Source: Spencer Platt / Getty
The failure to solve black homicides fuels a vicious cycle: It deepens distrust of police among black residents, making them less likely to cooperate in investigations, leading to fewer arrests. As a result, criminals are emboldened and residents’ fears are compounded.
In almost every city surveyed, arrests were made in killings of black victims at lower rates than homicides involving white victims.
Four cities — Chicago, Baltimore, Detroit and Philadelphia — accounted for more than 7,300 of the black murders with no arrests. But even smaller majority-white cities have amassed large rosters of these cases during the past decade: 422 in Columbus, Ohio; 277 in Buffalo; 183 in Nashville; and 144 in Omaha.
In interviews with The Post, more than two dozen police chiefs and homicide commanders said they work just as hard to solve black murders but that those investigations are often hampered by reluctant witnesses.
No major U.S. city had a wider gap in arrest rates for white and black victims than Boston, where Jackman was killed last summer and where the killings of white residents are solved at twice the rate of black victims.
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