"The level of violence should be understood primarily as a function of the extent to which state capacity is exerted to stop it. Violence, that is, is a policy choice."
I endorse many of your proposals -- collect more data, speed up the court system, prioritize spending in cities, etc. But the quotation and the framing reek of mid-60s hubris. E.g.:
"The level of illegal drug use should be understood primarily as a function of the extent to which state capacity is exerted to stop it. Drug use, that is, is a policy choice."
"The level of communist influence in Indochina should be understood primarily as a function of the extent to which state capacity is exerted to stop it. Letting Hanoi win, that is, is a policy choice."
This attitude that we can simply apply "state power" in ever-increasing quantities in order to win a War On X has proven to be a bad guide to policy in the past.
At the very least, policy should be guided by the understanding that "as a function" will mean "as a linear function" only for the easiest parts of the curve, and may mean "as a logarithmic function" or even "as an asymptotic function" for most of the curve. Reducing violence by a third (e.g.) may be a "policy choice" that requires non-infinite resources; eliminating violence is probably not one.
I'm asking for more incrementalism in the approach and the rhetoric -- at least a little bit more.
I'm generally in favor of more money to the court systems. It seems to me that the amount of time it takes to adjudicate cases must carry with it an enormous financial cost (beyond just the morality of keeping someone in limbo possibly for months before their case is even tried or settled). Sort of fits with one of my conclusions I've had since Ferguson*; a lot of the problems we pin on police are actually problems with the court system. There is the aforementioned time lag it takes sometimes for cases to be decided. But there is also the enormous capriciousness that can accompany how one DAs office operates vs. another. A lot of time has been spent on this Substack pushing back against the more left wing DAs out there with Chesa Boudin probably being the most famous example. But the rise of leftwing DAs is in part a reaction to some pretty abhorrent practices that seem to have and still exist in various DA offices across the country (see Ken Paxton. AG I know, but serves my point Or see the office in FL where apparently a DA explicitly in writing said they should treat Hispanic people differently).
This leads me to also say that one reason prison reform gained momentum was people pointing out that having prison populations explode carried it's own costs. There is the literal cost of prisons, guards, food etc. that falls on taxpayers. Then there is the cost to communities of having large swaths of working age men (and yes usually men) not only prison but having prison records permanently attached to their name. Just something to think about before going gung ho on throwing more money at the situation (again, not necessarily against).
*One of the other underrated parts of Ferguson is how much anti-tax policy can end up have perverse effects. My understanding is that absent sufficient tax revenue, there came to be an enormous incentive for the local minimalities to essentially "nickel and dime" their citizens with moving citations, traffic citations and other fines almost a revenue raiser. Police essentially became pseudo tax collectors in some sense. And considering Ferguson is not particularly well off, this had pretty terrible consequences in particular cases as people could not get fines and then would incur late fees they had not chance of paying. I know this probably didn't have much to do with the death of Michael Brown (don't want to relitigate the what really happened question), but thought this was one the more enlightening things to learn out of this situation.
One of the earlier times I remember noticing media bubbles was on that very issue of Ferguson. The FBI/DOJ did two seperate investigations into Ferguson. One was a criminal investigation into the shooting of Michael Brown (which found that the initial reports were mostly fabricated by people who wanted to by on tv, and the shooting began inside the police car during a fight over the officer's pistol and spilled out into the street, where it was justified by most understandings of the law) and the other of the Ferguson Police department's patterns and practices generally (which found that something like 60% of the city budget was coming from police-driven enforcement actions designed to nickle and dime people in the city municipal court or through other fees and assest seizures, with some pretty crazy stats.) If you watched conservative news, it was videos of stores burning down and lawyers explaining how the shooting was justified. If you watched left leaning news, it was peaceful marching and people reading about the racially disperate impact of having the police issue something like twice as many arrest warrants as there were people in the town, and the municipal court only being open during the morning weekdays (to encourage non:
On the cost of prison records attached to people's names: this is usually a cost born by the individual, in most cases fairly (you shouldn't get 4 DUIs, you shouldn't hit your wife, etc..) but it's not a cost to society in the wayI am reading you. Credentials of this sort are primarily about ranking. If we doubled the amount of Ivy League grads, for example, we wouldn't suddenly give twice as many people "Ivy League Jobs", we would more be just diluting the positive elite signaling of a Yale degree. Likewise, if 1 out of 5 job applicants has a criminal record, I'm much more likely to dismiss that 1, but if 1 out of 3 have records, I start to lose that luxury.
The other things is that it's no coincidence that police have borne a disproportionate share for legal system problems. They are the "front office staff" of criminal justice, like actors in a movie or players on a sports team. On top of that they are perceived as blue collar, white and conservative, which are all things that the Democrat Elite increasingly distances themselves from. Meanwhile, the educated lawyers and judges are becoming a core component of the Left establishment. So they are the last people the Democrats or academics or journalists want to blame.
There's actually a lot of progressive criticism of the justice system and court system generally. Again, see momentum to get more progressive DAs elected. But also see how often stories of death row inmates being released after it's revealed the DA withheld evidence or really shoddy evidence was used to convict someone. Heck, there "true crime" boom in podcasts can be traced to NPR's serial podcast which among other things pointed real holes in the prosecution's case.
In fact it's probably the opposite that's happening. Given how much education polarization is happening, it means lawyers are increasingly a left leaning bunch and it's almost certainly leading to more reporting of real problems in the criminal justice system; not just the blatant stuff, but things like disparities in sentencing guidelines (among other problems). And it's not just print. You can make an argument that Chris Hayes is the most prominent left leaning TV news pundit out there and his book "Colony in a Nation" is as much if not more about the court system as policing.
I've heard this argument before in regards to taxes as well. That the changing nature of the Democratic coalition means that Democrats will suddenly get a lot more hesitant about raising taxes on the wealthy. And that's...not happening. As Matt has pointed out, the donors in the Democratic party tend to be more left wing then normie voters and not just on identity politics issues. Maybe this will change over time, but so far that hasn't been the case with taxes or criminal justice.
I definitely agree that we will need to approach this with incrementalism, but I think he does. The evidence that he recites about the US being on the far end of the curve with regards to crime and particularly violence suggests that we are closer to the linear side than the exponential. His recommendations are relatively mild and seem aimed at low hanging fruit instead of aiming for the moon to mix my metaphors. For someone on the right, the language he uses sounds remarkably like a progressive speaking about poverty.
“That’s a lot! It’s about 20x all property crime losses, which are only about $15 billion…the cost of the criminal justice system is still higher than the cost of murder”
Only if you assume that reducing criminal justice spending would *not* result in more crimes being committed.
Precisely. This sort of half-assed cost-benefit analysis is worse than useless because short of enacting a real-world “Purge Night” as a control, we have only a limited inkling of what crime we’re actually preventing.
Where does the curve intercept the Y-axis in the US? 100 murders per 100,000 people annually? 500? 1000?
How many accidental deaths would self-defense measures and weapons additionally cause if you tried to drop enforcement to nothing?
It’s clear to me that if you do the reductio ad absurdum and literally defund the police, courts, and prisons, there will still be policing, judgement, and punishment. It would just be unprofessional, lawless, and vigilante.
Not to mention, and this is likely to be as large a problem as all the others put together, *messy*.
Pre-modern conceptions of justice were a shitshow in which killing dozens of innocent-but-related people including unarmed noncombatants in order to execute a single criminal was an accepted part of the process. The early elective kingships had very little recourse but to call the noble’s representative body into session and cajole all the clans into attacking the one which harbored a member who raped another noble’s daughter, lest long-term disorder break out.
I just can’t even imagine the implications of so thoroughly crippling the administration of justice today.
You shouldn’t compare costs of the system to the costs of crimes actually committed - you should compare it to the cost of crimes prevented. Otherwise you’re like the COVID-skeptics who compare the costs of shutdowns to the number of lives actually lost, rather than the lives saved.
But the benefits might include reduced SS and welfare spending on murder victims.
I'm kidding. Well, the statement is true. But I think it's a bit absurd to try to numerically tally $ costs benefits of crime. I tend to think that there is real ROI, and maybe we can get some $ estimate by some very difficulty and contentious longitudinal studies. But I don't think we can put aa $ value on most of the 1st order effects, let alone the 2nd order ones.
My point is not to get a precise estimate of the costs but to shift the conversation to crime, like immigration, as an economic growth issue, not a culture war issue.
Worth noting that the ~$10m Value of Life figure is used for population level risk modeling for differential outcomes. They've recommended changing the term to "value of mortality risk" to avoid confusion. Murder rates are sufficiently individual that I think this approach really breaks down (e.g., the value is infinity for the individual).
I don’t think the value is actually infinity for the individual. People knowingly increase their risk of death by non-zero amounts on many occasions, but only where the gain is high enough to make it worth their while. That makes sense because you don’t actually lose infinity by dying - you only lose the rest of your life, which is a *lot* compared to any one experience, but not *infinitely* much.
I like the data but if we spent $X billion to get violent crime near zero that would be fantastic (to me) despite spitting out a bad ratio. Meanwhile if we reduce property crime enforcement to zero I have no idea what will happen to your cost of property crime figure. To do cost benefit here you need some data or at least priors on the equilibria and the margins.
$300 billion in terms of national spending on a public service is really not that much. Especially since that is for the entire system (not just policing which is perhaps half that amount).
I am not saying we should spend less on those other functions but realistically the amount spent on police is trivial relative to what the government spends generally. On average Americans spend less $400 a year on police per capita. Obviously, it would be more per household (maybe $1.6k annually), but this is still just not that much money.
$10 million is only the cost of murder victims by your argument. Let’s add in mental anguish, bodily harm, material costs, quality of life, and all the other costs of crime and the math changes. Prison isn’t just for murderers.
"... it just seems like it usually doesn't stop with animals."
This, but for partner abuse (also). The percentage of murderers, esp spree killers, who have a record of unpunished wife beating, marital rape, attacks on women, etc., is very high.
I suspected as much and recently I went looking for similar data. But the very little evidence I was able to find pushed me away from that conclusion - it seemed like domestic violence is a somewhat different track of anti-social behavior that was less correlated with other crimes than I thought.
Very open to seeing better research on this, though. As I said, it was very hard to track down any numbers at all.
You might get at an estimate of prevented murders from recidivism studies. I'm too lazy to try it myself at the moment, but I think the data agrees that it's "quite a few":
I appreciate the meta-discourse of this article: A liberal writer gives a conservative writer a platform, and the conservative writer tries to persuade a (presumably) left-leaning audience of his policy agenda, using both data and appeals to liberal concerns (e.g., Black people are disproportionately the victims of crime).
Personally, I am horrified that the rate of male crime is so much higher than that of females. The cause is obviously poverty. To remedy this, males should be given free money to reduce the male poverty rate, which will then bring the male crime rate down.
Speeding up courts isn’t technocratically difficult: the fix is hiring more judges and prosecutors. In 2023, Georgia budgeted $106 million of state funds for prosecutors and $85 million for superior court judges, who hear both felonies and civil cases. The combined figure is roughly one-seventh of the $1.33 billion budgeted for prisons. (Localities supplement prosecutorial and judicial salaries and also run jails).
It is common for 160 felony cases to be on a single judge’s trial calendar. This creates tremendous pressure to induce guilty pleas, meaning people who plead guilty to mid grade felonies are treated pretty leniently and most folks who are convicted at trial, even
of a minor offense, get harsh sentences. It also means many cases take two years or more to come up for trial. Georgia could expand the number of judges and prosecutors by 30% for 4 to 5% of the Department of Corrections budget. That would be a far better deterrent to crime than mindlessly long sentences.
In mid-grade felony cases, a guilty plea takes 10 minutes, a bench trial one day and a jury trial three days. There simply aren’t enough days on the judges calendar to give every defendant a bench trial.
I’m also leery of anything that would further burden the right of citizens to have a jury trial. If we are interested in accurate determinations of guilt, judges are probably better than juries. But juries are useful bullshit tests for what can and can’t be prosecuted. In small counties, a situation where the local judge and local DA could put basically anyone in prison they wanted would 1) be ripe for abuse and 2) would not inspire the confidence of the lower classes.
I also think he meant "relative to plea bargaining". That is, we can't replace all plea bargains with bench trials, even if we also replaced jury trials with them. The total would still be too high.
The jury can render their verdict by simply checking boxes on a form. The judge needs to render a written opinion with complete findings of fact and law - this can easily be 100 pages.
That’s a good point: Juries are seriously powerful in our system.
I served on a jury in December - the defendant was facing a set of pretty serious felonies. Two days of testimony, three hours of closing arguments, and another 45 minutes of instructions and we were off to the races. We finished deliberating around noon the following day, and, yes, checked boxes on a form and with that simple administrative act, the defendant was a convicted felon facing years in prison.
