Impact measurement to make homicide investigation in Colombia more efficient

The high impunity indices exacerbate the population's discontent due to the ineptitude of the police force and the entities in charge of providing justice. Citizens maintain a deep perception of distrust toward authorities and, in many cases, they don´t even make complaints knowing that the probability of response is low. At the same time, those who commit crimes know that the possibilities of being convicted are low and, therefore, they will most probably commit crimes. 

Colombia is part of this reality when taking into consideration that of 100 homicides, only 10 are convicted, which means that 90 percent are not solved. One of the greatest challenges faced by the Colombian system is to increase the number of convictions in tribunals to increase the barriers to delinquency. 

Miguel de La Rota, National Director of Policies and Planning from the Nation's Attorney General's Office, explained that "in homicide investigation, traditional procedures are carried out where actors of several specialties interconnect, maintaining a low comunication flow between them, as they do not act as a coordinated team". That is, those who gather the evidence are not necessarily the ones who carry out the investigation, and the latter do not necessarily relate to the prosecutor that heads the case. In the process, details or important information may be omitted, or a long time may pass. These aspects prevent accusations to take place, and, therefore, convictions. 

With the objective of understanding the problem of the low number of accusations and convictions, the Direction of Public Policies and Planning of the Nations' Office of the District Attorney decided to make an exhaustive review of the investigation process and identified the opportunity to improve the way in which the groups that investigate homicides are organized. In addition, to see if a new group structure would have the expected effects, the District Attorney's Office jointly with CAF, Development Bank of Latin America, organized an impact evaluation to generate information that would enable an improvement in the manner in which resources are used during the investigation of homicides. 

For the impact evaluation, the process to investigate homicides was divided into two groups: one control group and one treatment group. The control group is made up of staff assigned to work in the solution of cases in the traditional manner. The treatment group has a leader who organizes the team in order to optimize all the human resources and work jointly during the investigation. The objective of the experiment is to identify if the group that has the new investigation methodology can increase the number of accusations. Cases are assigned randomly to either group. It is estimated that in September of this year the first results of this impact measurement will be published.