Veteran data journalist focuses on decline of homicide clearance rates

Thomas Hargrove is building software to identify trends in unsolved murders using data nobody’s bothered with before by Robert Kolker, February 8, 2017, Bloomberg BusinessWeek: “…We’re in a moment when, after decades of decreases nationally in the overall crime rate, the murder rate has begun creeping upward in many major U.S. cities. For two years running, homicides in major cities jumped on average more than 10 percent. (Those increases aren’t uniform, of course: Chicago leapt from 485 reported killings in 2015 to 762 in 2016, while the number of murders dipped in New York and Baltimore.) President Trump, in the campaign and since, has vowed to usher in a new era of law and order, hammering away on Twitter at Chicago’s “carnage” in particular. Threats of federal intervention aside, it will be difficult to fix the problem of high murder rates without first addressing clearance rates. So it’s fortuitous, perhaps, that we are living in an age in which the analysis of data is supposed to help us decipher, detect, and predict everything from the results of presidential elections to the performance of baseball players. The data-focused approach to problem-solving was brought to life for a lot of people by Michael Lewis’s Moneyball, which introduced the non-baseball-nerd public to the statistical evaluation of Major Leaguers and made a hero of Billy Beane, an executive with the Oakland A’s. Law enforcement would seem to be a fertile area for data to be helpful: In the 1990s the New York Police Department famously used data to more shrewdly deploy its officers to where the crimes were, and its CompStat system became the standard for other departments around the country. What Hargrove has managed to do goes a few orders of magnitude beyond that. His innovation was to teach a computer to spot trends in unsolved murders, using publicly available information that no one, including anyone in law enforcement, had used before. This makes him, in a manner of speaking, the Billy Beane of murder. His work shines light on a question that’s gone unanswered for too long: Why, exactly, aren’t the police getting any better at solving murder? And how can we even dream of reversing any upticks in the homicide rate while so many killers remain out on the streets?…”