I heard this a lot when I was researching my book. Apparently, they are also not being replaced. “The number of detectives has dropped from 7,182 in January 2001 to 5,200 this month, a 28% decline, according to numbers provided by the Detectives’ Endowment Association,” and reported today in a Daily News piece by Alison Gendar called Fading Shields. [The link to article is now broken.]

I know why people are retiring, but I’m not sure what the issue is with replacement. Not enough people with experience or talent enough to be promoted? That can’t be right though, can it? It must be a financial issue. Has to be.

According to the piece, the “Bronx 46 squad in University Heights had 38 detectives in 2001, 18 now,” and “Brooklyn’s 67 squad had 35 detectives on the books before Sept. 11. It has 27 today.” I’d be curious to know how many are manning the 44 in the Bronx and the 75 in Brooklyn. Those were the precincts with the highest numbers of unsolved murders when my book went to press. The precinct with the third highest number of unsolved murders was the 34 in Manhattan.

I have a list of facts that I take with me to interviews, in case I freeze and can’t remember something. It’s many pages long, but here are some highlights.

– The first Cold Case Squad was in Florida. In 1979, the Metro-Dade Police Department (now the Miami-Dade Police Department) created the first cold case squad in the United States. They called it the Pending Case Squad. There were some problems, and the squad was disbanded. They tried again 1983, and solved a 1982 murder of a little girl, and by 1984 they decided to formally give it another go, this time calling it the Cold Case Squad.

– The NYPD has the largest Cold Case Squad in the country, the next largest is in Los Angeles.

– There are just under 9,000 unsolved murders in New York since 1985.
– Los Angeles, the next largest city in America, had 8,000 from 1960 to 2004.
– For comparison, Fairfax, VA, has 75 going back to 1964.

– The number of unsolved murders is always going up, never down. In 2005, murder went up 4.8% nationally, but the clearance rate for that year is 62.6%. All over America, more than a third of all murder cases go cold.

– In New York, an unsolved murder has up to 5 – 10% chance of being cleared within one year after it goes cold. After two years, that chance decreases to less than 1%.

– DNA was used in less than 2% of the cases the NYPD’s Cold Case Squad cleared.

– “In most state or federal systems, for every one crime solved with DNA, we solve 26 cases with fingerprints,” according to Ed German, a recently retired Chief of Intelligence for the Army Criminal Investigation Command.

– 10 million Americans have had a family member or close friend murdered. 4 million of those people will never see their loved one’s killer locked up. (Data is from the National Crime Victims Research and Treatment Center, Medical University of South Carolina.)

– In New York you’re twice as likely to be murdered if you’re black, and your case is four times as likely to go cold.

The NYPD’s Cold Case Squad was formed in 1996. At the time my book went to press, of the 2,136 cases they had worked on by that point, they arrested 1,332 people in connection with those crimes, successfully cleared 629 cases and got exceptional clearances on 71 more (a case can be “exceptionally” cleared when the murderer has been identified definitively by a substantiated confession for example but the murderer has since died, or is in a country that refuses to extradite him. They don’t like to do it because it’s not as satisfying as taking someone off the streets and putting him in jail).

Congratulations Cold Case Squad, and thank you. There should be a party or dinner in your honor, something.

Here’s a teeny, tiny picture of the squad when they were first formed. Sadly, the squad is a lot smaller now.

Det. Wendell Stradford, (former Transit guy) makes an arrest [the article has since been removed]. From the piece: “Franklin praised cold-case Detective Wendell Stradford and Assistant DA Nitin Savur for hunting down Montgomery.” This was for a 1974 murder. In some ways I think the older the better. Those cases are sadder, they are the most forgotten, and the hardest to solve. After two years, if a murder hasn’t been solved, the chances of it ever being solved goes down to .01%. Solving a 32 year old case was really beating the odds.

Good work, Wendell and everyone who worked with him. (The picture is from one of Stradford’s promotion ceremonies.)