• axont [she/her, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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    12 days ago

    Only 40% of homicides get solved and nearly all of those are instances where the person’s identity is very easily obtained by witnesses or family or something. Most homicides involve someone who knew the victim, or at least had prior encounters with them.

    In this case it’s an unknown assailant shooting someone he had presumably never met, and also a person who took pains to conceal their identity. Cops are incredibly lazy and solving murders often relies on luck as much as investigation.

    This kind of thing doesn’t have a lot of precedent though. It’s been a while since a successful high profile assassination. Most assassinations are solved because someone captures the assassin right at the scene, within minutes. This guy has been MIA for over a day with still no name, no identity, not even a description other than probably a white male.

    The assassin is probably not in New York anymore, possibly not even in the USA. He/she could be in Paris by now. The only way I could imagine the feds/cops find this person is DNA or a fingerprint links them to someone who’s already in a database, then who knows. This seemed planned so the assassin could very well be holed up in an embassy Julian Assange style.

        • Thordros [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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          12 days ago

          I may have exaggerated a bit. Fingerprint evidence is almost entirely subjective analysis, relying on the person looking at the prints being ethical and unbiased. A perfect description of cops, if you ask me.

          There have been a lot of high profile cases where fingerprint evidence was a “100% match”, even though that would been impossible. The Madrid train bombings 20 years ago are the first case that immediately comes to mind—a guy halfway across the world, who had no passport, and hadn’t left the country in a decade, had “his” fingerprints all over the bombs. But, he’d recently converted to Islam, and the wAr On TeRrOr had just started firing on all cylinders in Iraq, so he got Patriot Act’d for a month.

          Fingerprints may very well be unique, but subjective analysis ain’t real science.