1) jury selection 2) prosecutors over engineer cases when their are jurors 3) evidentiary issues cannot be debated in the jury’s presence, that adds time 4) jury deliberations take longer than a decision from the bench
In this proposed scheme, promise of a reduced maximum sentence. Basically, if you're facing something with a maximum sentence of five years, if you agree to a bench trial the maximum will be 30 months. Take it to a jury, you face the full 5 years. Whether that makes sense I dunno.
I agree with the thesis of the piece, broadly speaking. But I am curious about which taxes Lehman would suggest we raise (or which other programs we cut) to pay for the proposals?
Literally almost nothing has a higher return on investment than rule of law.
While I’m not advocating for it… it’s entirely plausible that most current urban beneficiaries of any “welfare” program including TANF and Medicaid would be better off in a world in which those programs don’t exist but crime rates in their neighborhoods are in line with those of Western Europe. Safety of persons and property is just *that* fundamental to economic and social prospects.
"Literally almost nothing has a higher return on investment than rule of law."
Given the importance of RoL in creating an economy where people feel safe doing business, this is an argument for ramping up policing and prosecution of white-collar crimes.
Not even the slightest, tiny, piddling trace of disagreement here.
White collar crime is the only area where I think the prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment should be read narrowly as dealing only with physical punishments and people should simply be shamed and embarrassed to hell. Since Singaporean “whip them on TV so their friends and family get to watch them sob” is out, perhaps “make them scrub homeless people piss off public buildings while cameras follow them around for a year of YouTube live-streaming” would be sufficient substitute.
I haven't put too much thought into white collar crime and that leads me to a question.
When most people talk white collar crimes I feel like their mental reference is Bernie Madoff or something equally spectacular involving a person so rich that they are in most people's out-group. Or at least we imagine very wealthy perpetrators who it would feel good to "put in their place". At least this is what I imagine myself. So when I hear "let's get tough on white collar crime" this is what I assume people have in mind.
But what are the more routine types of white collar crime that we would catch with more policing and enforcement? For every pyramid scheme and federal judge bribery case are there probably 1,000 cases of simple fraud perpetrated by a person who is and has always been poor? Or would we be finding many cases that are currently settled through financial settlements 99% of the time and effectively viewed as something like a tax on doing business close to the line in legally unclear waters? Or cases where an organization is doing something dodgy but it's unclear who is personally liable - the CEO, the board, etc...
Small business owners who routinely commit wage theft would be at the top of my list. I've never met pettier or more penny wise-pound foolish people than the small businesses I worked for in HS and college. Never paid overtime no matter how much of it was worked. Falsified timecards. Always threatened to fire you if you complained about getting paid enough. I get that's not really "white collar" but the idea of low-profile crimes of fraud brought that to mind. Employees are routinely defrauded.
Yeah it's a good example. I don't think it's what people mostly have in mind when they complain about white collar, but it fits the definition for sure. How would you police that better?
Fwiw - I don't disbelieve your experience at all, but it's not something I ever encountered. Quite possibly I've just been fortunate, but I always found it relatively easy to quit a low-wage job if and find another when I was in HS and college. So I wonder how typical either or our experiences were / are. I imagine the stuff you are describing is 10x more common among employers of immigrants, especially illegal or undocumented or whatever word I supposed to use for that situation
I'm a white-collar practitioner. The major categories of white-collar crime by individuals include wire/mail fraud, bank offenses, embezzlement, tax offenses, deceptive business practices, and securities fraud. The Biden admin has also been pushing criminal antitrust (especially wage-fixing), but with little success. Large companies naturally have exposure to more unusual issues like the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (bribery abroad).
White-collar crimes have high intent standards to prevent the criminalization of normal business practices. As a general rule, the core question in blue-collar criminal defense is "did they do it," while the core question in white-collar criminal defense is often "was it a crime." Prosecutions are often very resource-intensive to prosecute, involving expert witnesses and terabytes of documents. In practice, even some USAOs don't really have the capacity to bring major cases. Plus for wealthy individuals, white-collar defense is often a price-is-no-object matter justifying hiring top-flight defense counsel.
As for your last point...see how DJT has avoided accountability. Feel like everything we've seen last 7 years shows that if you have the deep pockets, you don't even need that strong a case to "win" so-to-speak. Just have the resources to exhaust everyone and avoid actual accountability commensurate with your actions/crimes.
Out of sheer curiosity- are there any good structural reasons as to why white-collar crimes ended up requiring mens rea and 'ordinary' crimes don't? How did we end up here? Why aren't white-collar crimes just treated as 'did they do it'?
Most white collar crime is small-time fraud, embezzlement, and tax evasion. The thing is, white collar crime can be extremely labor intensive and time consuming to prove, especially as you get into the more sophisticated stuff. Most police departments don’t employ forensic accountants and aren’t willing to expend the resources necessary to show someone’s been cooking the books.
Completely agree with the previous poster on wage theft.
To your point a lot of white collar crime is probably almost by definition not being committed by CEOs or hedge fund managers. Reality is, there are only so many people who are CEOs and hedge fund managers. Most white collar workers are middle class or upper middle class, again almost by definition.
From my own experience, its often mid level employees and sales where a lot of unpunished white collar crime is committed. Forging signatures on documents to deals over the line or to meet quota or get your commission seems like an especially common one. Probably most famous example is the most recent Wells Fargo case where employees were signing up customers for accounts without the customers know so the employees can meet their quota.
This last example speaks to me the two most insidious aspects of how high level white collar crime really operates. One, the white collar crime is likely the result or at least heavily influenced by terrible incentive structures. Places that make a huge portion or even all compensation commission based are places that are just asking for employees to cut corners and engage in unethical or even illegal behavior. The benefit to the corporation is that you probably know the bad behavior is likely rampant but when someone is caught red handed you can place the blame entirely on the low level employees. After all there is nothing illegal per se about the compensation structures at various firms*. Two, the high white collar crime committed by people near the top is likelier to be one where you ignore or bury inconvenient information. I'm thinking specifically about JP Morgan right now and Jeffrey Epstein. This story is still unfolding so ready to change my theory of what was going on based on new info. But it seems likely to me that the real "sin" was not just there was a high level SVP who was getting "favors" from Epstein, but that various higher ups knew about it...and did nothing.
The latter is important because there is also the very grey area of when companies ignore "inconvenient truths". I use that phrase purposely as I'm thinking about places like Exxon or other oil companies. We know now that they had internal research from the 70s indicating how much their product was contributing to global warming and that global warming was a real phenomenon. But the companies didn't just ignore the info. They created a whole misinformation campaign to sow doubt about global warming findings. They were probably some of the first entities to truly realize the potential of exploiting MSM "view from nowhere" coverage (Scientists say global warming is real, but critics say otherwise). So here's my question, how much of this was illegal and how much should be illegal?
*Years ago I worked with someone who was a loan officer circa 2004-2008. So someone on the "front lines" of the real estate bubble. Supposedly what would happen is some manager would come in and say "we aren't originating enough of our subprime product". But the higher level person would never outright say they should shift customers from prime mortgages to subprime or push people who qualify for prime mortgages to subprime. It was just sort of left unsaid and basically helped create a "plausible deniability" situation.
This is my experience as well. I've mostly seen mid-level employees embezzle and cook books to secure a promotion or avoid punishment. Usually the company prefers to fire them as quietly as possible to avoid the hassle and embarrassment of legal proceedings.
Tax fraud is probably the biggest category by a considerable margin, followed by things like wage theft, collusion, and other crimes with more diffuse harms and favorable power imbalances between perpetrator and victim.
In any case, it’s precisely to avoid the “cost of doing business” issue that I propose this.
At a corporate level penalties should be pegged with a statutory minimum of “estimated benefit over a 10-year horizon multiplied by a factor of 5”.
For individuals, perhaps such a rule is also useful but my understanding of professional and capital-owning class motivations suggests that abject public embarrassment would be a far better deterrent.
Imagine Trump forced to clean up on Skid Row in LA for stiffing a CA-registered contractor. That would force his hand in a way that a hundred bankruptcy proceedings never have.
Isn't theft already handled pretty well because of incentives? A company has no reason to tolerate a mid-level employee stealing and will certainly fire that person if they find them. How often they bring criminal charges is something I don't know, but police aren't going to uncover these crimes, the companies will.
I guess the bigger problem is when the entire org is stealing.
I think the SCOTUS has put forward a clear and workable standard:
nothing may be prosecuted as a bribe, unless the check has "bribe" in the memo line, and the check is accompanied by a full itemization of what was the "quid" and what was the "quo," in columns so labeled.
"How many times do I have to tell you mugs? We *deduct* ammunition; we *depreciate* the firearm! Does the phrase "capital accounts" mean nothing to you?"
The pay-for is “heightened business and personal income tax take” at the federal level and “vastly increased real estate tax receipts” at the local level.
Like THPacis below, I find the question to be indicative of at least a double standard on what should be a clear and obvious basic investment.
There are a host of expenditures which should objectively be cut or reformed, but I refuse to engage in this weird exercise of only reducing those expenditures to pay for other specific ones rather than simply saying “some expenditures fail cost-benefit analysis and we should cut them until they don’t” independent of what other proposed expenditures exist.
That's exactly my point about the expenditure reduction portion of the deficit reduction issue. People on the tax side say what they want taxes to raise (some, like the corporate income tax I don't agree with, but they are honest.) Republicans until day before yesterday never said what they want to cut (or by what criterion they would cut. I've never hears a Republican say use CBA to judge expenditures.
The sums proposed here are rather modest . Curious you’d raise this question here and not on literally any other policy proposal mentioned in this substack, often much more expensive ?
Because I woke up early today and I’m guessing Manhattan Institute people are more fiscally conservative than me or Matt. If the sum is modest, great, should be easier to find pay-fors then; I am sincerely curious to hear what someone I am guessing is a few clicks to my right would suggest.
Frankly it’s a strange thing to ask. You can ask that about literally every policy proposal, but you don’t because it’s a separate question. Why is it only on this topic that you adopt the pose of an old school right wing spending hawk?
"You can ask that about literally every policy proposal,..."
There are many good policy questions, some of which could always be asked, which nevertheless are rarely asked, e.g. about opportunity costs, or whether our children is learning.
If you want to allege bad faith I’d appreciate it if you just spelled it out instead of beating around the bush. Like I said, I happened to wake up early today so I had time to read the article and ask a question before I went to the gym. It’s really not deeper than that.
Not bad faith, perhaps some bias towards the topic ? It just doesn’t make much sense. One proposes a certain policy based on certain argument why such and such spending is a good idea. One would expect discussion of the merits of the proposal, esp if the money involved is modest. It’s just a separate discussion from “where would you get the money”: there isn’t any reason to expect the proposer of the policy would have any special insights on the latter question. Eg we can all agree that spending on crime reduction is a good idea but differ on the financing : deficit increase, tax increases or cuts in social spending or what have you based on our priors. It’s just a separate discussion. The automatic rejoinder “where will you get the money” is just usually a boiler plate Republican slogan against any kind of expansion of the state or improvement of social services—and not a very good one at that for the above reasons. Since you are rather on the left on most issues (I believe) , and moreover a thoughtful person it strange to hear you voice a rather crude, right wing talking point.
Decent. Basically took the last week off because I hurt my left lat; in light of that I threw up some respectable numbers on bench (though less than I’d have liked) and good numbers on dumbell OHP after.
And it should be asked about every policy proposal. But the context for asking Lehman specifically is that law enforcement reform is NOT cheap -- hundreds of thousands of more officers (though some would not be "police") probably with higher salaries to be able to be more selective, thousands of more judges and prosecutors, the cost of a national gun registration and tracking system -- and the Manhattan Insitute is seen as being Republican-affiliated and Republicans have been, let's say, "reluctant" to increase taxes and in fact have taken aim at state and local taxes.
Couldn't the imputation of underlying ideological basis work symmetrically, though?
Instead of saying, "that Milan is a free-spending lefty; how come he's so cheap when it comes to *this* budget item?"
one could just as well say,
"those Manhattan Institute people are famously anti-spending; how come they ignore fiscal restraint when it comes to *this* budget item?"
But as others have said, perhaps it makes for a better discussion simply to discuss the proposal at the first order, without investigating consistency of outlook.
Yeah I mean I’m not trying to investigate consistency of outlook; I just don’t see pay-fors as independent of a given policy proposal so I was curious what Lehman had in mind.
Your last paragraph is precisely my view. Also it genuinely wasn’t clear to me to begin with that the Manhattan institute was Milan’s angle (he clarified that later in response to my question).
