Editorial Introduction to Homicide Studies Special Issue: In Pursuit of Justice: Advancements and Challenges in Homicide Closure Research

Despite a growing body of knowledge and major advances in forensic science and technology, homicide clearance rates have declined significantly in some parts of the world since the 1960s. This fact alone highlights the importance of understanding how and why homicides are solved. Furthermore, the success or failure in “solving” homicides is often taken as a general barometer of police effectiveness. Whilst significant advancements have been made in the past couple of decades in documenting clearance rates and the many factors that impact investigative outcomes, there is much left to learn. The paucity of research on homicide closure from different parts of the globe, for example, limits our ability to understand diverse offense, community, organizational and political contexts that impact investigative outcomes. The lack of data and analyses on police perceptions, use of forensic evidence, and particular subgroups of homicide victims have created challenges for developing effective training and identifying best practices for homicide investigators. We proposed this special issue on advancements and challenges in homicide closure research to help fill some of these gaps in this growing body of literature on homicide closures. The four pieces included each cover aspects of homicide closure about which knowledge is currently lacking.

Nicholson, Brookman, Jones and Maguire present the first quantitative findings of the characteristics associated with homicide clearance in England and Wales. Unlike the U.S. where quantitative studies have dominated the clearance literature, British research has generally forged a qualitative path to understanding the challenges and outcomes of homicide investigation. Adopting binary logistic regression, this novel study identifies which victim and offense characteristics are associated with significantly higher or lower odds of homicide clearance across all police forces in England and Wales. The authors highlight that certain victim and case characteristics pose challenges to proving that a homicide has occurred (e.g., some drug-related and infant death cases) – making it difficult for investigators to reach the thresholds required to charge suspects. In other instances, cases are more or less difficult to solve due to the age and gender of those involved, the weapons and methods used by the perpetrator and the social proximity of victims and offenders. The authors discuss the nuances of their statistical findings, how they compare and contrast to the international literature and theory on homicide clearance and recommend changes to data collection which may improve future research on homicide clearance in England and Wales.

An additional aspect of homicide investigations about which there is still much to learn is around the perceptions of investigators themselves. The existing research literature on homicide clearances is largely dominated by quantitative analyses. These models have generated valuable knowledge regarding the impacts of victim and incident characteristics on whether and how quickly cases will be cleared but are limited in their ability to shed light on the underlying reasons for those associations. Waszkiewicz helps to fill this gap with an analysis of interviews from 32 experienced homicide detectives in three U.S. law enforcement agencies designed to provide insight into how victim demographics influence their investigative approaches and actions. His findings highlight the tension between official policies mandating equal treatment of all cases with the realities of notions of “ideal victims” and the impact of victim age and gender on emotional investment in cases and generating investigative leads.

Another dimension of victim gender that is largely absent from the existing literature on homicide closures concerns investigations of cases involving transgender victims. As Lantz, Mills, Faulkner, and Wenger note, there are multiple reasons to expect high unsolved rates for homicides of transgender victims, but there is a lack of systematic analyses of these cases. To address this gap, they analyze data on transgender homicides from the Tracking Transgender Homicide in America database, an original open-source data collection effort of transgender homicides in the U.S. from 2010 forward. Their findings reveal a disproportionate use of deadnaming (calling a person by the name they used before they transitioned) in cases of Black victims, victims with a history of sex work, and victims killed in incidents considered bias crimes by the police, and a significantly lower clearance rate for cases in which transgender victims are deadnamed compared to other transgender homicides.

For many years, the public and the media have focused extensive attention on the use of forensic evidence in violent crime investigations. Much of this attention has been devoted to the use of DNA in either clearing unsolved crimes or identifying wrongly convicted individuals. The volume of scientific research on the role of forensic evidence in homicide investigations, however, is negligible. This is in part due to the lack of available datasets that include information about forensic evidence collected and tested during homicide investigations. Using a unique dataset of forensic evidence collection, submission, and testing for homicides committed in Cleveland, Ohio, Chamberlain, Miethe, and Regoeczi build on this small body of research by showing how different statistical models can influence conclusions about the influence of DNA on homicide closures. In particular, they show that while DNA does not have a significant direct effect on case clearance, but it can be very influential within specific contexts. Their findings emphasize the importance of assessing under what conditions forensic evidence increases the likelihood of solving cases, as opposed to assuming it will always serve as a “magic bullet.”

Taken together, the papers in this special issue advance our understanding of some of the many factors that can influence whether and how homicide cases are solved. They also expand the range of the methodologies and analytical techniques that have been used, which is important for capturing both the complex nature of homicide investigations and the cross-cultural differences that test the limits of universal generalizations around homicide clearances. They serve as a timely reminder that pursuing justice in homicide cases is only possible if the police are able to establish that a homicide has occurred in the first instance, to identify perpetrators, and to build a strong enough case to lay charges. The strength of evidence that investigators are able to amass then plays an important role in criminal/legal proceedings that hopefully bring perpetrators to justice and allow some sense of ‘closure’ for victims’ families and friends.