What is Minneapolis's close rate on homicide cases

1. Why the question matters — closure rates and public trust

Homicide clearance rates matter because they measure how often investigators identify and arrest a suspect, a metric that affects victims’ families, public safety perceptions, and political pressure on city officials; reporting has repeatedly framed Minneapolis’s clearance performance as a policy and equity problem that feeds mistrust in Black communities who are disproportionately victimized ^{[1] [4]}.

2. What the reporting says about Minneapolis’s clearance performance

Multiple news reports and local analyses describe Minneapolis as having an unusually low clearance rate in the pandemic and post‑George Floyd years, with NPR reporting that “more than half the homicides in Minneapolis this year remain unsolved,” an explicit indication the clearance rate dipped below roughly 50 percent in that coverage period ^[1], while CBS/WCCO framed the city within a national trend of “barely half” of U.S. murders getting solved and reported Minneapolis struggled relative to national averages ^[2].

3. How police explain the shortfall

Minneapolis police leaders cited understaffing, high caseloads, and a surge in homicides as primary explaining factors for low clearance rates, and noted the department has sought help from state and federal partners—FBI, ATF and the BCA have been embedded with the homicide unit—while also saying internal data reviews have occurred to ensure accuracy of clearance metrics ^[2].

4. Alternative framings and criticism

Civil‑society voices, criminologists and some city officials point to structural issues—historic disinvestment, unequal treatment of Black residents, community distrust that undermines cooperation, and questions about how the city tallies certain categories of homicide—that complicate a simple “staffing” explanation and raise doubts about whether reforms have addressed root causes ^{[1] [5]}.

5. Recent trends complicate a single answer

Coverage from 2023–2025 shows declining homicide counts in some years and signs of improvement in other metrics; for example, city reporting and local outlets noted year‑to‑year falls in homicides and other violent crimes in early 2025, and Minneapolis leaders announced reorganization of major crimes as part of a response to persistent clearance concerns ^{[6] [3] [7]}. Those shifts suggest the clearance story is dynamic, not frozen at a single low number.

6. Precise percentage — what the supplied reporting can and cannot say

The supplied sources repeatedly describe clearance rates as “low” and report that more than half of Minneapolis homicides were unsolved in specific reporting windows ^{[1] [2]}, but none of the provided documents gives a single, authoritative current percentage figure for Minneapolis’s homicide clearance rate as of now; therefore reporting supports a clear qualitative conclusion (below national norms and at times under ~50%) but does not permit stating an exact, up‑to‑date numeric close rate from this source set ^{[1] [2] [3]}.

7. Bottom line and what to watch next

Minneapolis’s homicide clearance rate has been widely reported as troublingly low—at times leaving more than half of killings unsolved—and city officials attribute that to staffing and caseload pressures while critics cite deeper structural and data‑quality issues; readers seeking a precise, current percentage should consult the city’s Crime Dashboard or the latest MPD and FBI/UCR/FBI NIBRS releases for an up‑to‑date numeric clearance rate, because the articles supplied document the problem without providing one definitive, current rate ^{[8] [2] [1]}.