For more than half a century, police clearance rates across the United States have been on a steady downward trajectory. Homicides, assaults, robberies, and property crimes are increasingly going unsolved, not because officers care less or communities are less cooperative, but because the fundamental math of policing has quietly broken down.
At the center of the problem is chronic understaffing.
Over the past several decades, the number of police officers per capita in the U.S. has dropped dramatically. While population has grown, call volume has increased, and crime has become more complex, the size of police agencies has not kept pace. In many jurisdictions, departments are operating with staffing levels comparable to the 1960s while facing vastly greater demands.
The result is predictable: fewer officers, less time per case, and declining clearance rates across nearly every crime category.
Modern policing is not limited by intent or professionalism. It is limited by time.
Officers today spend enormous portions of their shifts on tasks that do not directly involve solving crimes: writing reports, reviewing body-worn camera footage, completing administrative documentation, responding to public records requests, and preparing case files. These tasks are necessary, but they are also deeply time-intensive.
When staffing levels are low, every administrative hour comes at the expense of investigative work. Detectives carry overwhelming caseloads. Patrol officers lack the bandwidth to follow up on leads. Evidence goes unreviewed. Cases stall, not because they are unsolvable, but because there simply aren't enough hours in the day.
Clearance rates don't decline all at once. They erode gradually as agencies are forced to prioritize response over resolution.
For decades, the primary response to declining clearance rates has been to call for more officers. But hiring alone has proven to be an unreliable solution.
Recruitment pipelines are strained. Training takes years. Budgets are constrained. Attrition remains high. Even when agencies successfully hire, they are often replacing departing staff rather than growing overall capacity.
The reality is that most departments cannot realistically return to historical police-per-capita levels through hiring alone. The gap between demand and capacity is now structural.
To reverse the decline in clearance rates, policing needs a fundamentally new approach to scale.
TRULEO AI introduces a different solution: digital labor. Rather than attempting to solve understaffing by adding more humans to an increasingly constrained system, TRULEO augments existing personnel with AI-powered capabilities that take on the most time-consuming parts of police work.
TRULEO automates tasks such as reviewing and analyzing body-worn camera footage, generating reports, identifying key events, and surfacing critical insights that would otherwise take hours or days of manual work. What once required multiple staff members and extensive overtime can now be completed in minutes.
This is not about replacing officers. It's about multiplying them.
By removing administrative drag, TRULEO effectively restores and even surpasses the traditional police-per-capita ratio. Each officer becomes dramatically more productive, able to focus on investigations, community engagement, and proactive policing rather than paperwork.
When officers have more time, clearance rates rise. It's that simple.
With digital labor handling the background work, detectives can move faster. Patrol officers can follow up. Supervisors gain visibility into performance and patterns. Cases progress instead of piling up.
What's most important is that this improvement is not marginal. It is exponential. AI does not fatigue, does not take shifts off, and does not scale linearly. One system can support an entire department simultaneously.
This creates the possibility of something that has felt unattainable for decades: clearance rates approaching levels once thought impossible in modern policing.
Not by working officers harder but by finally giving them the support they've needed all along.
The decline in clearance rates is not inevitable. It is the result of a mismatch between 20th-century staffing models and 21st-century policing demands.
TRULEO AI closes that gap.
By delivering digital labor purpose-built for law enforcement, TRULEO enables agencies to do more with the resources they already have, restoring investigative capacity, improving accountability, and strengthening trust with the communities they serve.
For the first time in 50 years, the trajectory of clearance rates doesn't have to point downward.
With the right tools, it can turn sharply upward.
Book a quick 15-minute demo today!