The US already runs enormous deficits, I don't get this idea that everything has to be balanced like some kind of double-entry bookkeeping. If that was true, we wouldn't have Social Security or Medicare! I like David R.'s comment below that nothing has a higher ROI than rule of law. I would just.... spend the money, the way the US government already does now on everything else. (I say this as someone who's pro-mildly higher income taxes, less weird loopholes like Trump's one LLC one, and also pro-VAT)
Sure. But it seems like we’re headed for some amount of spending cuts, and we could probably use those cuts since NGDP is above trend. So if we want to spend more on police then we will need some combination of spending cuts elsewhere and tax increases (at least in the short term) and I am genuinely curious about what people would suggest.
"and we could probably use those cuts since NGDP is above trend." Non sequitur. NGDP is above trend because inflation is above the Fed' target. There is zero evidence that within the levels we have seen changes in the federal deficit affect Fed instrument setting. The deficit is too large, has been for decades, and is a drag on economic growth, but let the Fed correct its own mistakes.
Deficits transfer resources from investment to consumption. Yes, I'm assuming most federal spending is consumption and most of what higher interest rates depress is investments. If we taxed the consumption instead of raising interest rates investment would be greater. In addition, secular deficits in the US => higher interest rates => stronger dollar => shift in relative prices of traded goods (where productivity increases are easier) to services.
Also, if the increased policing is specifically being focused on urban areas (since that's where the crime is) as the article suggests, it makes sense to any taxation and/or spending cuts to fall primarily on these same areas.
These areas also tend to be significantly wealthier than non-urban areas, so that makes it arguably even more just. And sensible.
I like the SALT deduction elimination. If you are paying high local/state taxes, presumably you are getting a benefit from them. I don't see why that should be allowed to at the expense of a reduction of the federal govt's tax income.
Not against interstate/interstate transfers, but really Memphis should pay for reducing crime in Memphis. The Federal role should be to promote policy change (for which carrots can be useful), not transfer resources.
By that logic, Tennessee should really pay for SNAP in Tennessee, instead of Connecticut’s tax dollars paying. Or for that matter, why should Greenwich pay for public schools in New Haven? Why should anyone pay any taxes that fund things that they don’t benefit from? Personally I think part of the function of taxation is redistribution of resources and that’s fine.
I'm not saying no interregional redistribution, but interpersonal redistribution should be the driver. SNAP is from richer people wherever they are to poorer people wherever they are. But for a service that is both produced and consumed regionally, why SHOULD people in Connecticut pay for crime reduction in Tennessee.
To be clear, you prefer a SALT deduction to none for equal revenue raised? If we go from SALT to no-SALT deduction, whose marginal rate decreases to make up the difference?
Of course, that discourages S&L taxation, which is where the bulk of the resources for better law enforcement will have to come from. Deductions for S&L taxation is one of the only features (contributions to retirement savings is another) that make sense from the standpoint of wanting that system to tax consumption more as opposed to income.
I think redistribution should be from richer persons to poorer persons without much regard for how the cluster, so I do not see that as positive as positive. I's like to push the "income" tax system a bit more toward a consumption tax. I don't see S&L income tax paid as a choice between saving and consumption so is not "consumption." for the person, just like contribution to a 401K is consumption. So "deduct" those from the income that is taxed and make the overall rate make up for the revenue loss. Yes, this shifts income from high tax states to low tax states a tiny bit, but I so what?
I have to say there is not vast philosophical underpinning for my preference, but I look at the "safety net" as transfers from fortunate people at "good" times in our lives to unfortunate people at bad times. Anyone can be employed or unemployed, sick or not sick, disbled or not, young and old, parenting young children or not. I'd like a flat tax on consumption to redistribution consumption between people in different temporal and aleatory circumstances. Expenditures that benefit "everyone," I want to pay for with progressive consumption taxes. And expenditures that benefit an arbitrary few at a net cost to the many (ethanol subsidies, Jones Act enforcement, disaster insurance subsidies, farm price supports, whatever) not financed at all. And then there is pure income (or consumption) redistribution starting with EITC up to "high" marginal tax rates with the whole shebang summing to low deficits (not greater than public investment yielding income in the future). The tax on net emissions of CO2 is just to change relative prices, not to move resources between public and private sectors, so that could be a separate tax and refund as needed politically the get the relative price changes.
As someone who benefits from SALT and mortgage interest tax deduction, wholeheartedly agree these are giveaways that should be eliminated. Don't understand why I get to benefit from this.
SALT because those are not consumption expenditures. Mortgage deduction (though it ought to be a partial tax credit not a deduction) because Herber Hoover thought that promoting home ownership was a good idea.
I've been wondering if it would make more sense to swap the mortgage-interest deduction with a mortgage-down payment deduction. The down payment would get deducted from taxable income, pro-rated over a period of time after taking out a mortgage. The larger the down payment the larger the tax deduction. It would conceivably incentivize saving and disincentivize riskier mortgages. Also, corporations get to deduct capital expenditures, so why not individuals?
I endorse these ideas. You get what you pay for. And if Americans want more crime, a pretty good way to do it is to spend less money on crime prevention.
Relatedly, as I understand it, the country enjoyed something of a second order benefit in the 30-odd years or so after 1990: police budgets, policing numbers (and indeed prison numbers) were continuing to expand for many years even as crime was coming down. So the ratio of "law enforcement resources to level of crime" grew ever-more favorable for public safety. In essence, we tended to enjoy increasingly well-staffed and well-resourced police departments even as their workload was declining. Which only made law enforcement more effective (this dynamic allows the luxury of better *prioritization* of law enforcement resources, too).
One other thought: of the various things we should spend more money on, I'll put in a word for soil remediation to be included among them. I realize this is a somewhat controversial topic. But I believe the bang for buck factor is pretty impressive, though results take a while to show up.
I feel like an under appreciated low-hanging fruit on policing is that you could spend a lot of money explicitly NOT on sworn officers that would have the de facto result of putting more sworn officers on the street. Stuff like 1) mental health first responders, 2) administrative staff to keep officers from working desk jobs, and 3) automated enforcement, like speeding / red light cameras would all involve spending money in ways that lots of progressives would find palatable while still increasing law enforcement street presence. And although they are sworn officers, I tend to think that detectives would fall into this category in a lot of places.
Of course, good luck with all that. The whole reason that law enforcement budgets fell was the wave of budget-cutting fervor associated with the Great Recession and the subsequent Tea Party political wave of 2010. The current debt-limit fight suggests to me that those political imperatives on the right haven't changed much, and the politics on the left have gotten harder today than they were in 2008 because of the way in which not just bad policing, but police department culture, has taken on a much more explicit ideological / cultural valence to the right. That's not a good thing, and I wish that police officers / departments themselves could see that, but it's A Thing.
I admit to some confusion. You’ve seen the discussions around extending the Roosevelt Blvd enforcement pilot widely here… or that godforsaken ProPublica piece on Chicago’s camera enforcement program.
I was more referring to the mental health responders and the admin staff than the automated enforcement. I think support for automated enforcement is going to be much more spiky (in a way that is somewhat hilarious) because it's basically your classic yes-for-them, no-for-me issue.
That said, I do think it's always useful, when writing about what progressives would find palatable, to totemically start the comment with, "In the world where Joe Biden easily crushed all the more Progressive candidates in the last Democratic primary, I think..." I basically think that, for example, a lot of Biden voters would probably be fine with having first responders with specialized training for mental health issues, even if that was money in the official police budget. Maybe I shouldn't call Biden voters Progressives? I guess I could have written "Democratic voters," instead.
This is being tried in some cities but it's unclear how scalable or beneficial it is compared to the old approach. The specialized mental health professionals tend to need to bring the police with them more often then you'd think, and it's also very hard to know ahead-of-time which calls are routine check-ins or non-violent preventions versus which are going to suddenly spiral into psychotic violence.
I think the mental health stuff, like everything else I proposed, is a marginal change; you could just as easily say that there aren't that many uniformed officers sitting at desks, so admin support doesn't get you that much.
But the whole thing about complex problems is that they are complex; solving them is usually about nibbling away at ten or a hundred different little factors to make improvements, rather than trying to 1) find a silver bullet and 2) scale it up, because 1 is hard, and even if you get 1, it often falls apart when you try for step 2.
If you want an even smaller-bore approach to the mental health problem, I would be equally happy if you set aside a percentage of the uniformed police force for specific, in-depth training on mental health response (i.e. not just a one-Saturday class or whatever). Ideally you would give certified officers some kind of bonus. But right now, putting on my public health hat, police officers are the single largest group of mental-health responders we have, and they are not trained for it, which leads to the outcomes you would predict when you have an untrained person operating in situations that are challenging even for trained professionals. It's basically a policy disaster, and it makes everyone--the people with problems, but also the police officers, and the community--worse off.
Sure - go for it! I have no problem with this approach. But I do usually hear about it being pushed as something closer to a silver bullet. I know you don't see it that way, so I hope I'm not straw-manning too much.
Fwiw, when I read " they are not trained for it" it reminded me of a graham factor (former cop, former commentator here). I took the overall point to be that there are limits to what non-cops can do and we have to be realistic about those limits. Link below if you're curious, but here's one of the most relevant excerpts:
"My point here is that treating people with a mental illness and safely detaining those same people in uncontrolled environments are two related but different skill sets. If you sat on my couch and asked me to help you recover from depression, I would not do a very good job. But if you asked me to use a combination of verbal persuasion, teamwork, and less-lethal weapons to safely detain a mentally ill guy brandishing an ice pick on a public sidewalk? I’m gonna be better than any social worker, because I have been trained on using time, distance, and cover to safely resolve that situation."
The problem with forced psychiatric treatment centers is that they are the worst of all worlds: they are very expensive, they are very unpleasant for everyone involved (which is one reason why they are very expensive), and they mostly don't work. People talk about "deinstitutionalization" (I think someone mentioned it elsewhere in these comments), but the dirty secret is that what we actually did, de facto, is to switch into using prisons for the same purpose, but simply as an additional mandate. And the approach isn't even all that different; prisons are a significant employers of psych nurses for this reason.
So I'm not actually a big fan of bringing back forced institutionalization; I just don't think it would achieve much, and I think you could get a lot more bang for your psych-spending buck by offering substantially more support for upstream, lower-acuity psych services (like in-patient for children), because you are going to reap way more gains, from an efficiency standpoint, getting people into treatment BEFORE they have a violent episode or two. If you had really good upstream coverage, then maybe rethinking institutionalization makes sense, but that's not where our society is right now.
Re: Graham, I remember him; we did a few back and forth exchanges in the comments. I don't necessarily disagree with him, but I think there's a dimension of the problem that I appreciate from my nursing training which is basically that people respond to expectations and environment. If you send an armed police officer to someone experiencing a break, the mere existence of the officer on the scene escalates / worsens the situation, and I'm talking before the officer says or does anything at all. And a lot of these patients are caustic and irritating to deal with under the best of circumstances, almost by definition, so of course a lot of officers respond in very human ways...that escalate / worsen the situation.
It's just a really, really hard problem. And sometimes you are inevitably going to have to use force to deal with it. This is why I'm open to training police officers as a solution, and my honest assessment is that it's a problem with only limited solutions: hard problems are hard. But I think you can't fully appreciate the difficulty of the problem without acknowledging that the mere visual presence of an officer is a potential provocation.
I want to be clear: I'm not saying that in an "officers are all bad" way; it's just that a guy carrying a gun is a walking explicit threat of violence. There's no way around that. I think that police officers think of themselves as nice people, and I think that's great! But it elides the reality, which is that they are ALSO scary walking death machines. They can't help that. It isn't their fault. But it's the nature of situation. And one of the things about psych patients is that they are, in a funny way, sometimes more aware of certain aspects of reality than the rest of us, because they lack the mental coping tools to mentally cover it up / manage that cognitive tension, which is what the rest of us do most of the time.
Also agreed with Wigan, though. The US, like it or not, is awash in firearms and mental illness can lead untreated folks to do suicidally stupid things. The cops are going to be along for the ride on almost every mental illness call even if they are initially letting the unarmed experts take the lead. And most cops *want* someone there who can help try to contain the situation, in my experience. I was in Kensington along the El grabbing a coffee this Saturday and there was a patrol car trying to dissuade someone who was raving like a, well, lunatic, nearby. Clearly out of their depth, frustrated, and I think everyone is getting fed up operating downstream of a system which doesn't allow *any* sort of coercion to be applied to force the mentally ill and the drug-addled to be treated against their will, which is the clear and obvious need at this point.
Sure, and I think that the failure to pursue it is not just a policy failure, but a failure of policy imagination, as it were. These steps are also available in more red-leaning jurisdictions and haven't taken hold there, either.
This is what I was getting at with my second paragraph. I basically think that a core problem with the politics is the ideological and cultural friction between people who basically don't trust one another even though they theoretically want the same outcome. And I'm not sure how you overcome that, because it makes it extremely difficult for the parties to negotiate because of the underlying assumption of bad faith. I live in Philly, and the tension between the rank-and-file of the police department, the city government, and various communities within the city is palpable, and it makes literally everyone in that equation worse off. For that reason, it should be a free lunch: if you could reduce the friction and build cooperation, literally everyone would be noticeably better off. But because the friction is cultural and ideological and historical--people literally dislike and distrust one another, in part because of things that have been said or done in the past--people would rather starve in icy, unhappy righteousness than eat the free lunch. Because humans are funny.
