Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody (R-FL) is launching a new program to reinvestigate cold cases in Florida in an effort to resolve them. The project will be called Florida's Cold Case Investigations Unit.
The unit will assist Florida law enforcement specifically in homicides. Attorney General Moody announced the new unit under the Office of Statewide Prosecution. CCIU’s mission is to help law enforcement agencies that may lack resources needed to pursue potential leads in unsolved homicide investigations or to provide additional support with evidence testing in difficult cases.
Numbers are already being produced as the unit has already solved their first case, cracking the 2010 murder of a 16-year-old Alachua County boy. However, according to Project Cold Case, there are more than 20,000 open homicide cold cases in Florida since 1965. Florida ranks sixth in the nation for the number of unsolved homicide cold cases—behind California, New York, Texas, Illinois and Michigan, so there is plenty of work to be done.
Moody stated, "There are hundreds of thousands of unsolved murders in the U.S. and that number is growing every year. Florida law enforcement does a great job fighting crime, but when a challenging case goes cold it can be difficult to find the resources to revive the investigation. Our Cold Case Investigations Unit will serve as a resource to law enforcement agencies statewide to help give select unsolved cases new life."
Unsolved crimes are a growing trend nationally. News reports have stated that clearance rates—the percentage of crimes leading to arrests—for violent or property crimes, have dropped to the lowest levels since the Federal Bureau of Investigation began tracking the information in the 1960s. In 2022, police departments nationwide, on average, solved only 37% of these cases.
In general, elected officials and experts have attributed this failure rate to solve cold cases to a shortage of police personnel. However, Moody's new program seems to already be productive.
