Ask homicide detectives what the No. 1 roadblock to their investigations is, and, by far, the leading response is "witness cooperation." That's one reason the average homicide clearance rate � cases solved by police departments compared with the number of known homicides � which approached 90 percent in 1960 is now a third less, 61 percent......
...Rather than a police tendency to devalue victims from minority communities, hence ignoring or failing to pursue homicide investigations in these areas, it is actually "police devaluation" that is at the root of the problem.
"A victim or a person who knows them might distrust the police," Jarvis says, "but you also have victims who might not want to go to the police. They don't believe the police are the tool or the mechanism for resolving that behavior."
Maybe the fact that the police have no duty to protect any individual person has something to do with people not trusting law enforcement to protect them, do ya think? Why should citizens have faith in police who have no such duty?