All perfectly sensible. Hence I expect skepticism, outrage, RESISTANCE, from both sides of the aisle. Even in this comments section you can start seeing this dynamic.
So there's a lot of milquetoast, obviously correct stuff in here because the fundamental reality is that law enforcement has become increasingly ineffectual. While Charles gestures towards the need to do smarter law enforcement rather than just harsher, when you're also dropping positively framed references to "tough on crime" politics and the 94 crime bill it's pretty obvious that you're less concerned with effectual enforcement than you purport to be.
The fundamental problem is one of the tail wagging the dog. "Public Safety" is a positive externality of law enforcement, not the purpose. The purpose of law enforcement is investigating and successfully prosecuting crime. When you get the relationship backwards things break down. Simply throwing resources at "public safety" seriously undermines actual law enforcement. The metric that matters is clearance rates. Effectively improve clearance rates, and public safety follows. Decide to just do public safety pre-crime instead and the harm to justice perpetuates a sort of escalating, whack-a-mole, road to ever more oppressive and totalitarian solutions.
This is completely false. The purpose of law enforcement is crime reduction. Is it your position that if we had enough officers that we had no crime then law enforcement would be a failure? Is it your position that if adding more officers resulted in less crime and less arrests then this would be a failure?
I feel like the gaping chasm of a blind spot in this take is incredibly obvious. Of course you can build an incredibly low crime totalitarian police state. North Korea, by all accounts, has very little crime.
Success in law enforcement in a pluralistic, liberal democracy, is a question of maximizing the defense of individual rights. Crime infringes those rights. So do precrime and invasive searches and omniscient surveillance and paternalistic morality codes and vice laws etc etc.
"Success in law enforcement in a pluralistic, liberal democracy, is a question of maximizing the defense of individual rights."
I don't think the public agrees with you on this one - in general I think a liberal democracy wants the maximization of individual rights the public likes and not the ones they don't. They will put up with stuff they are ambivalent about, but anything the public is antagonistic about is likely to be constrained. E.g. the vice laws you refer to.
You're often right from a pure public opinion/democracy perspective, but that's why we have this whole constitution thing. We have an entire range of countermajoritarian institutions/checks and balances to preserve a pluralistic system of respect for minority rights.
Though you might also argue a lot of the time the elite technocratic values that get imposed are driven by overly influential minority opinions as well.
The constitution can only defend against 60% of the public - it can't defend against 90% of the public. Nor should it. We aren't just individuals whose actions never impact others. We live, work, act in communities and to the extent that are actions impact those communities, they are going to have influence and impact us. That includes legal restrictions on what can be done and mechanisms to enforce those rules.
Of course, something like the constitution will always work by putting a thumb on the scale. But the thumb is there in service of a a particular set of values that are incompatible with the vast state capacity of a totalitarian police state, regardless of the degree of benevolence of the dictator put at it's head.
One question that is sometimes raised is if spending directly on public safety is more or less effective than indirect poverty reduction or targeted help for would be criminals. Do you have any insight/data on these type of trade offs?
A major frustration that I personally have with the decentralized nature of things in the US is that we seem to do poorly at utilizing our mini-experiments to proliferate best practices across the country. Surely at least some of those 18,000 departments are doing something well and that others could learn from. Not everything is translatable and scalable but some things are. Is this something that is being done and we might just not hear able it as relative normies or are there ways you thing we could be systematizing this?
A minor editing quibble. When adding a stat like "Among the countries of the OECD for which I could find data, America has the fourth-highest homicide rate and the fifth-highest serious assault and rape rates." it would be helpful to know how many countries there are in OECD for those of us that don't know these things. (38 it seems)
Also the color choices on that first chart are a bit baffling.
Worth noting here that police work is a good, middle-class job that's attainable and attractive to young men, and doesn't require a 4-year degree. Investing in police roles is probably as beneficial to these groups, as say, public investment in manufacturing or coal mining jobs.
I would argue that one key reform is to stop treating police work, at least above the level of beat cop/patrolman, as a blue collar career path.
Treat it as the sort of enlisted soldier-style “job” that has folks spend 5-10 years doing it and then move on, overseen and constrained by a culturally different long-haul officer corps with wildly divergent interests and incentives.
Half the problem of today seems to be how to square the circle between “civilian control over law enforcement” and “pay and prestige sufficient to attract good candidates.”
Turn the whole thing into a prestige gig like the military, with similar post-enlistment benefits, and a professionalized officer corps inculcated up to the gills in civic ethos and deference to elected governments.
We’re currently at the intersection of some police throwing an unjustified bitch fit at the prospect of accountability and others (and potential candidates) taking one look at the working conditions and lack of prestige and saying, “don’t care if pay is good.”
I'm pretty skeptical of focusing on poverty reduction because poverty rates have not correlated with these crime problems, poverty seems to have been stable in the 90's and has *decreased* in the last few years, while after the 2008 GFC there was a spike in poverty but not a spike in crime and murder.
Right - murder and crime went down after the great recession. I'm old enough to remember everyone I knew and read at the time predicting the opposite.
We'd also expect crime to be dropping over the last 100 years or so as we've gotten vastly more wealthy. And we'd expect a lot more crime in Appalachia and the Rio Grande Valley if poverty was the prime factor behind crime.
"One question that is sometimes raised is if spending directly on public safety is more or less effective than indirect poverty reduction or targeted help for would be criminals. Do you have any insight/data on these type of trade offs?"
The difficulty in answering these questions is that they operate on different time scales and neither is immediate. If you catch violent criminals at a faster rate, for example, it may still take years for a much larger percentage to be off the street. But welfare investments take even longer to wind through the environment. Maybe better school lunches or lead removal can decrease violence, but if so we probably have to wait 15-20 years to see it.
That all said - poverty reduction is a good thing on its own terms but I've never seen evidence that it can do much to prevent criminality. As one reference point, El Paso, Texas is the poorest very large city in the USA but also the safest.
Another piece of evidence is the effect of fatherhood on crime. When a young man becomes a father he becomes, almost definitionally, poorer because he has a little mouth to feed. His material needs have grown. But what we find is that men who have any role in their children's lives as parents tend to reduce their criminal activity and spend more time on legitimate work.
I could have wished the author discussed the role of changes in prosecutorial policy. If part of the problem is that many crimes are not prosecuted, or are prosecuted very leniently, then increases in police funding will have much less impact than they could have.
We have kind of been running the experiment since the Floyd protests, and so far it looks like prosecutorial policy doesn't have much of an impact. The increase in crime across the United States had been pretty generally distributed since the pandemic; if prosecutorial policy was the key factor, you would expect to see places that elected liberal prosecutors in 2020 showing these big spikes, while places with conservative prosecutors would see crime flat or falling or at least not rising as much.
That's not quite what I see in the data. While I haven't tried sorting cities and counties by the politics of specific DAs, I have been able to sort by overall blue / red voting and other proxies for liberal, like whether a county is urban or rural. When I do that the data is pretty clear that homicides have risen everywhere, but much more in blue counties and cities than in rural and red county areas.
On a more anecdotal level, the big cities I know of that have taken a very liberal approach to crime have had huge problems with crime and disorder. Check out this story on the LA Metro, for example: https://www.joshbarro.com/p/the-subway-is-for-transportation or Philadelphia's record breaking homicide numbers.
I think this is kind of the problem: to test the prosecutorial hypothesis, you really WOULD have to sort by the politics of specific DAs, and you would also need to sort by actual policy choices, rather than rhetoric, so you would need to look at some basket of metrics, like number of prosecutions, types of plea deals struck, etc.
You are also going to need to distinguish between progressive DA policy and law enforcement actions, like the work-to-rule policing that some cities saw after the Floyd protests. Those were essentially labor actions, but they obviously have at least the potential to impact crime rates, assuming you believe that officer staffing impacts crime (which I do). Not sure, obviously, but if you told me that it was changes in police officer behavior that landed St. Louis atop the 2021 rankings, I would certainly find that a plausible explanation.
This is why I think that anecdotal policy analysis is basically worthless. I live in Philly, so I have some thoughts on the rise in crime, which impacts my own neighborhood. But I also have some thoughts on policing in Philly, which has been plagued in recent years by a series of scandals. And I can absolutely affirm that the police department in Philly is, in at least some quarters, basically actively feuding with the DA and the progressive parts of the city's political apparatus more generally.
I don't think any of this is great, but putting on my academic researcher hat, I also think that it makes teasing out particular causes very, very dicey. My own expertise is more in public health, and I have become somewhat skeptical, or at least cognizant of the limits, of this kind of research. That said, there are folks trying to do this type of analysis. See, for example: https://munkschool.utoronto.ca/research/violent-crime-and-public-prosecution.
I don't actually think the Munk authors have a slam dunk case, for the reasons I alluded to above. But I feel like if someone DID have a slam-dunk case--meaning, such an obvious signal in the data that you couldn't help but see it--that would have been trumpeted to the heavens by the appropriate partisan actors in a competitive political and information economy.
So that's why I'm skeptical of the prosecutorial policy hypothesis. It feels to me like "one weird trick" analysis: a simplistic analysis that confirms a particular group's priors.
Thanks for the link. This is all fine and a good, well-thought out comment. One thing I'm reflecting on is the data only says so much, it doesn't say why a trend happened, only that it did. You would really need to do what you say and what munk is apparently trying to disentangle prosecutors from other factors.
One thing I still want to point out though is this from your original comment "The increase in crime across the United States had been pretty generally distributed since the pandemic"
That part isn't correct - it really is rising higher in large cities and medium cities compared to red rural areas and suburban counties. And it really is rising more among Black and Native American communities compared to Latinos and especially White and Asian ones. The data doesn't tell us why, but it is quite clear that the divergence started in May/June 2020.
Important disclaimer: I'm wading out of my depth at this point, in terms of my knowledge of the literature not being that deep. But my impression is that the data is just kind of all over the place and can be sliced in lots of ways to suit various arguments. Just to take one example outside of the density context: Mississippi has a really high homicide rate.
So is that about Mississippi being a Republican-run state? Or about the racial composition of the state? Or about the socioeconomic conditions of the state? Or about the state's gun ownership rates? Or is it about cultural factors in the South? Or does it relate to particular policing and prosecutorial practices in the state? How does the state's prison system factor in? What are recidivism rates? Drug abuse rates? How does the nature of the state's economy (i.e. manufacturing to food production to services to mining, etc.) figure in?
And probably the answer is half or more of those plus two dozen other things; basically, I think the homicide rate is an emergent property of a complex system.
So when you say to me, "it really is rising in X vs. Y," it's not that I disagree; it's just that I think that is not really telling you a lot. It's kind of the lies, damn lies, and statistics school of analysis. All of this data is deeply, deeply squishy, down to "what constitutes urban" (parts of Detroit have low density and where, precisely, is the edge of "Houston"?) and what does it mean to be a "Black community" (I live in West Philadelphia; where does it stop being White and become Black, and how do you draw the gentrification line?).
I'm not a nihilist; I do think it is possible to draw these kinds of lines and learn genuinely interesting stuff and do real, rigorous analysis. But I think it is very hard, rarely done, and usually less conclusive than people think, so I have a really high bar on my BS-o'meter in these kinds of discussions, even assuming that all parties are engaging in good faith. And I also tend to assume that success, for the large majority of policy solutions, is basically going to look like bumping the numbers by one or two percentage points. And that's important! We should be trying to do that! But that's also why people hate these kinds of problems (I say, as a public health person). Winning is more of a grind than a transformation, which makes the politics very unrewarding.
I understand that the complexities makes this really, really challenging when talking about causes and especially when talking about solutions. If one were to "solve the equation" of crime it would probably look like what you're suggesting with dozens of inputs and outputs and feedback loops.
But you can still learn something by boiling things down to their simplest levels. The May/June homicide spike is real. **Something** happened for sure. And it happened more in Blue areas, in cities, among males, among Black populations and among young adults. I've pivot-tabled the data so many times that there's almost nothing else to conclude **something** happened and it impacted those demographics more.
At the same time **something** happened that increase traffic fatalities, drug overdoses and alcohol deaths at the exact same time and disproportionately to the exact same demographics. And all of these deaths rose, disproportionately in the same demographics, in 2015 when the Ferguson protests kicked off.
I agree with you that these things are complex and it's easy to selectively find data that would seem to support whatever you want. But I don't think that's what I'm doing. My starting point is "what kinds of deaths have increased since 2020 and who is most impacted". I don't really as much to say about why this happened or what should be done, but I think many of the suggestions you make about Mississippi can be just about ruled out given the simplest birds-eye views of the data.
