils or state legislatures or the federal government. And this is not just a fantasy. Some cities have tried this and seen that clearance rates — meaning the amount of murders solved — go up. Boston, for example, a few years back, they dedicated more resources to this issue and they saw clearance rates go up by 23%. So, that's pretty promising.
The second thing is better use of technology. We now have so many cameras available to us, right? But police can't always use them. And often, you know, they could deploy more cameras. Police know where there are blind spots in parts of the city. I should say Louisville, in particular, has made efforts to deploy more of these portable cameras. But, you know, a lot more of that work could be done. I should say that comes with concerns, right? Everybody has concerns about a surveillance state and all of that. But experts think that there must be ways to balance those concerns with the safety concerns. I mean, ultimately, people want their privacy protected, but they also want to be safe, and there's got to be some balancing act there to strike.
JR: You talked to several families throughout the report. What did they tell you about how they're feeling knowing that police haven't yet caught the person that killed their loved one?
GL: Well, the overwhelming sentiment is that they feel abandoned. They feel like they can't trust the police. They don't feel safe. I saw this in Louisville, but I've also seen this in neighborhoods all across the country. I travel a lot to cover crime and it's just something you hear very often that, you know, ‘police are not protecting us.’
You know, a few years back there was a lot of talk about defunding the police. But often, when you talk to people in these communities you hear them say they actually want more police attention, but they want more police attention to the serious crimes, not the petty stuff that they often get hassled with. And I should say, I think an important element of this that gets lost is, like, just put yourself in the mindset of someone who lives in the neighborhood where most murders are not solved. If you hear that somebody might go after you, what are you going to think? You're going to think, ‘maybe I need to take matters into my own hands.’ I've heard this. I went to Chicago a few years back for a story and people told me that they carry guns explicitly because they don't trust the police to protect them. That increases the chance of more crime, shootings and murders, right? So, that's a bad outcome. To me that's really why what a lot of these families are saying is concerning. I mean, obviously their personal experiences matter, but it's also just translating to a broader community sentiment that can be harmful on its own.
