Getting away with murder

THE manhunt lasted for more than three weeks. Some 1,300 heavily armed officers, with dogs and night-vision gear, prowled the damp woods of upstate New York in search of two murderers who had escaped from a state maximum-security prison on June 6th. The search is said to have cost around $1m a day. At last, on June 28th, the drama ended: David Sweat, the younger fugitive, was shot and arrested two days after a federal agent killed his co-conspirator, Richard Matt, in the woods near the Canadian border.

So these two killers, at least, are off the streets; but many more still roam the country with impunity. America’s homicide clearance rate—the percentage of solved crimes that lead to arrest—has fallen considerably in the past 50 years, from around 90% in 1965 to around 64% in 2012, according to federal statistics. This means more than 211,000 homicides committed since 1980 remain unsolved. Every year introduces nearly 5,000 more.