We could list those factors out point-by-point and find that most of them have a weak or non- existing correlation with homicide rate. It doesn't mean they don't play any role, I'm not a nihilist on solutions either. But I'm also not a nihilist on learning something from the simplest, strongest correlations visible in the data.
googling the issue brings up a lot of questionable statements on both sides of this issue. it could be that its too soon to say: cash bail started to get zuck level $ end of 2017
i don't think you need police or political data: there are fairly recent progressive ideas that you could find in prosecution data:
these are
-lower or non-existent cash bail
-% of charges refused
-# of non-violent charges (with special interest in illegal guns)
Are there cities that aren't liberal? I'm not sure there are enough of them to even get a meaningful comparison. How many cities vote less than 60% D? And 60% is enough to start pushing the justice system in much more left-leaning directions
Google is your friend, and an academic library is an even better one, if you have access (I do, but I get that most people don't). There is one study linked in my response Wigan, if you want a starting place, but this is the kind of subject where one study is basically just a starting place. Depending on how good you are with computer analysis, you can pull down the FBI statistics from 2021 on your own, but you will need to do some work with it.
Public Service Loan Forgiveness should be granted for 5, not 10, years of service. Many more doctors and lawyers would take lower-paid or otherwise harder (rural hospitals etc) jobs for 5 years to get their loans forgiven and it would make a real difference in recruitment for these key positions.
I can't speak across all specialties but in many cases the rural flyover state hospitals are paying much more than the coastal metropolises, because they need to in order to get candidates. So it's not a lack of financial incentive.
This post seems well-thought out and has some good charts. But how come every day I have to see and hear 38 year old graduate students saying things like "there's literally no empirical evidence that the police prevent crime!" or "there's no link between punishment and determent!" or whatever. And then they get quoted in the paper.
There seems to be a real disagreement about the basics of this whole thing.
I dunno, it feels like stupid people have a clearer view of this than smart people. Smart people have spent a lot of mental energy over the past several years figuring out how to blame "the pandemic" for people being shot at night clubs, illegal street racing events, etc.
Now . . . is it? This touches on a first order question: how much are complicated, often deep seated social phenomena subject to management through policy? What's the most benefit we can reasonably expect from policy? When can we really know which policies may work best?
Okay, take crime. It's arguable that the most effective policy we've had in decades is lead abatement. Obviously, there's not a consensus on this, but let's stipulate that this is indeed true for sake of argument. Back when lead abatement was being discussed and implemented, who was arguing that not only is a major reason to do so crime prevention in the coming decades, but that this would be the best strategy for doing so? Without googling, I'll say . . . no one.
The world's complicated! Things are so interweaved that you can't disentangle causality and pick out the right thread to follow to the glorious sunlit uplands.
Clearly, the link between policy and desired outcomes is more straightforward in certain cases. Old people don't have enough money, so let's create Social Security and give them money. We want to get to the moon, so let's get together a bunch of engineers and give them money to develop rockets that can go to the moon.
But others are a lot harder and can't be solved even with the best of, say, social science research. The studies are usually too small and give us no sense what can or can't scale. Instead, we have to be satisfied with muddling through (or, bore through some hard boards) and be either/both modest in our direct policy goals and greatly ambitious in our largest ones. By which I mean, don't think that you can design policies that will solve some specific hard problem, like crime, but instead focus on pursuing the biggest policy goals by aspiring to building on a productive economy through smart, modest management and just doing things that are obviously good, like funding R&D and hoping that will keep your economy vibrant through the years.
Great article! Another impact, which is hard to calculate due to the fragmentation of police but is very real, is that an increasing percentage of police funds have been directed to internal auditing, investigations, and accountability. This is not necessarily bad as, if those institutions fulfil their purpose, they make agencies better over time. That said, they can also grow fairly large in size in some jurisdictions and have been growing relative to general police funding. Thus, they consume a larger share of a shrinking budgetary pie. Again, not bad, but it further crowds out funding for crime prevention work.
"The level of violence should be understood primarily as a function of the extent to which state capacity is exerted to stop it. Violence, that is, is a policy choice."
I endorse many of your proposals -- collect more data, speed up the court system, prioritize spending in cities, etc. But the quotation and the framing reek of mid-60s hubris. E.g.:
"The level of illegal drug use should be understood primarily as a function of the extent to which state capacity is exerted to stop it. Drug use, that is, is a policy choice."
"The level of communist influence in Indochina should be understood primarily as a function of the extent to which state capacity is exerted to stop it. Letting Hanoi win, that is, is a policy choice."
This attitude that we can simply apply "state power" in ever-increasing quantities in order to win a War On X has proven to be a bad guide to policy in the past.
At the very least, policy should be guided by the understanding that "as a function" will mean "as a linear function" only for the easiest parts of the curve, and may mean "as a logarithmic function" or even "as an asymptotic function" for most of the curve. Reducing violence by a third (e.g.) may be a "policy choice" that requires non-infinite resources; eliminating violence is probably not one.
I'm asking for more incrementalism in the approach and the rhetoric -- at least a little bit more.
I'm generally in favor of more money to the court systems. It seems to me that the amount of time it takes to adjudicate cases must carry with it an enormous financial cost (beyond just the morality of keeping someone in limbo possibly for months before their case is even tried or settled). Sort of fits with one of my conclusions I've had since Ferguson*; a lot of the problems we pin on police are actually problems with the court system. There is the aforementioned time lag it takes sometimes for cases to be decided. But there is also the enormous capriciousness that can accompany how one DAs office operates vs. another. A lot of time has been spent on this Substack pushing back against the more left wing DAs out there with Chesa Boudin probably being the most famous example. But the rise of leftwing DAs is in part a reaction to some pretty abhorrent practices that seem to have and still exist in various DA offices across the country (see Ken Paxton. AG I know, but serves my point Or see the office in FL where apparently a DA explicitly in writing said they should treat Hispanic people differently).
This leads me to also say that one reason prison reform gained momentum was people pointing out that having prison populations explode carried it's own costs. There is the literal cost of prisons, guards, food etc. that falls on taxpayers. Then there is the cost to communities of having large swaths of working age men (and yes usually men) not only prison but having prison records permanently attached to their name. Just something to think about before going gung ho on throwing more money at the situation (again, not necessarily against).
*One of the other underrated parts of Ferguson is how much anti-tax policy can end up have perverse effects. My understanding is that absent sufficient tax revenue, there came to be an enormous incentive for the local minimalities to essentially "nickel and dime" their citizens with moving citations, traffic citations and other fines almost a revenue raiser. Police essentially became pseudo tax collectors in some sense. And considering Ferguson is not particularly well off, this had pretty terrible consequences in particular cases as people could not get fines and then would incur late fees they had not chance of paying. I know this probably didn't have much to do with the death of Michael Brown (don't want to relitigate the what really happened question), but thought this was one the more enlightening things to learn out of this situation.
One of the earlier times I remember noticing media bubbles was on that very issue of Ferguson. The FBI/DOJ did two seperate investigations into Ferguson. One was a criminal investigation into the shooting of Michael Brown (which found that the initial reports were mostly fabricated by people who wanted to by on tv, and the shooting began inside the police car during a fight over the officer's pistol and spilled out into the street, where it was justified by most understandings of the law) and the other of the Ferguson Police department's patterns and practices generally (which found that something like 60% of the city budget was coming from police-driven enforcement actions designed to nickle and dime people in the city municipal court or through other fees and assest seizures, with some pretty crazy stats.) If you watched conservative news, it was videos of stores burning down and lawyers explaining how the shooting was justified. If you watched left leaning news, it was peaceful marching and people reading about the racially disperate impact of having the police issue something like twice as many arrest warrants as there were people in the town, and the municipal court only being open during the morning weekdays (to encourage non:
-appearances).
I have two unrelated thoughts:
On the cost of prison records attached to people's names: this is usually a cost born by the individual, in most cases fairly (you shouldn't get 4 DUIs, you shouldn't hit your wife, etc..) but it's not a cost to society in the wayI am reading you. Credentials of this sort are primarily about ranking. If we doubled the amount of Ivy League grads, for example, we wouldn't suddenly give twice as many people "Ivy League Jobs", we would more be just diluting the positive elite signaling of a Yale degree. Likewise, if 1 out of 5 job applicants has a criminal record, I'm much more likely to dismiss that 1, but if 1 out of 3 have records, I start to lose that luxury.
The other things is that it's no coincidence that police have borne a disproportionate share for legal system problems. They are the "front office staff" of criminal justice, like actors in a movie or players on a sports team. On top of that they are perceived as blue collar, white and conservative, which are all things that the Democrat Elite increasingly distances themselves from. Meanwhile, the educated lawyers and judges are becoming a core component of the Left establishment. So they are the last people the Democrats or academics or journalists want to blame.
There's actually a lot of progressive criticism of the justice system and court system generally. Again, see momentum to get more progressive DAs elected. But also see how often stories of death row inmates being released after it's revealed the DA withheld evidence or really shoddy evidence was used to convict someone. Heck, there "true crime" boom in podcasts can be traced to NPR's serial podcast which among other things pointed real holes in the prosecution's case.
In fact it's probably the opposite that's happening. Given how much education polarization is happening, it means lawyers are increasingly a left leaning bunch and it's almost certainly leading to more reporting of real problems in the criminal justice system; not just the blatant stuff, but things like disparities in sentencing guidelines (among other problems). And it's not just print. You can make an argument that Chris Hayes is the most prominent left leaning TV news pundit out there and his book "Colony in a Nation" is as much if not more about the court system as policing.
I've heard this argument before in regards to taxes as well. That the changing nature of the Democratic coalition means that Democrats will suddenly get a lot more hesitant about raising taxes on the wealthy. And that's...not happening. As Matt has pointed out, the donors in the Democratic party tend to be more left wing then normie voters and not just on identity politics issues. Maybe this will change over time, but so far that hasn't been the case with taxes or criminal justice.
I'm glad I could write the same comment here on the West Coast hours later.
But still . . . good comment. But not funny at all, which makes me a little concerned for you. Everything okay?
"But not funny at all, which makes me a little concerned for you. Everything okay?"
Absolutely! All hunky dory.
(And I did try to end with a tiny joke about wanting incrementalism in small amounts.)
I enjoyed the joke and, but for an annoying meeting, was tempted to post yet again:
What do we want? Incrementalism!
When do we want it? In due course!
😉
If you want to go for subtle humor, you've picked the wrong crowd. Go write for Benny Hill.
Slowboring, now with a Yakkity Sax!
But seriously, thanks for asking. I hope you are doing alright, too.
I definitely agree that we will need to approach this with incrementalism, but I think he does. The evidence that he recites about the US being on the far end of the curve with regards to crime and particularly violence suggests that we are closer to the linear side than the exponential. His recommendations are relatively mild and seem aimed at low hanging fruit instead of aiming for the moon to mix my metaphors. For someone on the right, the language he uses sounds remarkably like a progressive speaking about poverty.
“That’s a lot! It’s about 20x all property crime losses, which are only about $15 billion…the cost of the criminal justice system is still higher than the cost of murder”
Only if you assume that reducing criminal justice spending would *not* result in more crimes being committed.
I was about to chime in when I saw this.
Precisely. This sort of half-assed cost-benefit analysis is worse than useless because short of enacting a real-world “Purge Night” as a control, we have only a limited inkling of what crime we’re actually preventing.
Where does the curve intercept the Y-axis in the US? 100 murders per 100,000 people annually? 500? 1000?
How many accidental deaths would self-defense measures and weapons additionally cause if you tried to drop enforcement to nothing?
It’s clear to me that if you do the reductio ad absurdum and literally defund the police, courts, and prisons, there will still be policing, judgement, and punishment. It would just be unprofessional, lawless, and vigilante.
Not to mention, and this is likely to be as large a problem as all the others put together, *messy*.
Pre-modern conceptions of justice were a shitshow in which killing dozens of innocent-but-related people including unarmed noncombatants in order to execute a single criminal was an accepted part of the process. The early elective kingships had very little recourse but to call the noble’s representative body into session and cajole all the clans into attacking the one which harbored a member who raped another noble’s daughter, lest long-term disorder break out.
I just can’t even imagine the implications of so thoroughly crippling the administration of justice today.
You shouldn’t compare costs of the system to the costs of crimes actually committed - you should compare it to the cost of crimes prevented. Otherwise you’re like the COVID-skeptics who compare the costs of shutdowns to the number of lives actually lost, rather than the lives saved.
The costs of crime include private costs of deterrents and lifestyle changes.
But the benefits might include reduced SS and welfare spending on murder victims.
