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It varies, a lot, even within a single jurisdiction. I've seen indictments where police clearly spent hundreds of manhours chasing down every possible lead, and others where a slam-dunk case gets dropped cause no one could be arsed to handle all the court forms. Baltimore's probably (hopefully?) the most extreme example, where proximity to DC has gotten the police department a remarkable breadth of camera systems, license plate scanners, open-source intel analysts, and investigatory resources, and even for murders and just for those where the investigation has been publicly disclosed, there's a wide disparity that's clearly unrelated to the strength of the initial leads.
There's a reputation for 'missing white girl' syndrome to drive that, and it's not wrong, but elderly couples or young kids of any race can get sizable attention and interest, and even the prototypical gang banger on gang banger violence can (rarely) if there's something about the incident that drives political or local interest. There's a reputation for corruption driving a lot of that, it's it's not wrong. Baltimore's GTTF scandal was probably known by 10%+ of the force, which is appalling when they were shaking down civilians, and shocking when you remember that they were selling guns to people shooting at other cops.
((Sometimes "who" matters in a different way: I've seen grand theft on small businesses that were probably destined for the 'when we get to it' pile, except the business coordinated with other similar small businesses to demonstrate an interstate pattern with a clear direction and unique identifying characters, and while that 'only' gets the equivalent of a national wanted poster, it gets a lot of highway patrols looking for an easy to way make a big arrest.))
On the flip side, there's a problem with the world where you don't. It's very easy to come up with a plan where there's no witnesses and any physical evidence is destroyed! You end up with massive selection pressures toward the most dangerous criminal behaviors.
It's definitely and definitionally not possible to provide above-average effort for every case; there's far too much uncertainty to triage cases in a QALY-like manner; it's definitely possible to triage cases at all and find deep investigation still valuable.
I've mixed feelings.
How effective community-oriented or 'broken windows' theory of policing is controversial, and not just for the normal crimonology versus social justice reasons: even the best evidence in favor has been hard to pull apart from normal economic impacts. But the extent that dangerous criminals routinely grow into violent crime from, act on, and rely on casual disruptive law-breaking make Pealian community-oriented boots-on-roads policing very hard to overlook, and it's just not compatible with the All Available Effort approach.
But in turn the overwhelming majority of successful boots-on-roads efforts come in communities with unsophisticated and disorganized criminals, in cultures not predisposed to escalatory violence. They seldom, if ever, can point to clear successes -- even short of actually reducing broad strokes of crime, even just in getting inroads with the civilian populace -- in low-trust societies.
I think, though, this ultimately missed the deeper question: "can they choose"?
A bloodless focus on the easiest-to-solve crimes will near-unavoidably leave cops focusing on trivial but simple-to-prove laws: it's what Sam Francis wanted to be talking about for anarchotyranny. In extreme cases, the knowledge that police will happily pass out tickets or throw someone in jail for selling lossies, but won't handle a serious theft or assault unless the offender is caught redhanded, is strong motivation to never include or cooperate with police at all. Hyperprioritization of serious crime leads to the mirror problem, where those massive investments chasing hard-to-solve crimes end up wasted not just because the crimes are hard, but because the police quickly looses the community relations, familiarity with the domain, and trial experience necessary to bring a case to conviction.
This is a classic Motte comment. Demonstrates the complexity and interdependencies of a problem, relative tradeoffs, real world likely impacts and outcomes, and doesn't use any cliche argumentation, sloganeering, etc.
So, of course, my only response is: Defund The Police because Blue Lives Matter.
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