Police Department Resource Allocation and Racial Disparities in Cold Cases

By Emilia Lopez-Mateos '26

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Introduction

During the Civil Rights Era, racially motivated murders skyrocketed in the Deep South with little to no resolution, remaining cold for decades. This was, in large part, due to the deliberate negligence of law enforcement to pursue those cases because of their own racial biases against African Americans. One such case of violence in the South during the Civil Rights Era involved Henry Dee and Charles Moore, who were kidnapped and murdered by Ku Klux Klan members in Mississippi in 1964. Dee and Moore were picked up while hitchhiking and taken to a remote location where they were brutally beaten and interrogated under suspicion of being connected to the Civil Rights Movement. Dee and Moore’s bodies were found in the Mississippi River weeks later, but no meaningful investigations were pursued. There were no prosecutions even after discovering the identities of two Klan members, James Ford Seale and Charles Marcus Edwards, and the case ultimately went cold with no resolution. (1)

Since the beginning of the Civil Rights Era, hate crimes against black people have gone unsolved at disproportionate rates in comparison to their white counterparts. (2) The Civil Rights Division under the U.S. Department of Justice prohibits discrimination and reports heavily on homicides against black people as a direct result, closely monitoring homicide data since the Civil Rights Era. (3) Federal funding law, as it stands, does not sufficiently provide funds for local police departments to increase their clearance rates, or the percentage of crimes solved by an arrest. The laws currently fail to prevent racial disparities in homicide outcomes and must be restructured to better allocate funds. 

The persistent gap between resource allocation and racial disparities in cold homicide cases in the Southeast United States has remained without redress or reform. In the Southeast, stark racial disparities in homicide cases “gone cold” have long coincided with uneven resource allocation for local police departments. (4) Little has come from restructuring federal funding in providing equal protection. Clearance rate reports according to a victim’s race, staffing allocation reporting for lower-income neighborhoods, and time spent per homicide case are all feasible options for reallocating funds. 

Legal Framework & Criticisms

Many criticisms of the institution of policing have arisen, arguing that the Equal Protection Clause requires that discriminatory intent be present for a case to be considered a violation of the clause, so lower homicide clearance rates for racial minorities have become increasingly difficult to prove without explicit officer intent to ignore said cases. (5) Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits the government and its actors from denying people benefits, promoting harassment, and limiting federal funding based on race and/or ethnicity. Police departments receiving funding from the Department of Justice are covered under Title VI, examples including COPS funding, or the Community Oriented Policing Services Program. (6) Because of the need for proof of intentional discrimination, disparities are still present at the agency level and are significantly more difficult to prove than in private suits. 

Another criticism of the institutionalization of policing is reflected in police agencies. Across the United States, these agencies continue to suffer from staffing shortages and are consistently given band-aid fixes like more diversity hires and greater retention, while ignoring the suffrage of workload demand, especially in higher crime areas. Calls for service take up a considerable amount of time and workload for officers daily, and performance objectives, such as community policing, also require much more proactive training and policing. (7) 

Several variables play additional roles in determining how many officers are needed, such as “crime rates, job tasks and types of calls, officer to population ratios, mandatory minimums, collective bargaining minimums, shift distribution, …”  that determine the needs of the policing and citizen community. (8) Many of the personnel interviewed for this study stressed that they did not think population-based staffing metrics were accurate, as they did not incorporate community needs, as well as sharing that city budgets sometimes rely on historical precedent that assumes the current policing environment is the same as it was perhaps fifty years ago. (9) 

In the case of United States v. Ferguson (2016), the Department of Justice investigated the Ferguson Police Department in Ferguson, Missouri, under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994. (10) The Supreme Court found that FPD violated the First, Fourth, and Fourteenth Amendments by using racial bias in their crime control by disproportionately stopping, searching, and arresting African Americans to gain as much revenue as possible. This was corroborated by the Department of Justice, where the DOJ ultimately changed its revenue and funding practices to place less emphasis on crime control for the purpose of making money. (11)

Theoretical Application

The Department of Justice falls short on investigating cases of homicide clearance inequalities at the agency level, as most of their rulings on Equal Protection violations are revenue-driven. Investigators play a key role in clearing homicides, which can be explained by Donald Black’s quantity of law hypothesis. He explained that investigator efforts determine the amount of law applied to a case, as well as how many resources are used, alongside the “status,” or extralegal factors of the offender and victim, such as their race, gender, and age. (12) Another hypothesis is the nondiscretionary approach, where the seriousness and pressure to solve a case from the media, public eye, organization, and colleagues lead to maximum investigative effort regardless of race, gender, and age. (13) The nondiscretionary approach, however, falls short in making up for the racial disparities observed in cold homicide cases, as African American homicides and victimization continually face a lack of media representation in comparison to white people. (14) 

Redress & Reform

The persistence of racial disparities in homicide clearance rates underscores a systemic failure when observing how resources are allocated. The mean homicide clearance rates in and around 2022 through to current observations, or homicides for which an arrest was made, are around 60%, where half of the homicides comprise minority adult males murdered in a neighborhood made up of an overwhelming amount of minorities as well. (15) Investigators are reported to only spend around 7% of their time actively solving crimes, whereas the majority of their time is spent focusing on administrative tasks, and only 2.7% of homicide clearances are done using special investigative techniques. (16) Passing these tasks over to secretarial positions, or opening positions for “cold-case squads,” would allow investigators to focus on crime resolution.