I'm kidding. Well, the statement is true. But I think it's a bit absurd to try to numerically tally $ costs benefits of crime. I tend to think that there is real ROI, and maybe we can get some $ estimate by some very difficulty and contentious longitudinal studies. But I don't think we can put aa $ value on most of the 1st order effects, let alone the 2nd order ones.
My point is not to get a precise estimate of the costs but to shift the conversation to crime, like immigration, as an economic growth issue, not a culture war issue.
Worth noting that the ~$10m Value of Life figure is used for population level risk modeling for differential outcomes. They've recommended changing the term to "value of mortality risk" to avoid confusion. Murder rates are sufficiently individual that I think this approach really breaks down (e.g., the value is infinity for the individual).
https://www.epa.gov/system/files/documents/2022-03/86189901_0.pdf
I don’t think the value is actually infinity for the individual. People knowingly increase their risk of death by non-zero amounts on many occasions, but only where the gain is high enough to make it worth their while. That makes sense because you don’t actually lose infinity by dying - you only lose the rest of your life, which is a *lot* compared to any one experience, but not *infinitely* much.
I think that just leads to doubting the utility of the purely numerical approach even more.
I like the data but if we spent $X billion to get violent crime near zero that would be fantastic (to me) despite spitting out a bad ratio. Meanwhile if we reduce property crime enforcement to zero I have no idea what will happen to your cost of property crime figure. To do cost benefit here you need some data or at least priors on the equilibria and the margins.
$300 billion in terms of national spending on a public service is really not that much. Especially since that is for the entire system (not just policing which is perhaps half that amount).
By way of comparison, in 2019 (the most recent date I could find data) state and local governments spent 3.7% of their funding on police (with 2.5 going to corrections and 1.5 going to courts). The same governments spent 22.6% of their funding on public welfare , 21.1% on elementary and secondary education, 9.9% on hospitals (that also charge additional fees) and 9.2% on higher education (that is also collecting substantial fees). Here is a link to the chart I am referencing: https://www.urban.org/policy-centers/cross-center-initiatives/state-and-local-finance-initiative/state-and-local-backgrounders/criminal-justice-police-corrections-courts-expenditures#:~:text=states%20and%20localities%3F-,How%20much%20do%20state%20and%20local%20governments%20spend%20on%20police,on%20courts%20(1.5%20percent).
I am not saying we should spend less on those other functions but realistically the amount spent on police is trivial relative to what the government spends generally. On average Americans spend less $400 a year on police per capita. Obviously, it would be more per household (maybe $1.6k annually), but this is still just not that much money.
i spent $10 on an umbrella last year and since then ive gotten zero drops of rain on my head. what a waste!
$10 million is only the cost of murder victims by your argument. Let’s add in mental anguish, bodily harm, material costs, quality of life, and all the other costs of crime and the math changes. Prison isn’t just for murderers.
And in reality, for every murder there are going to be 10 attempted murders or assaults resulting in physical injury or psychological scarring.
Plus most murders flow out of other illegal activity that the justice system is supposed to prevent.
"... it just seems like it usually doesn't stop with animals."
This, but for partner abuse (also). The percentage of murderers, esp spree killers, who have a record of unpunished wife beating, marital rape, attacks on women, etc., is very high.
I suspected as much and recently I went looking for similar data. But the very little evidence I was able to find pushed me away from that conclusion - it seemed like domestic violence is a somewhat different track of anti-social behavior that was less correlated with other crimes than I thought.
Very open to seeing better research on this, though. As I said, it was very hard to track down any numbers at all.
You might get at an estimate of prevented murders from recidivism studies. I'm too lazy to try it myself at the moment, but I think the data agrees that it's "quite a few":
https://bjs.ojp.gov/sites/g/files/xyckuh236/files/media/document/rpr34s125yfup1217.pdf
I appreciate the meta-discourse of this article: A liberal writer gives a conservative writer a platform, and the conservative writer tries to persuade a (presumably) left-leaning audience of his policy agenda, using both data and appeals to liberal concerns (e.g., Black people are disproportionately the victims of crime).
Personally, I am horrified that the rate of male crime is so much higher than that of females. The cause is obviously poverty. To remedy this, males should be given free money to reduce the male poverty rate, which will then bring the male crime rate down.
"...male crime is so much higher than that of females. The cause is obviously poverty."
Perhaps we should instead give women targeted subsidies to commit more crime? Felony empowerment?
It’s impossible to say from the data provided. There may be a lack of criminal opportunities for woman as well.
My understanding is that this is due to the overpolicing of male neighborhoods.
Also, it proves systemic discrimination. Let’s stop prosecuting crimes that so disproportionately convict and incarcerate males! /S
The criminal law is the masochism of the patriarchy.
Speeding up courts isn’t technocratically difficult: the fix is hiring more judges and prosecutors. In 2023, Georgia budgeted $106 million of state funds for prosecutors and $85 million for superior court judges, who hear both felonies and civil cases. The combined figure is roughly one-seventh of the $1.33 billion budgeted for prisons. (Localities supplement prosecutorial and judicial salaries and also run jails).
It is common for 160 felony cases to be on a single judge’s trial calendar. This creates tremendous pressure to induce guilty pleas, meaning people who plead guilty to mid grade felonies are treated pretty leniently and most folks who are convicted at trial, even
of a minor offense, get harsh sentences. It also means many cases take two years or more to come up for trial. Georgia could expand the number of judges and prosecutors by 30% for 4 to 5% of the Department of Corrections budget. That would be a far better deterrent to crime than mindlessly long sentences.
Thoughts on bench trials as an alternative to plea bargaining? We did that as a high school debate topic many years ago in the days of my youth.
In mid-grade felony cases, a guilty plea takes 10 minutes, a bench trial one day and a jury trial three days. There simply aren’t enough days on the judges calendar to give every defendant a bench trial.
I’m also leery of anything that would further burden the right of citizens to have a jury trial. If we are interested in accurate determinations of guilt, judges are probably better than juries. But juries are useful bullshit tests for what can and can’t be prosecuted. In small counties, a situation where the local judge and local DA could put basically anyone in prison they wanted would 1) be ripe for abuse and 2) would not inspire the confidence of the lower classes.
“…a bench trial one day and a jury trial three days”
Superficially that sounds like bench trials would net out to more free days for the judges. Why is that not the case?
I also think he meant "relative to plea bargaining". That is, we can't replace all plea bargains with bench trials, even if we also replaced jury trials with them. The total would still be too high.
The jury can render their verdict by simply checking boxes on a form. The judge needs to render a written opinion with complete findings of fact and law - this can easily be 100 pages.
That’s a good point: Juries are seriously powerful in our system.
I served on a jury in December - the defendant was facing a set of pretty serious felonies. Two days of testimony, three hours of closing arguments, and another 45 minutes of instructions and we were off to the races. We finished deliberating around noon the following day, and, yes, checked boxes on a form and with that simple administrative act, the defendant was a convicted felon facing years in prison.
Can you share more about your experience? What were the deliberations like? Any dissenters in the ranks? Thoughts on the performance of the attorneys?
Why is a jury trial three times as long as a bench trial? That can't just be jury selection, can it?
1) jury selection 2) prosecutors over engineer cases when their are jurors 3) evidentiary issues cannot be debated in the jury’s presence, that adds time 4) jury deliberations take longer than a decision from the bench
Why would a defendant who wants to go to trial agree to a bench trial when they have the right to a jury trial?
In this proposed scheme, promise of a reduced maximum sentence. Basically, if you're facing something with a maximum sentence of five years, if you agree to a bench trial the maximum will be 30 months. Take it to a jury, you face the full 5 years. Whether that makes sense I dunno.
I agree with the thesis of the piece, broadly speaking. But I am curious about which taxes Lehman would suggest we raise (or which other programs we cut) to pay for the proposals?
Literally almost nothing has a higher return on investment than rule of law.
While I’m not advocating for it… it’s entirely plausible that most current urban beneficiaries of any “welfare” program including TANF and Medicaid would be better off in a world in which those programs don’t exist but crime rates in their neighborhoods are in line with those of Western Europe. Safety of persons and property is just *that* fundamental to economic and social prospects.
"Literally almost nothing has a higher return on investment than rule of law."
Given the importance of RoL in creating an economy where people feel safe doing business, this is an argument for ramping up policing and prosecution of white-collar crimes.
Not even the slightest, tiny, piddling trace of disagreement here.
White collar crime is the only area where I think the prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment should be read narrowly as dealing only with physical punishments and people should simply be shamed and embarrassed to hell. Since Singaporean “whip them on TV so their friends and family get to watch them sob” is out, perhaps “make them scrub homeless people piss off public buildings while cameras follow them around for a year of YouTube live-streaming” would be sufficient substitute.
I haven't put too much thought into white collar crime and that leads me to a question.
When most people talk white collar crimes I feel like their mental reference is Bernie Madoff or something equally spectacular involving a person so rich that they are in most people's out-group. Or at least we imagine very wealthy perpetrators who it would feel good to "put in their place". At least this is what I imagine myself. So when I hear "let's get tough on white collar crime" this is what I assume people have in mind.
But what are the more routine types of white collar crime that we would catch with more policing and enforcement? For every pyramid scheme and federal judge bribery case are there probably 1,000 cases of simple fraud perpetrated by a person who is and has always been poor? Or would we be finding many cases that are currently settled through financial settlements 99% of the time and effectively viewed as something like a tax on doing business close to the line in legally unclear waters? Or cases where an organization is doing something dodgy but it's unclear who is personally liable - the CEO, the board, etc...
Small business owners who routinely commit wage theft would be at the top of my list. I've never met pettier or more penny wise-pound foolish people than the small businesses I worked for in HS and college. Never paid overtime no matter how much of it was worked. Falsified timecards. Always threatened to fire you if you complained about getting paid enough. I get that's not really "white collar" but the idea of low-profile crimes of fraud brought that to mind. Employees are routinely defrauded.
Yeah it's a good example. I don't think it's what people mostly have in mind when they complain about white collar, but it fits the definition for sure. How would you police that better?
Fwiw - I don't disbelieve your experience at all, but it's not something I ever encountered. Quite possibly I've just been fortunate, but I always found it relatively easy to quit a low-wage job if and find another when I was in HS and college. So I wonder how typical either or our experiences were / are. I imagine the stuff you are describing is 10x more common among employers of immigrants, especially illegal or undocumented or whatever word I supposed to use for that situation
I'm a white-collar practitioner. The major categories of white-collar crime by individuals include wire/mail fraud, bank offenses, embezzlement, tax offenses, deceptive business practices, and securities fraud. The Biden admin has also been pushing criminal antitrust (especially wage-fixing), but with little success. Large companies naturally have exposure to more unusual issues like the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (bribery abroad).
White-collar crimes have high intent standards to prevent the criminalization of normal business practices. As a general rule, the core question in blue-collar criminal defense is "did they do it," while the core question in white-collar criminal defense is often "was it a crime." Prosecutions are often very resource-intensive to prosecute, involving expert witnesses and terabytes of documents. In practice, even some USAOs don't really have the capacity to bring major cases. Plus for wealthy individuals, white-collar defense is often a price-is-no-object matter justifying hiring top-flight defense counsel.
As for your last point...see how DJT has avoided accountability. Feel like everything we've seen last 7 years shows that if you have the deep pockets, you don't even need that strong a case to "win" so-to-speak. Just have the resources to exhaust everyone and avoid actual accountability commensurate with your actions/crimes.
Out of sheer curiosity- are there any good structural reasons as to why white-collar crimes ended up requiring mens rea and 'ordinary' crimes don't? How did we end up here? Why aren't white-collar crimes just treated as 'did they do it'?
Most white collar crime is small-time fraud, embezzlement, and tax evasion. The thing is, white collar crime can be extremely labor intensive and time consuming to prove, especially as you get into the more sophisticated stuff. Most police departments don’t employ forensic accountants and aren’t willing to expend the resources necessary to show someone’s been cooking the books.
Completely agree with the previous poster on wage theft.
To your point a lot of white collar crime is probably almost by definition not being committed by CEOs or hedge fund managers. Reality is, there are only so many people who are CEOs and hedge fund managers. Most white collar workers are middle class or upper middle class, again almost by definition.
From my own experience, its often mid level employees and sales where a lot of unpunished white collar crime is committed. Forging signatures on documents to deals over the line or to meet quota or get your commission seems like an especially common one. Probably most famous example is the most recent Wells Fargo case where employees were signing up customers for accounts without the customers know so the employees can meet their quota.
