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Detectives canvassed the area — a mix of dilapidated duplexes, auto repair shops and corner liquors — for witnesses but never found enough evidence. Nine years later, no one has been arrested in Dickson’s slaying, one of thousands of homicides clustered in neighborhoods across the nation where killers are hardly ever b...
The Washington Post has identified the places in dozens of American cities where murder is common but arrests are rare. These pockets of impunity were identified by obtaining and analyzing up to a decade of homicide arrest data from 50 of the nation’s largest cities. The analysis of 52,000 criminal homicides goes beyon...
The Post mapped more than 52,000 homicides and whether each resulted in an arrest.
The analysis identified areas with low homicide arrest rates, which are shaded in orange.
Many of the cities also have areas with high homicide arrest rates, which are shaded in blue.
The overall homicide arrest rate in the 50 cities is 49 percent, but in these areas of impunity, police make arrests less than 33 percent of the time. Despite a nationwide drop in violence to historic lows, 34 of the 50 cities have a lower homicide arrest rate now than a decade ago.
Some cities, such as Baltimore and Chicago, solve so few homicides that vast areas stretching for miles experience hundreds of homicides with virtually no arrests. In other places, such as Atlanta, police manage to make arrests in a majority of homicides — even those that occur in the city’s most violent areas.
In Pittsburgh, a low-arrest zone occupies a run-down stretch of boarded-up buildings, two-story brick homes and vacant lots. In San Francisco, another one falls within a bustling immigrant neighborhood where day laborers and community college students crowd bus shelters and freeways snake overhead. In the District, yet...
As part of an ongoing examination, The Washington Post has compiled and mapped up to a decade of homicide arrest data from 50 of America’s largest cities.
Police blame the failure to solve homicides in these places on insufficient resources and poor relationships with residents, especially in areas that grapple with drug and gang activity where potential witnesses fear retaliation. But families of those killed, and even some officers, say the fault rests with apathetic p...
Detectives said they cannot solve homicides without community cooperation, which makes it almost impossible to close cases in areas where residents already distrust police. As a result, distrust deepens, and killers remain on the street with no deterrent.
“If these cases go unsolved, it has the potential to send the message to our community that we don’t care,” said Oakland police Capt. Roland Holmgren, who leads the department’s criminal investigation division. That city has two zones where unsolved homicides are clustered.
Homicide arrest rates vary widely when examined by the race of the victim: An arrest was made in 63 percent of the killings of white victims, compared with 48 percent of killings of Latino victims and 46 percent of the killings of black victims. Almost all of the low-arrest zones are home primarily to low-income black ...
The data, which The Post is making public, is more precise than the national homicide data published annually by the FBI. The federal data fails to distinguish whether a case was closed due to an arrest or other circumstances, such as the death of the suspect, and does not have enough detail to allow for the mapping of...
In Omaha, police made an arrest in nearly 60 percent of homicides across the city. But the 12-block area where Dickson was killed saw an arrest in just 15 percent of its homicides.
There are 17 cities where killings have spiked over the past decade but where police now make fewer arrests. One is Indianapolis, where only 64 of the 155 criminal homicides last year resulted in an arrest.
The city has four zones with a high concentration of unsolved killings.
Among them is Crown Hill, a neighborhood of primarily poor black residents living in modest single-family homes. In the past decade, there have been 40 killings but only 12 arrests.
In the absence of justice, community activists such as the Rev. Charles Harrison, 57, have taken it upon themselves to try to stop the killing.
Harrison runs a nonprofit group that has mobilized 50 people to embed themselves in Crown Hill and the other areas plagued by violence. He said the goal is to gather street knowledge — tips, gossip, relationships — that can help police solve killings and prevent future ones.
One recent morning, Harrison stood inside the foyer of his home, flipping through a leather-bound notebook. In it, he tracks the violence in Crown Hill and three other neighborhoods, recording how many days it has been since a young person was killed. Each morning, Harrison updates the numbers; his notebook’s pages now...
