Kyle Mazza/NurPhoto via AP
Police officers on the scene investigating a shooting in Philadelphia, May 24, 2023
Serious crime is dropping across most of the United States. Homicides are down by an estimated 12 percent in the first half of 2023; as Jeff Asher writes at The Atlantic, if the trend holds up it would put the country about where it was before the pandemic, and make for one of the largest percentage drops in American history. In New York City, shootings are down by one-quarter.
Violent crime is a complex phenomenon influenced by many factors. But none of the case studies of plummeting crime rates indicate that throwing ever more money at police departments was the key to the new trend. In fact, the evidence reinforces the need to reform corrupt departments, to address the ongoing crisis of trust in so many cities.
Four stories are illustrative. The first and likely most representative is in Philadelphia, where as Ellie Rushing reports, shootings are down by about 20 percent and homicides down about 18 percent relative to last year (though still quite a bit higher than before COVID-19). That is despite the fact that, like most American cities, little has changed with respect to Philly crime policy. The district attorney and police chief and mayor are all the same people as last year, and the police department is still plagued with problems. The homicide clearance rate is up, to be fair, but only to 61 percent.
Lesson: The ongoing drop in homicides is probably reversion to the pre-pandemic mean. As Rushing writes, “The motives behind most homicides remain largely the same: arguments, drugs, domestic disputes, and neighborhood feuds.” The pandemic was horribly stressful and traumatic, and fueled a lot of conflict. That memory is now fading. Meanwhile, the resentments surrounding the George Floyd protests, during which Philadelphia cops brutally beat and tear-gassed protesters, are also fading with the passage of time and department reforms, helped along by some grudging dismissals of bad cops.
The second story is in San Francisco, where the reform district attorney Chesa Boudin was successfully recalled last year through a hair-on-fire crime panic propaganda campaign funded by reactionary Big Tech oligarchs. Boudin was replaced with police union favorite Brooke Jenkins. Fast-forward a year, and crime is worse than it was under Boudin: Murders, robberies, and vehicle thefts are all up. Even on drug crime, where Jenkins loudly promised to institute Nixon-style harsh penalties for users and dealers, she has convicted fewer drug dealers than Boudin did over a similar period, and opioid overdose deaths are on track to hit a record.
San Francisco crime ought to be coasting down as it is in most places, but it’s going up instead, and the only obvious change relative to last year is in DA policy. Lesson: Promising to harshly punish criminals doesn’t necessarily accomplish anything, and might actually make crime worse.
The third story concerns Golden Valley, a wealthy, smallish suburb of Minneapolis, largely full of white liberals. As Radley Balko details at The New York Times, when the George Floyd protests happened, the city responded with some reforms, including hiring the first Black police chief and first high-ranking Black woman officer. The largely white police department was outraged, and more than half—some of whom were later discovered to have made racist comments about the chief—resigned. After that, crime went down.
Now, crime was admittedly already low in Golden Valley, but the lesson remains: Abusive, racist police can be worse than nothing.
The fourth story concerns an incredibly deadly neighborhood in West Baltimore, which was the site for a test of something called the “Group Violence Reduction Strategy.” This is when police are paired with respected community members (often reformed former convicts) and social support services, so as to connect with the small minority of people who commit most crimes and convince them to chill out or seek help. Sure enough, homicides and nonfatal shootings went down by 33 percent—and as this careful Baltimore Banner investigation shows, the experimental reform is the most likely explanation.
Lesson: Police can act as a deterrent, but only if they are actually respected, and can work much more effectively in concert with other social services.
For many years, apologists for American-style policing have deployed a tautological argument about crime. If it goes up, then it’s an emergency requiring more funding for police; if it goes down, then police deserve credit and more funding. The reality is more complicated. Societies with little violent crime—say, Norway—tend to be ones where economic inequality is low, where guns are difficult to access, where social services are generous and readily available, and above all, where the state is trusted to adjudicate conflicts. Police have a role to play in catching criminals, but can only serve as a deterrent if they are trusted.
It follows that abusive, racist cops create crime. When departments develop a bad reputation among some population, witnesses will refuse to cooperate with investigations, so crimes go unsolved, and people take justice into their own hands. But conversely, purging departments of abusive racists—and diverting money spent on cop overtime scams to social services—will reduce crime.