This last example speaks to me the two most insidious aspects of how high level white collar crime really operates. One, the white collar crime is likely the result or at least heavily influenced by terrible incentive structures. Places that make a huge portion or even all compensation commission based are places that are just asking for employees to cut corners and engage in unethical or even illegal behavior. The benefit to the corporation is that you probably know the bad behavior is likely rampant but when someone is caught red handed you can place the blame entirely on the low level employees. After all there is nothing illegal per se about the compensation structures at various firms*. Two, the high white collar crime committed by people near the top is likelier to be one where you ignore or bury inconvenient information. I'm thinking specifically about JP Morgan right now and Jeffrey Epstein. This story is still unfolding so ready to change my theory of what was going on based on new info. But it seems likely to me that the real "sin" was not just there was a high level SVP who was getting "favors" from Epstein, but that various higher ups knew about it...and did nothing.
The latter is important because there is also the very grey area of when companies ignore "inconvenient truths". I use that phrase purposely as I'm thinking about places like Exxon or other oil companies. We know now that they had internal research from the 70s indicating how much their product was contributing to global warming and that global warming was a real phenomenon. But the companies didn't just ignore the info. They created a whole misinformation campaign to sow doubt about global warming findings. They were probably some of the first entities to truly realize the potential of exploiting MSM "view from nowhere" coverage (Scientists say global warming is real, but critics say otherwise). So here's my question, how much of this was illegal and how much should be illegal?
*Years ago I worked with someone who was a loan officer circa 2004-2008. So someone on the "front lines" of the real estate bubble. Supposedly what would happen is some manager would come in and say "we aren't originating enough of our subprime product". But the higher level person would never outright say they should shift customers from prime mortgages to subprime or push people who qualify for prime mortgages to subprime. It was just sort of left unsaid and basically helped create a "plausible deniability" situation.
This is my experience as well. I've mostly seen mid-level employees embezzle and cook books to secure a promotion or avoid punishment. Usually the company prefers to fire them as quietly as possible to avoid the hassle and embarrassment of legal proceedings.
Tax fraud is probably the biggest category by a considerable margin, followed by things like wage theft, collusion, and other crimes with more diffuse harms and favorable power imbalances between perpetrator and victim.
In any case, it’s precisely to avoid the “cost of doing business” issue that I propose this.
At a corporate level penalties should be pegged with a statutory minimum of “estimated benefit over a 10-year horizon multiplied by a factor of 5”.
For individuals, perhaps such a rule is also useful but my understanding of professional and capital-owning class motivations suggests that abject public embarrassment would be a far better deterrent.
Imagine Trump forced to clean up on Skid Row in LA for stiffing a CA-registered contractor. That would force his hand in a way that a hundred bankruptcy proceedings never have.
Mortgage fraud. Tax cheating of various kinds. Underpayment of wages.
Isn't theft already handled pretty well because of incentives? A company has no reason to tolerate a mid-level employee stealing and will certainly fire that person if they find them. How often they bring criminal charges is something I don't know, but police aren't going to uncover these crimes, the companies will.
I guess the bigger problem is when the entire org is stealing.
I think the SCOTUS has put forward a clear and workable standard:
nothing may be prosecuted as a bribe, unless the check has "bribe" in the memo line, and the check is accompanied by a full itemization of what was the "quid" and what was the "quo," in columns so labeled.
Otherwise, no case.
You can also prosecute kickbacks!
"How many times do I have to tell you mugs? We *deduct* ammunition; we *depreciate* the firearm! Does the phrase "capital accounts" mean nothing to you?"
Sure, but this doesn’t answer my question
The pay-for is “heightened business and personal income tax take” at the federal level and “vastly increased real estate tax receipts” at the local level.
Like THPacis below, I find the question to be indicative of at least a double standard on what should be a clear and obvious basic investment.
There are a host of expenditures which should objectively be cut or reformed, but I refuse to engage in this weird exercise of only reducing those expenditures to pay for other specific ones rather than simply saying “some expenditures fail cost-benefit analysis and we should cut them until they don’t” independent of what other proposed expenditures exist.
That's exactly my point about the expenditure reduction portion of the deficit reduction issue. People on the tax side say what they want taxes to raise (some, like the corporate income tax I don't agree with, but they are honest.) Republicans until day before yesterday never said what they want to cut (or by what criterion they would cut. I've never hears a Republican say use CBA to judge expenditures.
Yea it’s a dumb mental framework, period, and I hate seeing lefty folks lend it legitimacy through this kind of selective application.
The sums proposed here are rather modest . Curious you’d raise this question here and not on literally any other policy proposal mentioned in this substack, often much more expensive ?
Because I woke up early today and I’m guessing Manhattan Institute people are more fiscally conservative than me or Matt. If the sum is modest, great, should be easier to find pay-fors then; I am sincerely curious to hear what someone I am guessing is a few clicks to my right would suggest.
Frankly it’s a strange thing to ask. You can ask that about literally every policy proposal, but you don’t because it’s a separate question. Why is it only on this topic that you adopt the pose of an old school right wing spending hawk?
"You can ask that about literally every policy proposal,..."
There are many good policy questions, some of which could always be asked, which nevertheless are rarely asked, e.g. about opportunity costs, or whether our children is learning.
If you want to allege bad faith I’d appreciate it if you just spelled it out instead of beating around the bush. Like I said, I happened to wake up early today so I had time to read the article and ask a question before I went to the gym. It’s really not deeper than that.
Not bad faith, perhaps some bias towards the topic ? It just doesn’t make much sense. One proposes a certain policy based on certain argument why such and such spending is a good idea. One would expect discussion of the merits of the proposal, esp if the money involved is modest. It’s just a separate discussion from “where would you get the money”: there isn’t any reason to expect the proposer of the policy would have any special insights on the latter question. Eg we can all agree that spending on crime reduction is a good idea but differ on the financing : deficit increase, tax increases or cuts in social spending or what have you based on our priors. It’s just a separate discussion. The automatic rejoinder “where will you get the money” is just usually a boiler plate Republican slogan against any kind of expansion of the state or improvement of social services—and not a very good one at that for the above reasons. Since you are rather on the left on most issues (I believe) , and moreover a thoughtful person it strange to hear you voice a rather crude, right wing talking point.
The proposer of the policy likely has different priors on fiscal policy than me which is why I am asking him the question!
How was the workout you fiscal hawk u?
Decent. Basically took the last week off because I hurt my left lat; in light of that I threw up some respectable numbers on bench (though less than I’d have liked) and good numbers on dumbell OHP after.
And it should be asked about every policy proposal. But the context for asking Lehman specifically is that law enforcement reform is NOT cheap -- hundreds of thousands of more officers (though some would not be "police") probably with higher salaries to be able to be more selective, thousands of more judges and prosecutors, the cost of a national gun registration and tracking system -- and the Manhattan Insitute is seen as being Republican-affiliated and Republicans have been, let's say, "reluctant" to increase taxes and in fact have taken aim at state and local taxes.
Couldn't the imputation of underlying ideological basis work symmetrically, though?
Instead of saying, "that Milan is a free-spending lefty; how come he's so cheap when it comes to *this* budget item?"
one could just as well say,
"those Manhattan Institute people are famously anti-spending; how come they ignore fiscal restraint when it comes to *this* budget item?"
But as others have said, perhaps it makes for a better discussion simply to discuss the proposal at the first order, without investigating consistency of outlook.
Yeah I mean I’m not trying to investigate consistency of outlook; I just don’t see pay-fors as independent of a given policy proposal so I was curious what Lehman had in mind.
Your last paragraph is precisely my view. Also it genuinely wasn’t clear to me to begin with that the Manhattan institute was Milan’s angle (he clarified that later in response to my question).
Awesome. Then we're all good.
The US already runs enormous deficits, I don't get this idea that everything has to be balanced like some kind of double-entry bookkeeping. If that was true, we wouldn't have Social Security or Medicare! I like David R.'s comment below that nothing has a higher ROI than rule of law. I would just.... spend the money, the way the US government already does now on everything else. (I say this as someone who's pro-mildly higher income taxes, less weird loopholes like Trump's one LLC one, and also pro-VAT)
Sure. But it seems like we’re headed for some amount of spending cuts, and we could probably use those cuts since NGDP is above trend. So if we want to spend more on police then we will need some combination of spending cuts elsewhere and tax increases (at least in the short term) and I am genuinely curious about what people would suggest.
"and we could probably use those cuts since NGDP is above trend." Non sequitur. NGDP is above trend because inflation is above the Fed' target. There is zero evidence that within the levels we have seen changes in the federal deficit affect Fed instrument setting. The deficit is too large, has been for decades, and is a drag on economic growth, but let the Fed correct its own mistakes.
What’s the case for the deficit having been too large and holding back growth for decades?
Deficits transfer resources from investment to consumption. Yes, I'm assuming most federal spending is consumption and most of what higher interest rates depress is investments. If we taxed the consumption instead of raising interest rates investment would be greater. In addition, secular deficits in the US => higher interest rates => stronger dollar => shift in relative prices of traded goods (where productivity increases are easier) to services.
I think the article would have suffered if it had gone into the realm of pay-fors. Better to focus on the merits of the policy.
Take it out the Department of Education’s budget.
Also, if the increased policing is specifically being focused on urban areas (since that's where the crime is) as the article suggests, it makes sense to any taxation and/or spending cuts to fall primarily on these same areas.
These areas also tend to be significantly wealthier than non-urban areas, so that makes it arguably even more just. And sensible.
I like the SALT deduction elimination. If you are paying high local/state taxes, presumably you are getting a benefit from them. I don't see why that should be allowed to at the expense of a reduction of the federal govt's tax income.
That's not only where crime is.
I agree. But the article mentioned that that is where the increased policing is needed, because that is where crime disproportionately takes place.
Not against interstate/interstate transfers, but really Memphis should pay for reducing crime in Memphis. The Federal role should be to promote policy change (for which carrots can be useful), not transfer resources.
By that logic, Tennessee should really pay for SNAP in Tennessee, instead of Connecticut’s tax dollars paying. Or for that matter, why should Greenwich pay for public schools in New Haven? Why should anyone pay any taxes that fund things that they don’t benefit from? Personally I think part of the function of taxation is redistribution of resources and that’s fine.
I'm not saying no interregional redistribution, but interpersonal redistribution should be the driver. SNAP is from richer people wherever they are to poorer people wherever they are. But for a service that is both produced and consumed regionally, why SHOULD people in Connecticut pay for crime reduction in Tennessee.
To be clear, you prefer a SALT deduction to none for equal revenue raised? If we go from SALT to no-SALT deduction, whose marginal rate decreases to make up the difference?
Of course, that discourages S&L taxation, which is where the bulk of the resources for better law enforcement will have to come from. Deductions for S&L taxation is one of the only features (contributions to retirement savings is another) that make sense from the standpoint of wanting that system to tax consumption more as opposed to income.
I think redistribution should be from richer persons to poorer persons without much regard for how the cluster, so I do not see that as positive as positive. I's like to push the "income" tax system a bit more toward a consumption tax. I don't see S&L income tax paid as a choice between saving and consumption so is not "consumption." for the person, just like contribution to a 401K is consumption. So "deduct" those from the income that is taxed and make the overall rate make up for the revenue loss. Yes, this shifts income from high tax states to low tax states a tiny bit, but I so what?
I have to say there is not vast philosophical underpinning for my preference, but I look at the "safety net" as transfers from fortunate people at "good" times in our lives to unfortunate people at bad times. Anyone can be employed or unemployed, sick or not sick, disbled or not, young and old, parenting young children or not. I'd like a flat tax on consumption to redistribution consumption between people in different temporal and aleatory circumstances. Expenditures that benefit "everyone," I want to pay for with progressive consumption taxes. And expenditures that benefit an arbitrary few at a net cost to the many (ethanol subsidies, Jones Act enforcement, disaster insurance subsidies, farm price supports, whatever) not financed at all. And then there is pure income (or consumption) redistribution starting with EITC up to "high" marginal tax rates with the whole shebang summing to low deficits (not greater than public investment yielding income in the future). The tax on net emissions of CO2 is just to change relative prices, not to move resources between public and private sectors, so that could be a separate tax and refund as needed politically the get the relative price changes.
Agree on SALT; what exactly do you mean by “tax the libs”?
SALT also makes very little sense.
As someone who benefits from SALT and mortgage interest tax deduction, wholeheartedly agree these are giveaways that should be eliminated. Don't understand why I get to benefit from this.
I was just coming to obnoxiously suggest killing the MID 🤓
SALT because those are not consumption expenditures. Mortgage deduction (though it ought to be a partial tax credit not a deduction) because Herber Hoover thought that promoting home ownership was a good idea.
I've been wondering if it would make more sense to swap the mortgage-interest deduction with a mortgage-down payment deduction. The down payment would get deducted from taxable income, pro-rated over a period of time after taking out a mortgage. The larger the down payment the larger the tax deduction. It would conceivably incentivize saving and disincentivize riskier mortgages. Also, corporations get to deduct capital expenditures, so why not individuals?
has nothing to do with income tax but total tax.
I endorse these ideas. You get what you pay for. And if Americans want more crime, a pretty good way to do it is to spend less money on crime prevention.
