Homicide clearance rates in Philadelphia are way up in 2026. I learned from this article that clearance rate is basically the number of arrest warrants issued on open homicide cases divided by the number of homicides during a calendar year. Some homicides get solved in later years, so it’s not a perfect measure of cases solved but it’s a reasonable proxy. The rate in 2025 was 71% compared to numbers that often hovered in the 40s or 50s over the past decade or so. This is partly due to homicide rates falling so that a fixed number of police can devote more time to each case, and partly due to surveillance technology. It supports the idea, which I first thought seriously about after reading the book Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America, that most communities support police if they feel like they are being policed fairly and if they feel that crimes have a good chance of being solved. And it’s not discussed in this article, but I suspect that when people feel like they can call the authorities in and have a good chance of justice being served, they are less likely to take matters into their own hands. And over time, a culture of escalating revenge and retaliation might slowly change.