Harrisburg Police Chief Thomas Carter.
How hard is it to get away with murder in Harrisburg?
TheBurg’s April issue, which comes out tomorrow, includes a story about the city’s homicide clearance rate—the percentage of murders solved by police.
Relying on data from the county coroner, the county courts, newspaper reports, the district attorney’s office and the Harrisburg police department, we compiled a chart of local homicides over six years, from 2009 to 2014.
There were 87 homicides in Harrisburg in that period, a high murder rate for a city this size. Police made arrests in 77 percent of the cases, with 20 remaining unsolved.
That’s a relatively high clearance rate—higher than the national average for homicides in 2013, which was 64 percent. Harrisburg Police Chief Thomas Carter, in an interview for the story, explained some of the factors he thought contributed to his department’s success, including good police relationships in the community.
This morning, a few days after our story went to print, NPR debuted a tool on its website that allows users to compare clearance rates of local agencies.
NPR requested data from the FBI for local law enforcement agencies across the country. (The FBI already makes regional data available on its website.) Their tool provides data on homicide and other crimes from 2011 to 2013.
In those years, Harrisburg reported solve rates of 125 percent, 64 percent and 88 percent, respectively. Over the three years combined, the clearance rate on a total of 36 murders is about 89 percent.
One note on percentages: The NPR tool, following the FBI’s crime reporting standards, gives a clearance rate for each individual year. You simply take the number of crimes cleared in a given year, and divide by the number of new crimes that year.
That allows for more uniform comparisons, though it does come with some caveats—data reported by local agencies are not always accurate, and some are missing, leading to obviously incorrect conclusions (for example, the tool reports the NYPD cleared zero homicides in 2011 and 2012).
For our analysis, we used homicides committed and solved to get a single percentage over the six-year period, a somewhat different measure. Our solve rate skews high in the early years (since police have had more time to solve those crimes) and low in the later years (since they’ve had less time).
Missing data aside, though, one great thing about NPR’s tool is it allows you to compare Harrisburg with other cities. York, for example, has a homicide rate and population similar to Harrisburg’s: there were 39 murders in York between 2011 and 2013, in a population of 43,841.
In 2012 and 2013, York reported clearance rates of 55 and 33 percent, respectively. (Clearance data appear to be missing for 2011.)
Philadelphia, which saw 902 murders from 2011 to 2013 in a population of 1,553,153, posted clearance rates in those years of 60, 70 and 70 percent.
You can view NPR’s clearance rate tool here. To access a spreadsheet of our 2009-2014 homicide data for Harrisburg, click HBG homicides, 2009 – 2014. Our story on Harrisburg’s solve rate will appear in TheBurg’s April issue.
