According to Jeff Asher, the clearance rate data for 2025 are preliminary, but monthly data are predictive of outcomes in the FBI’s annual report.
As of now, nearly 36 percent of robberies reported to the FBI in 2025 have been cleared, which, if it holds up, would be the highest national clearance rate for robberies since 1965.
Robberies do, however, stand out among other crimes with respect to their clearance rates relative to pre-COVID levels. Clearance rates for most crime types fell enormously in 2020 and 2021 but have returned to their historical norms. Robberies, by contrast, are far exceeding previous levels.
Indeed, the robbery clearance rate in 2025 was likely the highest since the 1960s, when clearance rate stats were notoriously unreliable.
Be Careful In Interpreting This Data
Asher’s data comes from monitoring urban public police dashboards, so while his data is promising, it may not be representative of national police statistics. See Jeff’s article for the methodology.
Note that 2025 police data is very preliminary and will be fully counted in the late summer of 2026.
It’s been my experience that preliminary crime data (especially from the FBI) can be considerably less than end-of-year results. Many police agencies dump their data late in the calendar year.
The chart below is from Jeff Asher, based on Urban Police Dashboards.
Crimes Solved
The FBI uses the term solved (an arrest) or solved by exceptional means which refers to identifying a suspect who is unattainable (cannot be located).
FBI-Crimes Cleared-2024
There were 3,577,000 violent crimes. 1,283,000 were cleared by arrests, and 215,000 were cleared by exceptional means (suspect identified but unavailable for arrest). Robbery is counted as a crime against property in this index (yes, it’s counted as a violent crime in FBI annual reports).
This means that approximately 35 percent of violent incidents were cleared by an arrest. See the FBI’s Crime Data Explorer.
Understanding the FBI Data
Some readers may notice that one FBI dataset shows about 3.6 million violent crime offenses, while the national estimate for violent crime is only about 1.2 million incidents. At first glance, the numbers appear inconsistent.
The difference comes from how the Federal Bureau of Investigation collects crime data through the FBI’s new National Incident-Based Reporting System.
Under NIBRS, police report incidents, which are individual criminal events. But each incident can include multiple offenses. For example, a robbery might also involve an aggravated assault and a weapons violation. In the FBI’s system, that single criminal event could be recorded as several offenses even though it happened during one incident.
Because of this, some FBI tables—especially those dealing with crimes cleared or solved—count offenses rather than incidents. That means the totals can appear much larger than the number of violent crime incidents reported nationally.
There appear to be roughly three violent offenses recorded for every violent crime incident in some datasets, because multiple offenses can occur within a single crime event.
The FBI also measures crimes solved by counting offenses cleared, not individuals arrested.
One arrest can clear multiple crimes in the statistics if investigators determine that the offender committed several offenses.
For readers, the key takeaway is that the FBI’s crime reporting system counts crime in different ways depending on the dataset. Incident counts describe how many criminal events occurred, while offense counts describe the total number of specific crimes that took place within those events.
Previous Data-Solved Homicides-Worst In The World?
The U.S. is among the worst at solving murders in the industrialized world, according to NPR.
While the rate at which murders are solved or “cleared” has been declining for decades, it has now dropped to slightly below 50% in 2020 – a new historic low. And several big cities, including Chicago, have seen the number of murder cases resulting in at least one arrest dip into the low to mid-30 percent range.
Previous Data-Pew-Lowest Levels Since 1993
Nationwide clearance rates for both violent and property crime are at their lowest levels since at least 1993, FBI data shows.
Police cleared a little over a third (36.7%) of the violent crimes that came to their attention in 2022, down from nearly half (48.1%) as recently as 2013. During the same period, there were decreases for each of the four types of violent crime the FBI tracks:
- Police cleared 52.3% of reported murders and nonnegligent homicides in 2022, down from 64.1% in 2013.
- They cleared 41.4% of aggravated assaults, down from 57.7%.
- They cleared 26.1% of rapes, down from 40.6%.
- They cleared 23.2% of robberies, down from 29.4%.
The pattern is less pronounced for property crime. Overall, law enforcement agencies cleared 12.1% of reported property crimes in 2022, down from 19.7% in 2013. The clearance rate for burglary didn’t change much, but it fell for larceny/theft (to 12.4% in 2022 from 22.4% in 2013) and motor vehicle theft (to 9.3% from 14.2%).
State Arrests (Not Crimes Solved) Cut In Half Before Increasing In 2023-Statista
The data below is offered as a contrast to crimes solved.
There were over 7.55 million arrests for all offenses in the United States in 2023. This figure is a decrease from 1990 levels, when the number of arrests was over 14.1 million.
Conclusions
We have problems with offender accountability. We lost over 25,000 police officers. Arrests have plummeted since 1996. Crimes solved have decreased by huge amounts. The state prison and jail populations decreased substantially.
But jail admissions and correctional populations have increased slightly. The loss of police officers has stabilized somewhat, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ preliminary data. There is a very small increase in arrests in two of the three indexes I use.
Now we have the first sign that crimes cleared may be improving, per Jeff Asher.
The justice system “may” be stabilizing for the first time in many years.
If you trust the USDOJ’s National Crime Victimization Survey, we are at record highs for rates, with the largest increase in violence in the nation’s history (44 percent). If you rely on crimes reported to law enforcement (the overwhelming majority are not), there was a 3 percent decrease in violence in 2023 and a 4.5 percent decrease in 2024 (the last full report). Statistics for 2025 are available here, but, once again, preliminary FBI data are often substantially overstated.
If you deal with victim rights organizations, they will tell you that accountability for criminal offenders can be either challenging or nonexistent. They suggest that this has a profound impact on people’s trust in the government. According to polls of attitudes towards institutions, they are correct.
But there seems to be a slight rebound in police officers, arrests, jail admissions, and prison incarcerations, with crimes solved possibly increasing. Local media reports also suggest enhanced clearance rates.
Will all this continue to improve? Time will tell.
Appendix: There Are More Crimes Than What’s Reported
Crime statistics depend heavily on how crime is measured. The National Crime Victimization Survey, conducted by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, consistently finds far more crimes than appear in police statistics because many victims never report offenses to law enforcement.
At the same time, the FBI’s newer National Incident-Based Reporting System shows that a single criminal incident can involve multiple offenses. Traditional national crime summaries from the Federal Bureau of Investigation focus on a limited number of major crimes (referred to as the Summary Reporting System), which can simplify long-term trend comparisons.
But obviously, there are far more crimes happening than what’s reported in monthly or yearly crime summaries.
Taken together, these measurement differences mean that the total number of individual criminal acts occurring in society is likely higher than what appears in the most commonly cited national crime totals.
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