New article this week documents it

https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/what-explains-...

Only 60% of homicides are solved? I would have guessed like 99%. This is sort of crazy to me.

The main reason is that most homicides are not the fancy middle class pre meditated murder type of crime as seen on TV but are often related to other criminal activities and with low evidence. This means that any witnesses are likely going to be within that world of not speaking to the police and any evidence in a gang killing for example, will be of low quality.

But it also matters what we mean by "solved" too.

And there are less resources devoted to poor people getting murdered

Try watching a show called “the First 48” on A&E sometime. Their murder cases are only solved because a suspect confesses. If the suspect doesn’t confess, or lawyers up, then forget about solving it.

I watched a few episodes, but this show is depressing. I noticed that most of the time they get their suspect because someone "snitches".

My own personal speculation is that TV shows have a lot to do with it. People watching TV get used to the idea of an elite crew of colorful personalities inevitably hunting down their man, and they think murder is a guaranteed jail sentence, so they murder less often. In reality, probably pretty easy to get away with murder.

Also: video games. Young men, who commit most of the murders, spend more time playing video games and therefore less time murdering.

Yup, and this doesn't even include all the disappearances that never get called homicides. You're disincentivized against calling a case a homicide if you can't bring a case—your clearance rate will drop. It also doesn't cover all the clearances which involved an innocent person pleading guilty to avoid heinous sentencing.

I read that in Mexico that number is less then 10%. https://www.animalpolitico.com/kill-murder-mexico/homicides-...

Same in South Africa

But really, what made these serial killers famous is that they often tried to communicate and bask in their fame, no? I'm curious if they no longer advertise themselves, or that their letters are no longer advertised widely?

I do remember seeing the luka magnotta documentary on netflix (don't fuck with cats), which while not quite a serial killers, comes close to someone who liked the attention.

And here I was thinking that in today's surveillance ridden landscape it's far harder to get away with crime

No you just catch the ones that didn't do their homework.

Most of the (solved) crime news I read about, I'm always confounded how unaware criminals are about "tradecraft".

For an example of stupid criminals, I remember reading in the local newspaper about a group of guys that had robbed a store of phone cards (the story is a bit old) and tried to sell them back to said store.

Instead of using a public phone with one of those cards, they just used their own mobile phone to contact the store. Since in France you're required to give ID to get a SIM card, I'll let you guess how long it took the police to find the robbers :)

In Belgium a group of robbers was told by a shop owner to not steal him now but to come back in the evening to steal more money from the cash register. He also managed to convince the police to be there in case they would come back, and they did.

https://www.20minutes.fr/insolite/2359379-20181023-belgique-...

It's survival bias in that we don't know about the criminals that get away with stuff, only the ones we catch.

Most burglaries and robberies are performed close to where the criminal lives. They are mostly opportunistic crimes done criminals with no thought at the time of what they are doing and no fear of the consequences.

The stereotypical version of that is the drug addict doing anything to get money for their fix, but generally it's associated with not very smart people who do stuff and do not fear the consequences.

What is the “clearance rate” of a homicide? I see you’ve used that phrase a few times here and it’s keeping me from understanding your contributions.

The number of murders 'cleared' divided by the number of murders recorded. What makes a crime cleared or not depends on who is doing to measuring but consider it to relate to whether the government thinks that they have enough evidence to charge someone with the crime.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clearance_rate

Now they just shoot people