In interviews, Indianapolis police officials blamed the low arrest rates in Crown Hill and elsewhere on frayed relationships with residents and on witnesses who are unwilling to cooperate.
“The lack of cooperation is what we battle the most,” Deputy Chief Chris Bailey said.
Retaliation is a real fear. Henry Nunn Sr., 63, was killed in 2015 after he testified in court about a shooting he witnessed. Police note that in December, a local gang posted a YouTube video titled “Ain’t no tellin,” filmed at a cemetery. In it, gang members act out a scene in which a young man is bound, doused in gas...
But police also acknowledge department shortcomings: In a city where 69 percent of those killed are black, 24 of 30 homicide detectives are white.
Detective Marcus Kennedy, 58, who is retiring next year after more than three decades with the department, said he thinks cases go unsolved because some of his colleagues spend too much time at their desks instead of working the streets.
Kennedy, who is black, said his peers also have failed at times to treat people in the community with respect. “Some detectives, you know, not to call them out, but I mean they’ll piss people off real quick. Just with an attitude,” he said.
He recalled a killing several years ago in which some of his colleagues offended a homicide witness, a drug-addicted woman. Kennedy said he had to go to the crime scene and smooth things over with the woman and another person who was at the home.
“I kind of charmed them and then went back the next day, and she said, ‘Let me see your notebook pad,’ and she wrote down who did it,” Kennedy said.
Police made an arrest based on the information the woman provided, and she served as a witness at trial, in which the suspect was convicted. Kennedy bought the woman a $5 bottle of Night Train Express wine for her help.
In sprawling Los Angeles, police are proud of their homicide statistics over the past decade. The number of killings has dropped annually, and more than half of the 2,200 homicides since 2010 have led to an arrest, which is slightly better than average for cities surveyed. Yet the city has several pockets where unsolve...
In Pico-Union, a gentrifying Latino neighborhood, 19 killings have led to five arrests. Right across the 110 freeway in downtown Los Angeles, a much larger area, three-quarters of homicides this decade have been solved.
It’s been nearly seven years since 18-year-old Daniel Williams was shot in the head on Oct. 13, 2011, as he stood in front of a store on Pico Boulevard, one of Pico-Union’s main commercial drags.
His mother, Frances Williams, 45, drove the neighborhood searching for her son after getting a call about the shooting. By the time she found him, he was at a hospital, where he died a few days later.
Frances Williams said she thinks police have not prioritized the case because they are wrongly convinced her son was part of a gang.
A department spokesman denied Frances Williams’s claim and said police are “relentless” in their efforts to solve every homicide, including the killing of her son. He noted that when including cases closed for reasons other than arrest, Los Angeles police solved 73 percent of their homicides in 2017.
In the weeks after Williams’s death, police said they detained a suspect but released the man for lack of evidence. No one has since been arrested or charged in the killing.
In interviews, police said most of the killings in Pico-Union are linked to Latino gangs, primarily with roots in El Salvador. Many of the killings are drive-bys or walk-up shootings, and at times, the killers target the family members of rivals, stoking fear across the community, police said. This means witnesses are ...
Charles Wellford, a University of Maryland criminologist who for two decades has studied homicide closure rates, said some types of homicide — gang violence, drive-by shootings, stranger-on-stranger killings — can be especially challenging to solve.
One key to cracking these cases, homicide investigators said, is cultivating suspects’ family members — particularly mothers or girlfriends — who may have information about a killing.
“Lots of the time I would try to get that girlfriend or that sister or that mother to trust me,” said John Skaggs, who retired from the Los Angeles Police Department last year after24 years as a homicide detective. Skaggs, 53, had a reputation as one of the department’s best investigators and was the central figure in ...
Skaggs estimated that he solved nearly 90 percent of the 350 homicides he handled, primarily by pounding the pavement.
“There are a lot of detectives in this country that love sitting at their desk,” said Skaggs, who now travels the country training homicide detectives.
Omaha police said the July 2009 killing of Christopher Dickson outside the liquor store on the north side of the city officially remains under investigation. The reality, experts said, is that the longer a case lingers, the less likely it will ever be solved.
