A clearance rate in crime is the percentage of reported offenses that police consider solved, either because someone was arrested and sent to court, or because the case was closed by what the FBI calls exceptional means. In the most recent detailed national data, roughly 45% of violent crimes and about 15% of property crimes were cleared, with wide variation by offense. A cleared crime is not a conviction, and that distinction is where most people misread the numbers.
The Two Ways a Crime Gets Cleared
Under FBI reporting rules, a case is cleared by arrest when at least one person has been arrested, charged with the offense, and turned over to the court system for prosecution.1Federal Bureau of Investigation. Crime in the United States 2010 – Offenses Cleared A suspect sitting in a holding cell doesn’t count. The case has to move into the court pipeline.
A case is cleared by exceptional means when police have identified the offender, gathered enough evidence to arrest and charge, and located the person, but something outside law enforcement’s control prevents the arrest. All four conditions have to be met. Common examples: the suspect dies before arrest, the victim refuses to cooperate once the offender has been identified, or the suspect is already being prosecuted in another jurisdiction that denies extradition.1Federal Bureau of Investigation. Crime in the United States 2010 – Offenses Cleared
The second category matters more than most readers assume. When a department reports a 50% clearance rate, some of those “solved” cases closed without anyone ever being prosecuted.
Clearance Rates by Crime Type
Violent crimes clear at much higher rates than property crimes. Violent offenses receive more investigative attention and often involve witnesses or direct contact between offender and victim. Property crimes frequently lack both.
The FBI’s 2019 figures, the last year with comprehensive crime-type breakdowns under the legacy reporting system, show the gap:2Federal Bureau of Investigation. Crime in the United States 2019 – Clearances
- Murder: 61.4%
- Aggravated assault: 52.3%
- Rape: 32.9%
- Robbery: 30.5%
- Larceny-theft: 18.4%
- Burglary: 14.1%
- Motor vehicle theft: 12.8%
For every ten burglaries reported, roughly eight or nine went unsolved. Even for murder, nearly four in ten cases produced no arrest or exceptional clearance. The rape clearance rate is strikingly low for a violent offense, reflecting the investigative challenges around sexual assault cases: delayed reporting, evidence collection difficulties, and victim reluctance to participate in prosecution.
Cleared Is Not the Same as Convicted
This is the point where crime statistics most often get misread. A cleared crime means police identified a suspect and moved the case toward prosecution. It does not mean anyone was convicted or punished. Cases fall apart after clearance for many reasons: charges get dropped, plea deals reduce the offense, juries acquit, or courts dismiss the case on procedural grounds.
For homicide, fewer than half of cleared cases ultimately end in a conviction.3Council on Criminal Justice. Trends in Homicide: What You Need to Know If roughly half of murders are cleared, and fewer than half of those produce a conviction, the actual prosecution success rate for homicide sits well below 25%. For less serious offenses the national data is thinner, but the same pattern holds. Clearance consistently overstates the system’s ability to hold offenders accountable.
By 2022, the homicide clearance rate itself had dropped to roughly 50%, meaning about half of all killings in the country resulted in no arrest at all.3Council on Criminal Justice. Trends in Homicide: What You Need to Know
How the Number Is Calculated
Clearance rate is a simple ratio: offenses cleared during a period divided by offenses reported during that period, multiplied by 100. A department with 200 reported burglaries that cleared 30 of them reports a 15% burglary clearance rate.
Two quirks of the counting are worth knowing. The FBI counts offenses cleared rather than people arrested, so one arrest can clear multiple crimes if the suspect is linked to several offenses. Arresting five people for a single crime, on the other hand, counts as one clearance.1Federal Bureau of Investigation. Crime in the United States 2010 – Offenses Cleared
The data itself comes from local law enforcement agencies reporting voluntarily to the FBI. For decades, that happened through the Uniform Crime Reporting Program’s Summary Reporting System. In January 2021, the FBI retired that system and moved to the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS), which collects far more detail about each individual incident. The transition created a data gap: not all agencies made the switch smoothly, and some large departments missed reporting deadlines, so national clearance figures from 2021 and 2022 are less complete than earlier years.
What the Number Doesn’t Show
Clearance rates only measure crimes that get reported to police. A large share of crime never does, particularly property crimes, sexual assaults, and offenses in communities with low trust in law enforcement. The Bureau of Justice Statistics tracks that gap through the National Crime Victimization Survey, and it is consistently large. A high clearance rate in a place where most crime goes unreported may say more about reporting patterns than about policing.
There is also a manipulation problem. Departments face institutional pressure to show improving numbers, and some have been caught adjusting the books. A 2025 Department of Justice draft report found that the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department had repeatedly downgraded and misclassified criminal offenses to make crime appear lower than it actually was. In a review of 191 aggravated assault reports, about a third were misclassified. Among reports labeled “pending investigation,” 68% were actually robberies and assaults that had been placed in the wrong category.
Other documented forms of distortion include closing old cases through questionable exceptional clearances, reclassifying felonies as misdemeanors to move them off the books, and pressuring detectives to close cases prematurely. These practices don’t describe every department, but they appear often enough that any single clearance figure should be read with care, and ideally alongside conviction data and victimization surveys.