Increasing police funding involves a complex dynamic; while it allows for better pay or more officers employed to make up for overloaded crime rates, it also increases low-level crime arrests against Black residents, creating a substantial strain among Black people against their police departments. (17) As previously mentioned, gang violence is a leading cause to explain the enormous gap in violence towards explicitly Black, but also Latino youths. With this comes the consequence of a fear in Black and Latino communities to come forward as witnesses in fear of gang-affiliated threats and intimidation.

After years of low homicide clearance rates, the Boston Police Department employed a problem-oriented policing approach, adding more detectives to its homicide unit, effective investigative procedures, in-depth reviews of forensic technology, better training for investigative personnel, and peer review of ongoing investigations. (18) All of these practices were found to increase BPD’s overall homicide clearance rates by a substantial amount.

A critical point of restructuring police funding for higher homicide clearance rates remains in efforts to better report a holistic analysis of socioeconomic attributes of victims and offenders, using this data relative to crime rates in the areas where the homicides occurred. Current research efforts fail to compile enough data to potentially attribute any offender or victim characteristics to investigative negligence because little data is reported back to the DOJ regarding race-based analyses. 

One such example involves the use of race-disaggregated data, or the breakdown of racial categories to identify socioeconomic disparities. With more funding towards the investigative homicide unit comes a greater need for research and analysis, and these reports can be sent back to the DOJ as a means of conceptualizing racial disparities in cold cases. As of 2020, clearance rates across the country were reported at 87% for white victims and 59% for black victims, with wider gaps in impoverished neighborhoods. (19) 

Staffing should also be allocated proportionately by neighborhood. Neighborhoods with more crime often require more policing and are usually much higher in their homicide rates, especially against minorities, than upper-class neighborhoods. Rather than an even number of investigative detectives assigned to a jurisdiction across the board, more emphasis should be placed on the homicide clearance rates of impoverished, minority communities.

Conclusion

With more funding towards investigative staffing comes the lesser necessity for administrative tasks to overshadow homicide clearances. By allowing other departments to handle non-crime-related and non-investigative tasks, leaving the job of homicide investigation to detectives allows for a significant decrease in pressure to participate in revenue-based tasks and focus on arrests and crime resolutions. With communities that have excessive racial disparities in cold cases and homicide clearances, investigations should be opened to examine officer intent and analyze the factors leading to these large gaps and disparities for a solution-oriented approach.

With police funding comes equity rules. Congress provides police departments funding under certain conditions that must be adhered to. Reform efforts have yet to be made, but plausible changes include requiring reports of clearance rates according to a victim’s race, reporting staffing allocation for lower income neighborhoods, and time spent per case, especially persons cases and homicide cases. This would provide clearer information currently lacking for cross-state research, where there is currently not enough data present on each data report reform listed. Additionally, it would heighten sensitivities and raise concerns about the gap in racial disparities, where high homicide rates are most observed for minorities. While Title VI prohibits discrimination in federally funded programs, there are no current guidelines to report race-based investigative outcomes for homicides.

Is this constitutionally feasible? The restructuring of the Equal Protection Clause to allow for more open investigations into agencies and their discriminatory practices, under the Fourteenth Amendment, could allow for a better awareness of the regulations that must be made to better allocate funds and resources effectively for policing communities. Title VI was made to ensure federal funding would not allow for discriminatory practices, and equity must become a central focus in restructuring federal funding for police departments.

Endnotes

1. U.S. Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division, [Full Report Title] (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice, 2022).

2. The Civil Rights Cold Case Project (2021).

3. Civil Rights Act of 1964, 42 U.S.C. § 2000d (Title VI).

4. James Q. Wilson and John Grammich, Police Staffing and Allocation (Washington, DC: Police Executive Research Forum, 2024).

5. U.S. Const. amend. XIV.

6. Constitution Annotated, 2026 ed.

7. Nathan James, COPS Program (Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, 2026).

8. Richard Coe and Deborah Weisel, Police Performance Metrics (Washington, DC: Police Foundation, 2008).

9. Michelle Alexander, “Homicide Clearance and Investigative Discretion,” [Journal Name] (2012).

10. U.S. Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division, Investigation of the Ferguson Police Department (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice, 2016).

11. Donald Black, The Behavior of Law (New York: Academic Press, 1976).

12. Robert Lyons, “Nondiscretionary Investigative Theory,” [Journal Name] (2009).

13. Jill Leovy, Ghettoside (New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2015), 7.

14. David Bjerk, “Homicide Clearance Rates,” [Journal Name] (2022).

15. Alexander, “Homicide Clearance and Investigative Discretion.”

16. Robert C. Davis et al., Cold-Case Investigations: An Analysis of Current Practices and Factors Associated with Successful Outcomes (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2015).

17. Anthony A. Braga, “Boston Homicide Clearance Study,” [Journal Name] (2016).

18. Slepicka, “National Clearance Rate Disparities,” [Journal Name] (2025).

19. John E. Eck et al., “Problem-Oriented Policing for Reducing Crime and Disorder,” Campbell Systematic Reviews (2020).

20. Stacy M. Brown, “Racial Disparities in Criminal Convictions Disproportionately Harm Blacks: Report,” Washington Informer, January 16, 2024.