In the US, most crime also goes unpunished. The numbers I've found for the US are about 14% too, depending on the crime - https://www.statista.com/statistics/194213/crime-clearance-r... . (Larceny , burglary, and property crimes are far more common than the other crimes.)

Frustratingly, wage theft is very common in the US but not covered under criminal law. Quoting https://www.epi.org/publication/wage-theft-bigger-problem-fo...

> Wage theft—employers’ failure to pay workers money they are legally entitled to—affects far more people than more well-known and feared forms of theft such as bank robberies, convenience store robberies, street and highway robberies, and gas station robberies. Employers steal billions of dollars from their employees each year by working them off the clock, by failing to pay the minimum wage, or by cheating them of overtime pay they have a right to receive. Survey research shows that well over two-thirds of low-wage workers have been the victims of wage theft.

Even in the US, different regions have different ways to measure the clearance rate, and as I pointed out with wage theft, even the concept of what is measured differs between jurisdictions.

I therefore find it hard to judge that a raw number like "14%" is easily comparable with other countries.

In researching this I found https://bra.se/bra-in-english/home/publications/archive/publ... from 2014, which makes a similar point:

> The aim is to find explanations for why Sweden has a lower clearance rate than the other countries, despite the fact that victim surveys show that real crime levels are roughly the same.

> One factor of relevance to differences in the clearance rate is the issue of differences in the way the police register crimes. In Sweden, for example, the method used to count the number of reported offences is less restrictive than those employed in the other countries. Several of the countries also use a definition of cleared offences that differs from that employed in Sweden. In some countries, it is sufficient to have registered a suspect on reasonable grounds for the offence to be considered cleared. In Sweden, however, an individual must either have been prosecuted for the offence or issued with a summary sanction order or a waiver of prosecution.

> Finally, the chapter presents an alternative method of measuring police effectiveness in the countries studied, namely the number of conviction decisions per 1,000 of population. Using this measure, Sweden is no worse than the other five countries; in fact, all of the countries lie at approximately the same level.

In that report the official clearance rates were:

Sweden 17
Norway 47
Denmark 18
Netherlands 25
Germany 54
England & Wales 27 / 29

but, for example, "in the Netherlands, as in Germany and Norway, offences are for the most part reported at a police station or at the crime scene. It is also possible to report an offence by telephone or via the internet, but this happens far less often than in Sweden."

Or, in Germany, "If the police consider that a reported incident does not meet these requirements, it is not registered as an offence in the crime statistics. In addition, statistics on reported offences do not include open cases.", and "The procedure employed to produce offence counts is also more restrictive than in Sweden, and employs the principal offence meth-od. Thus, if a perpetrator assaults two men on the same occasion, this is only counted as a single offence in Germany, while in Sweden it would be counted as two separate offences."

These are just some of ways that biases the official statistics in ways that make it difficult to compare numbers directly.