Very little attention has been devoted to studying factors associated with how quickly murders are cleared. This dearth of knowledge is mainly due to a lack of available data, especially at the national level. Currently the Uniform Crime Reporting Program is undergoing a large-scale conversion from its traditional summary system form of data collection to the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS). One benefit of NIBRS is that it enables law enforcement agencies to report incident-level clearance information, including the incident and clearance dates. The present study utilizes NIBRS data to compare characteristics of homicides that are cleared quickly with those cleared over a longer period of time and those that are not cleared. Findings from this exploratory study confirm the conventional belief that murders are cleared quickly if at all, as a large drop in the percentage of cleared cases is observed one week after a murder occurs. The present research also suggests that incident characteristics play a dynamic role in predicting not only whether a murder is cleared, but how quickly. These findings provide new insights for studying clearance and suggest policy implications.
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