To Dickson’s family, the trail feels as though it has long since gone cold.
In the years since the shooting, Dickson’s widow — who believes he was targeted for robbery — has taken it upon herself to generate tips. She holds a block party each year, on the anniversary of the shooting, aimed at drumming up publicity. Family members heard a rumor that someone in prison had bragged about the killi...
Omaha police officials declined to answer specific questions about Dickson’s killing or address rumors about a potential suspect. Schmaderer, the police chief, said that in most of their unsolved murders, police believe they know who committed the crime but lack the evidence to make an arrest.
Like their counterparts in other cities, police officials in Omaha said that homicide victims and perpetrators are often among the same pool of people.
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Gangs are a factor in the neighborhood where Dickson was killed, a heavily trafficked area that is home to several bars and a public housing complex. While police do not believe that Dickson’s killing involved drugs or gangs, most of the other 12 killings in the neighborhood since 2007 have some gang connection, accord...
Police have made arrests in just two of the 13 killings — both cases in which police benefited from a measure of luck.
On May 30, 2016, when officers found Angela Parks, 60, stabbed to death in her small home on Pinkney Street, the suspected killer, her 58-year-old roommate, Darlene Endsley, was still at the scene. Endsley was arrested, convicted and sentenced to prison for manslaughter.
The only other murder to result in an arrest in this part of North Omaha in the past decade was the slaying of Virgil Dunn on Dec. 10, 2013.
Just before 10 p.m., Dunn, 34, was leaving a liquor store when he was confronted by two men who robbed him of his wallet and a pack of cigarillos. When Dunn ran, one of the robbers shot him six times in the back. Near the shooting scene, police found a red baseball cap.
Two months later, during an unrelated traffic stop, Omaha police found a six-shot revolver beneath the passenger seat. Ballistic tests confirmed that it was the gun used to kill Dunn. And the passenger, Teon Hill, was linked via DNA to the baseball cap left at the scene. In 2016, Hill was sentenced to life in prison fo...
Police officials acknowledge the challenges they face in some neighborhoods but said improving arrest rates has been a priority. In 2017, Omaha police made arrests in 69 percent of the city’s homicides, and officials said they are working to make arrests in unsolved cases from prior years.
They said they have renewed efforts to engage residents in parts of North Omaha where trust has historically been lacking and now hold weekly gatherings of police, public health officials, philanthropists and community leaders.
Still, residents noted that dozens of cases in North Omaha remain unsolved.
“Providing closure to the families could possibly reduce the violence,” said Akile Banister, a lifelong North Omaha resident who has launched a youth leadership academy in honor of Kentril Banister, his 20-year-old cousin who was shot and killed in the neighborhood on April 10, 2010.
It was the second time in three years that one of Banister’s cousins had been gunned down in North Omaha. No one has been arrested in connection with either killing.
In the case of Dickson’s homicide, his widow said she hasn’t given up hope.
Deborah Taylor said she no longer calls detectives each week, but she said she still plans to hold her yearly block party next month to generate tips.
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The Washington Post compiled up to a decade of homicide arrest data from 50 of America’s largest cities.
The Post mapped and analyzed the data to identify the homicides that most often led to an arrest and those that did not.
Homicide arrest rates were calculated by victim’s race, age, gender and location. The Post’s data, which provides a level of specificity lacking in the homicide data released annually by the FBI, is being released publicly and will be expanded over 2018.
To provide information about homicides in your area, send us an email at unsolved@washpost.com.
Design and development by Danielle Rindler and Leslie Shapiro. Maps by Lauren Tierney. Editing by David Fallis and Kaeti Hinck. Produced by Julie Vitkovskaya. Copy editing by Matt Schnabel.
Base maps created using data from Maps4News/HERE and ESA Sentinel imagery.
Video reporting by Dalton Bennett.
Additional reporting by Julie Tate, Jennifer Jenkins, Kristian Hernandez, Matt Bernardini, Mitra Malek and Samuel Northrop.
Have you been the victim of a crime? Tell us about how the police responded.
