in the U.S. It's because were a free society, in which people have civil rights and liberties. And some other, worse reasons as well. But mostly it's because there are real limits to police powers here. We have strict rules of evidence, and an extremely high standard of proof for criminal conviction: "beyond a reasonable doubt."
Law enforcement in America fails at a prodigious rate, but some sort of high failure rate is pretty much baked into our system. If you want the highest rates of crimes solved and crimimals charged you have to move to an authoritarian nation, of which there are plenty to choose from (but you'll be trading one problem for a whole lot of others).
Even for the crime we put the most law enforcement focus on, murder, in America somebody gets arrested only about half the time. Our national murder clearance rate was 59% in 2016 and 61% in 2017... among the lowest in the world. "Clearance" meaning the murderer was arrested, or else identified but couldn't be arrested. Of the latter group, some are already dead themselves, but for others, the police depts' "exceptional clearances," the murderer is known, but the evidence is insufficient for arrest. (Also, some depts. have been known to inflate their clearance rates, "The Wire"- style, by allowing a few unsolved cases to be mis-attributed to somebody already dead or incarcerated. Rare, but it happens.) So, all told, if you're murdered in America, it's about a 50-50 proposition that law enforcement is going to charge somebody for it.
Again, that's for our most aggressively enforced crime.
Now consider burglary or robbery. Arrest rates are much worse. Consider rape. The majority are acquaintance, date, or domestic abuse rapes; the great majority of all rapes aren't even reported. The % of rapes for which someone gets charged is tiny.
How about financial crimes? For well-off bad guys, law enforcement is more abysmal still. How many insider trading financial crimes do we think actually occur for every one in which someone gets indicted? A 5000-to-1 ratio wouldn't surprise me.
In short, the vast majority of crimes committed in America go unpunished. We're just a very goddamned free country, and in practical terms that extends to freedom from arrest for by far the majority of the crimes that Americans commit.
Mueller's team's inability to prove conspiracy between Trump & Co. and Putin's govt should be no surprise at all, to anyone. I remain convinced that considerable communication did go on, through intermediaries if nothing else, between the Kremlin and Trump's astonishingly incompetent clown show of a campaign. So it's disappointing no one's going to jail, or getting evicted from the White House, for it. But that result is completely in keeping with our nation's track record in criminal justice.
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