CCJS Professor Emeritus Charles F. Wellford along with UMD alumni Cynthia Lum and Ph.D. student Tom Scott have been awarded $570,000 by the Arnold Foundation to support their research on crime clearances. 

The project will use trajectory analysis on clearance rates for all index offenses for the period 1980 to 2013 to identify clearance patterns in large agencies. They plan on analyzing how organizational characteristics are related to these patterns and collect information on samples of investigations to determine what accounts for variations in clearances. The team’s ultimate goal is to identify ways to increase fair and accurate clearances for serious crime.