Crime coverage from Daily Detective News.
Exceptional clearance closes an offense with no arrest and no prosecution, on the agency's own judgment — a status researchers say is used unevenly enough to distort the clearance rates built on it.
Published crime numbers are drafts, not verdicts: agencies amend submissions, the FBI re-estimates, and BJS redesigns — which is why a headline figure can move months after it is released.
The National Crime Victimization Survey interviews households directly, and its numbers routinely exceed police counts by a wide margin — the gap is a measurement fact, not an accusation.
Since the FBI retired its old summary counts, incident-based records have offered a sharper view of burglary, larceny, and motor vehicle theft — if readers know what the transition broke.
The FBI's clearance rate counts a case as solved on much looser terms than most readers assume, and the arithmetic behind it rewards paperwork as much as investigation.