The Washington Post is collecting stories of personal interactions between crime victims and police departments.
Do you have a tip on Highway 20 disappearances?
Where is Rachanda Pickle’s body? Did anybody see teenagers Melissa Sanders and Sheila Swanson on Highway 20 before they vanished in 1992?
Investigators believe state highway mechanic John Ackroyd is responsible for the disappearances of all three teenagers in addition to the crime he was convicted of committing: the 1978 murder of runner Kaye Turner. Ackroyd also raped Marlene Gabrielsen in 1977, though he wasn’t charged in the attack.
Decades have passed but detectives hope that renewed attention to the cases might jog memories or provide new information that can shed light on what happened to the women.
To the police and prosecutors who tracked him, Ackroyd is a confirmed serial killer.
But how many others might Ackroyd have found and harmed along his route?
Authorities point to the remains or clothes of five other people found in the 1970s in the isolated wilderness not far from Highway 20 -- and all in Linn County, where Ackroyd grew up.
1976: The skull of one unidentified woman was found a mile off Highway 20, on Swamp Mountain.
1977: The remains of Elizabeth Mussler, 22, of Lebanon were discovered in a shallow grave in the Thistle Creek area of Green Peter Reservoir.
1977: Friends Karen Lee, 15, and Rodney Grissom, 14, made their final phone call from Lebanon. Their bodies were never found but Karen’s jeans, pages of her journal and the blouse she’d sewn for a school project were found off a logging road in the Upper Soda Fork area of Linn County. Five years later, some of Grissom’...
1978: The skull of another unidentified woman was found by a logging crew in the woods a quarter-mile south of the highway near Snow Creek.
No evidence linked Ackroyd to any of these other deaths, but the cases all remain open. Their timing and proximity to Highway 20 prompted investigators to wonder if the mechanic had a hand in them.
If you have information about Ackroyd or the disappearances: Call the Linn County Sheriff’s Office tip line at 866-557-9988.
Demand for physical gold out of China and other emerging markets has become the key driver of bullion prices, according to HSBC, as the rampant outflows from exchange traded funds (ETF) seen last year begin to stabilize.
"Investment demand, which had fueled the rally for over a decade, is no longer driving gold prices," James Steel analyst at HSBC wrote in a report on Tuesday.
"Instead, we believe gold is being driven by physical demand for jewelry, coins, and bars from China, in particular. Indeed, we would argue that physical demand trends in the emerging world will largely define gold's price movements this year," Steel added.
Gold's 12-year bull-run ended in 2013, with prices suffering their largest annual decline since 1981 as the Federal Reserve's decision to taper its monthly asset purchases triggered heavy ETF selling.
Investors liquidated 881 tons of gold from ETF holdings last year, reducing total holdings by one-third from their peak at the end of 2012.
While the prospect for further liquidation exists, the bulk of ETF sales have likely occurred, the bank said, forecasting ETF demand will increase by around 90 tons this year.
As institutional investors shun gold, Chinese consumers have come to the rescue, absorbing the flood of gold from the ETFs. Last year, China overtook India to become the largest consumer of the yellow metal, and the bank expects to see continued robust demand out of the mainland.
"China is the main actor in what has become a historic physical migration of gold from western investment hands to eastern consumers," Steel said, noting that the country alone is absorbing the equivalent of half the world's gold mine production.
While the pace of gold buying in China may moderate this year from the white-hot levels of 2013, there's no reason for a notable slowdown, he said.
As economic policy shifts from export- and investment-driven growth to greater domestic consumption, this should benefit the purchases for luxury gold items and stimulate consumption in regions where, up to now, demand has been modest, he added.
Based largely on the growing appetite for gold in China, the bank forecasts a 5 percent on-year increase in jewelry demand to 2,310 tons in 2014.
Nonetheless, the HSBC is leaving its price forecasts for gold unchanged at an average of $1,292 per ounce for 2014, below current levels of $1,350.
"[We] expect a slight reduction in mine growth supply, weak increases in scrap supplies, steady central bank demand, and ongoing increases in jewelry, coin, and bar demand," he said.

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