that's because there are very few masterminds on the other side of the fence.

The idea of a detective as per cop movies are romanticised, a lot of them are doing bare minimum and are as dumb as the criminals.

I had the misfortune of seeing this first hand. I caught an employee who embezzled $19,000 from my company red handed. The police refused to help even after I reported it until I called the mayor's office and complained.

But if you caught them red handed why are their hands not red? Case closed.

Now that's going all the way to the top!

> Yet the clearance rate for homicides in the US is below 60%

The war on drugs helped a lot with this.

I assume you mean because LE is splitting resources and also dealing with drug cases. I think it wouldn't be unrealistic to have the drug cases fund themselves through seizures. I wonder how bad of an ROI our LE gets on drug investigations.

Drug prohibition also drives up murder rates massively. For your typical turf war murder, even the victims' side has little incentive to talk to the cops.