London has one of the stronger clearance records of any major city. New research shows why the cases left behind matter as much as the success rate.

London’s Metropolitan Police solves roughly nine of every 10 homicides — a real measure of institutional performance, in a city where killings have been falling for years. But new analysis by Action on Armed Violence finds a very different pattern inside the cases that remain. Between 2019 and 2023, people from minority ethnic backgrounds were 61.7% of London’s homicide victims but 92.9% of victims in unsolved cases. Black people accounted for 40% of all homicide victims in that period — and 73% of the unsolved ones.

That gap changes what a clearance rate can tell you. An institution can solve the overwhelming majority of killings while the small remainder falls almost entirely on particular communities. London averaged about 125 homicides a year over those five years, and 41 killings from the period were still unsolved when researchers ran the analysis. So the question isn’t whether the Met solves murders. It plainly does. The harder question is whose murders are concentrated in the cases where justice never arrives.

The Unsolved Cases Are Different

Race isn’t the only thing separating the unresolved cases from the rest. Method and circumstance matter, too.

Shootings were 8.7% of London homicides between 2019 and 2023 but 38% of the murders that went unsolved. The average homicide victim was about 36 years old; in unresolved cases, 28. Action on Armed Violence found the unsolved cases clustered among younger Black men and firearm violence.

That distinction matters, because the numbers alone don’t show that detectives work a Black victim’s death less hard than a white victim’s. Met officials say street shootings and stabbings are inherently harder to investigate than killings such as domestic homicides, where the relationship between victim and suspect narrows the field immediately. Firearm attacks tend to involve more planning, fewer witnesses willing to testify and less physical evidence linking an offender to a victim.

But that doesn’t make the disparity less structural. It points to where the structure is operating.

Trust Is Part of the Investigative System

Met homicide commander Paul Brogden told The Guardian that serious violence disproportionately affects young Black men, who also report some of the lowest levels of trust in policing. Witness testimony is often decisive in street killings. Which means distrust of police isn’t an abstract measure of community relations — it becomes part of whether investigators ever get the evidence to solve a murder.

The loop is self-reinforcing. Communities with less confidence in police are less willing to talk to investigators. Cases get harder to solve. Unsolved killings then give families and neighbors fresh reason to conclude the system doesn’t protect them equally. Iain Overton of Action on Armed Violence warned the pattern risks entrenching a perception of unequal protection under the law. The trap is that trust is both an outcome of policing and an input policing requires to work.

London’s broader progress makes the contradiction sharper, not softer. The city recorded 97 homicides in 2025, down from 153 in 2019 and its lowest total in a decade. From 2015 through 2024, 110 of 1,222 homicides went unsolved — about 9%. Those figures describe a city getting substantially better at both preventing and resolving lethal violence. They don’t answer the question of who is concentrated inside the remaining 9%.

Equal Protection Can Be Measured in Outcomes

Crime statistics are usually organized around totals: how many murders, whether violence is up or down, what share of cases police close. Those numbers matter. But disaggregating the same data surfaces an institutional experience the average conceals.

No family experiences a clearance rate as 90%. Their case is solved or it isn’t. If Black Londoners are 40% of victims and nearly three-quarters of the unresolved cases, then London’s strong overall performance and its racial disparity are both true at once.

That is what makes these figures more than another crime measure. Equal protection isn’t only the promise that the same law applies to everyone. It can be tested against a harder outcome: whether the odds of finding justice shift depending on whose life was taken.