MPD's homicide clearance rate falls to 62%

Homicide cases are tough and can take a while

Buried within 153 pages of oversight responses was MPD’s announcement this week that in calendar year 2022 they had a “clearance rate” of 62% for homicide cases, a 5% decrease from 2021 and the lowest % since 2015 (but still higher than many similar cities). Clearance rates count the # “of homicide cases closed in a calendar year by the total number of homicides that occurred in that year. The cases closed can be for homicides that occurred in the current year or in the prior years.” To focus on more recent crimes, in this post I looked specifically at how MPD is making arrests for homicides that occurred in 2022. So far they’ve made arrests in ~40% of those cases:

• Homicide arrests can take a while. 20% of arrests occur within the first week after the homicide but over half of arrests occur after 8 or more weeks.

• Arrest rates vary quite a bit by ward. Wards 4 & 6 had arrests in 22%-25% of their homicides while Ward 1 had arrests in 57% of its homicide cases.

  • Ward 8, which had by far the most homicides, only had a 37% arrest rate

• Most homicide suspects are from DC (62%) but 27% are from Maryland

• Gun homicides have a lower arrest rate of 37% and most cases take longer

• At least 4 recent murder cases seem to have been dropped by the USAO and 4 other homicide arrests don’t seem to have court cases in DC Superior Court

I want to be transparent that the data pull for this post was pretty manual in order to get more detail on each case. That comes with some tradeoffs:

• MPD reported 112 adult and 12 juvenile homicide arrests in calendar year 2022. Those arrest Excel files don’t include much information about where/when the homicide occurred or the suspect’s name. Therefore I went through MPD’s homicide press releases to get enough information to tie arrests & suspects to specific homicides. My manual review of MPD press releases yielded 106 arrests in 2022 so I got ~85% of the total. The “missing” 15% could be for homicides in 2022 or previous years.

• I also included arrests that occurred in 2023 for homicides that happened in 2022. That includes all of the arrests that MPD announced as of 3/29/2023. Over time, MPD will make more arrests for the 2022 “cohort” of homicides so this post is purely a snapshot in time and likely a slight undercount of total arrests.

• This only looks at arrests and not cases that are “exceptionally cleared” (i.e. suspect died or is otherwise unable to be charged)

One advantage of this manual approach is that by linking arrests to specific homicides we can measure how long it took for MPD to make an arrest in each case:

About 20% of arrests occur in the first week after the homicide but after that the volume of arrests is relatively steady week-over-week. There’s also quite a long tail of arrests that happen long after the homicide. This dataset was focused on 2022 homicides (so the maximum case length is capped) but MPD made arrests in 2022 for cases as old as 1992 so “cold cases” absolutely do get solved sometimes. About 29% of the homicide arrests in 2022/2023 (so far) were for homicides that occurred in 2021 or earlier. So while delays may be painful for victims’ families, they don’t mean that MPD isn’t seriously working on those cases.

There’s interesting variation in homicide arrest rates by ward. Wards 4 & 6 had a relatively low number of homicides but very low arrest rates. Ward 8 has by far the highest number of murders and only a 37% arrest rate (though when MPD does make an arrest it’s relatively faster).

About 62% of arrested homicide suspects are from DC. Notably 27% are from Maryland and these cases tend to take longer; about 2 weeks more on average. When a suspect has “no fixed address” MPD does not report a state and this can be confusing. Some of these individuals are reported to be homeless living in DC while in other cases they have little/no connection to DC. In 5 cases both the suspect and victim had “no fixed address”:

Unsurprisingly, gun homicides are some of the most difficult to solve with the lowest arrest rate and the longest average time for an arrest. Unfortunately guns are the method of choice for the vast majority of homicides:

We don’t have a benchmark for how many homicides should be “solved” by this point so the “~40% arrest rate” is simply a snapshot in time and not a judgement on the Homicide Branch’s performance. It’s also important to remember that most arrests of DC homicide suspects are made outside DC. Since MPD lacks jurisdiction outside the District, 50% of homicide arrests were made by the Capital Area Regional Fugitive Task Force; compared to 41% by MPD and the rest by out-of-area police departments. This reflects that DC is very small geographically and federal and inter-state collaboration is necessary to make arrests because suspects are mobile.

Given the ongoing discussion of the United States Attorney’s Office (USAO’s) prosecution decisions (more on the Washington Post’s latest story in a future post), I also checked how these homicide arrests were holding up in court. The vast majority of cases are still open, pending various procedural steps or ended in guilty pleas; which is to be expected. However, I did find 4 cases that seem have been dropped in DC Superior Court records and another 4 where I can’t find a case at all. These represent about 8% of the homicide arrests I reviewed so I hope some enterprising journalist(s) can dig into why these murder cases seem to have fallen apart:

• Case 2022 CF1 003269: I wrote an entire post and tweeted about this lengthy murder case that was mysteriously dropped by the USAO days after the public defender asked for Brady evidence. This is by far the most suspicious of these dropped murder cases.

• Case 2022 CF1 002998: In this case the suspect said the victim “swung on him” and that he “stabbed his ass!” MPD made an arrest on 5/29/2022 and the USAO dropped the case by 6/8/2022. Possible self-defense case.

• Case 2022 CF1 001953: A witness stated that the suspect shot the victim and there were some witness statements that partially supported the case. MPD made an arrest on 4/7/2022 and the USAO dropped the case on 1/6/2023.

• Case 2022 CF1 001387: In this case the suspect was in an argument with the victim (on camera) and then admitted to shooting the victim (claiming self-defense). MPD made an arrest on 3/8/2022 and the USAO dropped the case on 4/18/2022.

• Then there are 4 cases where MPD reported an arrest but I cannot find a DC Superior Court case for the arrest:

  • Christopher Clanton was arrested for the murder of Stephon Jenkins

  • Darnell Crawford was arrested for the murder of Jerrame Watts

  • Marcus Isom was arrested for the murder of Michael Stover, Jr.

  • Mussay Rezene was arrested for the murder of Brayan Villataro

I am very much not a court reporter so it’s possible that some of these dropped cases may have been filed in/transferred to Federal court. However, some of these individuals have been arrested for crimes that took place since their murder cases were dismissed so it’s likely that some of them were truly released. It’s worth a further look from journalists and/or legislators why MPD felt these cases were strong enough to charge but the USAO disagreed. It’s also worth questioning why lesser charges (like manslaughter) don’t seem to have been filed if murder was too hard to prove. I’ve focused on homicide cases because they are so serious and high-profile that these should be the cases where MPD and the USAO have the most alignment and priority for scarce lab/DFS resources. It’s very likely that there’s even more MPD-USAO disagreement on cases like assault with a deadly weapon and robbery that are too numerous for one blogger’s manual review; but would make for a great research topic! District residents, leaders and MPD deserve more than once-a-year summary tables on USAO papering and dismissal decisions to have visibility into what happens after an arrest.

As a reminder DC Superior Court records can be found here. It’s also possible that some cases are filed in Federal court which requires PACER access.