Improving Investigation Clearance Rates with Federal Funding

Naturally, improving clearance rates is a top priority for every law enforcement agency. Not only does it get serial offenders off the street, but importantly provides a degree of closure and justice for victims and their families.

According to FBI Uniform Crime Reporting, national clearance rates have been hovering in lower ranges for decades, and the COVID-19 pandemic has further impacted closure numbers to:

• 61% for homicide
• 45% for violent crime overall
• 16% for property crime

Investigator caseload is a major pain point for law enforcement agencies and has a direct negative impact on clearance rates, also. With recruitment and budget challenges in mind, you need a system that helps you optimize your agency’s investigative resources while also balancing the load.

Federal Funding is Available

The White House is providing $2.1 billion, including $401 million in state and local grants as part of the American Rescue Plan Act $350 billion stimulus. This federal funding has been allocated for law enforcement across states, cities and counties — with 57 percent going to states and 35 percent to local governments.

Smarter Investigative Case Management Software Can Help Your Agency Solve More Cases

Police investigations are the engine of the criminal justice system. They help investigators build the case in the field and prosecutors make the case in the courtroom. But none of this is possible without the right case management tools.

For investigative case management, police departments have traditionally relied on under-powered RMS modules and homegrown or manual systems. These approaches lack the analytics, collaboration tools and workflow engine that detectives need to solve cases quickly. As a result, clearance rates suffer, and serial offenders remain free to commit more crime. Many departments may be unaware of the advantages modern solutions employ to optimize investigations and increase the efficiency of investigative work.

Implementing a secure, cloud-based case management system can provide an invaluable benefit to the law enforcement agency by allowing officers to easily record and manage all of the information involved with completing an incident worksheet – and then have a central database to be able to link two cases together – solving more crimes.

Impact on Homicide Case Clearance Rate

CaseBuilder™ is designed as a fully automated solution that allows for collaboration, correlations of tip and witness clues, case status, management of confidential informant information and gang data, as well as streamlining the workflow itself to ensure the most efficient and effective process for solving a case. Watch the video to see how it works.

CaseBuilder helped a large Metropolitan Police Department with their case screening process and allowed them to take a deeper dive into investigators’ active caseloads, examining not only the number of cases per investigator, but also the status and progress of those cases. See the results below.

Investigative Case Management Software is an Allowable Use of American Rescue Plan Act Funds

Smaller budgets, recruitment challenges, and highly engaged communities have heightened the priority of adopting crime management software to support your team’s efforts.

That is why an investment in CaseBuilder is an allowable use of American Rescue Plan Act funding to help agencies of all sizes navigate the recent increase in violent crime.

How to Access the Funds

SoundThinking™ can help you navigate the critical steps necessary with your local administration and elected officials to secure federal funding as you continue to protect your community.

• SoundThinking’s funding experts can research your city’s allocations and keep you up to date on U.S. Department of Treasury disbursement of funds.
• We can be your best advocate by preparing your application, compiling data to support your request, and gaining the support of local government and non-government partners.