Relatedly, as I understand it, the country enjoyed something of a second order benefit in the 30-odd years or so after 1990: police budgets, policing numbers (and indeed prison numbers) were continuing to expand for many years even as crime was coming down. So the ratio of "law enforcement resources to level of crime" grew ever-more favorable for public safety. In essence, we tended to enjoy increasingly well-staffed and well-resourced police departments even as their workload was declining. Which only made law enforcement more effective (this dynamic allows the luxury of better *prioritization* of law enforcement resources, too).
One other thought: of the various things we should spend more money on, I'll put in a word for soil remediation to be included among them. I realize this is a somewhat controversial topic. But I believe the bang for buck factor is pretty impressive, though results take a while to show up.
https://jabberwocking.com/lead-water-pipes-should-get-a-little-less-attention/
https://jabberwocking.com/yet-another-look-at-that-lead-crime-meta-study/
I feel like an under appreciated low-hanging fruit on policing is that you could spend a lot of money explicitly NOT on sworn officers that would have the de facto result of putting more sworn officers on the street. Stuff like 1) mental health first responders, 2) administrative staff to keep officers from working desk jobs, and 3) automated enforcement, like speeding / red light cameras would all involve spending money in ways that lots of progressives would find palatable while still increasing law enforcement street presence. And although they are sworn officers, I tend to think that detectives would fall into this category in a lot of places.
Of course, good luck with all that. The whole reason that law enforcement budgets fell was the wave of budget-cutting fervor associated with the Great Recession and the subsequent Tea Party political wave of 2010. The current debt-limit fight suggests to me that those political imperatives on the right haven't changed much, and the politics on the left have gotten harder today than they were in 2008 because of the way in which not just bad policing, but police department culture, has taken on a much more explicit ideological / cultural valence to the right. That's not a good thing, and I wish that police officers / departments themselves could see that, but it's A Thing.
EDIT: fixed the numbering
“speeding / red light cameras”
“lots of progressives would find palatable”
…
I admit to some confusion. You’ve seen the discussions around extending the Roosevelt Blvd enforcement pilot widely here… or that godforsaken ProPublica piece on Chicago’s camera enforcement program.
I was more referring to the mental health responders and the admin staff than the automated enforcement. I think support for automated enforcement is going to be much more spiky (in a way that is somewhat hilarious) because it's basically your classic yes-for-them, no-for-me issue.
That said, I do think it's always useful, when writing about what progressives would find palatable, to totemically start the comment with, "In the world where Joe Biden easily crushed all the more Progressive candidates in the last Democratic primary, I think..." I basically think that, for example, a lot of Biden voters would probably be fine with having first responders with specialized training for mental health issues, even if that was money in the official police budget. Maybe I shouldn't call Biden voters Progressives? I guess I could have written "Democratic voters," instead.
This is being tried in some cities but it's unclear how scalable or beneficial it is compared to the old approach. The specialized mental health professionals tend to need to bring the police with them more often then you'd think, and it's also very hard to know ahead-of-time which calls are routine check-ins or non-violent preventions versus which are going to suddenly spiral into psychotic violence.
I think the mental health stuff, like everything else I proposed, is a marginal change; you could just as easily say that there aren't that many uniformed officers sitting at desks, so admin support doesn't get you that much.
But the whole thing about complex problems is that they are complex; solving them is usually about nibbling away at ten or a hundred different little factors to make improvements, rather than trying to 1) find a silver bullet and 2) scale it up, because 1 is hard, and even if you get 1, it often falls apart when you try for step 2.
If you want an even smaller-bore approach to the mental health problem, I would be equally happy if you set aside a percentage of the uniformed police force for specific, in-depth training on mental health response (i.e. not just a one-Saturday class or whatever). Ideally you would give certified officers some kind of bonus. But right now, putting on my public health hat, police officers are the single largest group of mental-health responders we have, and they are not trained for it, which leads to the outcomes you would predict when you have an untrained person operating in situations that are challenging even for trained professionals. It's basically a policy disaster, and it makes everyone--the people with problems, but also the police officers, and the community--worse off.
Sure - go for it! I have no problem with this approach. But I do usually hear about it being pushed as something closer to a silver bullet. I know you don't see it that way, so I hope I'm not straw-manning too much.
Fwiw, when I read " they are not trained for it" it reminded me of a graham factor (former cop, former commentator here). I took the overall point to be that there are limits to what non-cops can do and we have to be realistic about those limits. Link below if you're curious, but here's one of the most relevant excerpts:
"My point here is that treating people with a mental illness and safely detaining those same people in uncontrolled environments are two related but different skill sets. If you sat on my couch and asked me to help you recover from depression, I would not do a very good job. But if you asked me to use a combination of verbal persuasion, teamwork, and less-lethal weapons to safely detain a mentally ill guy brandishing an ice pick on a public sidewalk? I’m gonna be better than any social worker, because I have been trained on using time, distance, and cover to safely resolve that situation."
https://grahamfactor.substack.com/p/send-a-cop-not-a-social-worker
Maybe the best way to square the circle and make incremental progress is to force more people into psychiatric treatment centers?
The problem with forced psychiatric treatment centers is that they are the worst of all worlds: they are very expensive, they are very unpleasant for everyone involved (which is one reason why they are very expensive), and they mostly don't work. People talk about "deinstitutionalization" (I think someone mentioned it elsewhere in these comments), but the dirty secret is that what we actually did, de facto, is to switch into using prisons for the same purpose, but simply as an additional mandate. And the approach isn't even all that different; prisons are a significant employers of psych nurses for this reason.
So I'm not actually a big fan of bringing back forced institutionalization; I just don't think it would achieve much, and I think you could get a lot more bang for your psych-spending buck by offering substantially more support for upstream, lower-acuity psych services (like in-patient for children), because you are going to reap way more gains, from an efficiency standpoint, getting people into treatment BEFORE they have a violent episode or two. If you had really good upstream coverage, then maybe rethinking institutionalization makes sense, but that's not where our society is right now.
Re: Graham, I remember him; we did a few back and forth exchanges in the comments. I don't necessarily disagree with him, but I think there's a dimension of the problem that I appreciate from my nursing training which is basically that people respond to expectations and environment. If you send an armed police officer to someone experiencing a break, the mere existence of the officer on the scene escalates / worsens the situation, and I'm talking before the officer says or does anything at all. And a lot of these patients are caustic and irritating to deal with under the best of circumstances, almost by definition, so of course a lot of officers respond in very human ways...that escalate / worsen the situation.
It's just a really, really hard problem. And sometimes you are inevitably going to have to use force to deal with it. This is why I'm open to training police officers as a solution, and my honest assessment is that it's a problem with only limited solutions: hard problems are hard. But I think you can't fully appreciate the difficulty of the problem without acknowledging that the mere visual presence of an officer is a potential provocation.
I want to be clear: I'm not saying that in an "officers are all bad" way; it's just that a guy carrying a gun is a walking explicit threat of violence. There's no way around that. I think that police officers think of themselves as nice people, and I think that's great! But it elides the reality, which is that they are ALSO scary walking death machines. They can't help that. It isn't their fault. But it's the nature of situation. And one of the things about psych patients is that they are, in a funny way, sometimes more aware of certain aspects of reality than the rest of us, because they lack the mental coping tools to mentally cover it up / manage that cognitive tension, which is what the rest of us do most of the time.
Agreed with the last paragraph.
Also agreed with Wigan, though. The US, like it or not, is awash in firearms and mental illness can lead untreated folks to do suicidally stupid things. The cops are going to be along for the ride on almost every mental illness call even if they are initially letting the unarmed experts take the lead. And most cops *want* someone there who can help try to contain the situation, in my experience. I was in Kensington along the El grabbing a coffee this Saturday and there was a patrol car trying to dissuade someone who was raving like a, well, lunatic, nearby. Clearly out of their depth, frustrated, and I think everyone is getting fed up operating downstream of a system which doesn't allow *any* sort of coercion to be applied to force the mentally ill and the drug-addled to be treated against their will, which is the clear and obvious need at this point.
Correcting the abuses would have been “expensive” in direct accounting terms. Remember who presided over those “reforms.”
Aren't these kinds of changes almost entirely within the powers of blue cities within blue states like LA and NYC and Chicago?
Sure, and I think that the failure to pursue it is not just a policy failure, but a failure of policy imagination, as it were. These steps are also available in more red-leaning jurisdictions and haven't taken hold there, either.
This is what I was getting at with my second paragraph. I basically think that a core problem with the politics is the ideological and cultural friction between people who basically don't trust one another even though they theoretically want the same outcome. And I'm not sure how you overcome that, because it makes it extremely difficult for the parties to negotiate because of the underlying assumption of bad faith. I live in Philly, and the tension between the rank-and-file of the police department, the city government, and various communities within the city is palpable, and it makes literally everyone in that equation worse off. For that reason, it should be a free lunch: if you could reduce the friction and build cooperation, literally everyone would be noticeably better off. But because the friction is cultural and ideological and historical--people literally dislike and distrust one another, in part because of things that have been said or done in the past--people would rather starve in icy, unhappy righteousness than eat the free lunch. Because humans are funny.
All perfectly sensible. Hence I expect skepticism, outrage, RESISTANCE, from both sides of the aisle. Even in this comments section you can start seeing this dynamic.
I'm outraged that you would say such a thing!
So there's a lot of milquetoast, obviously correct stuff in here because the fundamental reality is that law enforcement has become increasingly ineffectual. While Charles gestures towards the need to do smarter law enforcement rather than just harsher, when you're also dropping positively framed references to "tough on crime" politics and the 94 crime bill it's pretty obvious that you're less concerned with effectual enforcement than you purport to be.
The fundamental problem is one of the tail wagging the dog. "Public Safety" is a positive externality of law enforcement, not the purpose. The purpose of law enforcement is investigating and successfully prosecuting crime. When you get the relationship backwards things break down. Simply throwing resources at "public safety" seriously undermines actual law enforcement. The metric that matters is clearance rates. Effectively improve clearance rates, and public safety follows. Decide to just do public safety pre-crime instead and the harm to justice perpetuates a sort of escalating, whack-a-mole, road to ever more oppressive and totalitarian solutions.
This is completely false. The purpose of law enforcement is crime reduction. Is it your position that if we had enough officers that we had no crime then law enforcement would be a failure? Is it your position that if adding more officers resulted in less crime and less arrests then this would be a failure?
I feel like the gaping chasm of a blind spot in this take is incredibly obvious. Of course you can build an incredibly low crime totalitarian police state. North Korea, by all accounts, has very little crime.
Success in law enforcement in a pluralistic, liberal democracy, is a question of maximizing the defense of individual rights. Crime infringes those rights. So do precrime and invasive searches and omniscient surveillance and paternalistic morality codes and vice laws etc etc.
This is the entire concept of the rule of law.
"Success in law enforcement in a pluralistic, liberal democracy, is a question of maximizing the defense of individual rights."
I don't think the public agrees with you on this one - in general I think a liberal democracy wants the maximization of individual rights the public likes and not the ones they don't. They will put up with stuff they are ambivalent about, but anything the public is antagonistic about is likely to be constrained. E.g. the vice laws you refer to.
You're often right from a pure public opinion/democracy perspective, but that's why we have this whole constitution thing. We have an entire range of countermajoritarian institutions/checks and balances to preserve a pluralistic system of respect for minority rights.
Though you might also argue a lot of the time the elite technocratic values that get imposed are driven by overly influential minority opinions as well.
The constitution can only defend against 60% of the public - it can't defend against 90% of the public. Nor should it. We aren't just individuals whose actions never impact others. We live, work, act in communities and to the extent that are actions impact those communities, they are going to have influence and impact us. That includes legal restrictions on what can be done and mechanisms to enforce those rules.
Of course, something like the constitution will always work by putting a thumb on the scale. But the thumb is there in service of a a particular set of values that are incompatible with the vast state capacity of a totalitarian police state, regardless of the degree of benevolence of the dictator put at it's head.
One question that is sometimes raised is if spending directly on public safety is more or less effective than indirect poverty reduction or targeted help for would be criminals. Do you have any insight/data on these type of trade offs?
A major frustration that I personally have with the decentralized nature of things in the US is that we seem to do poorly at utilizing our mini-experiments to proliferate best practices across the country. Surely at least some of those 18,000 departments are doing something well and that others could learn from. Not everything is translatable and scalable but some things are. Is this something that is being done and we might just not hear able it as relative normies or are there ways you thing we could be systematizing this?
A minor editing quibble. When adding a stat like "Among the countries of the OECD for which I could find data, America has the fourth-highest homicide rate and the fifth-highest serious assault and rape rates." it would be helpful to know how many countries there are in OECD for those of us that don't know these things. (38 it seems)
Also the color choices on that first chart are a bit baffling.
Worth noting here that police work is a good, middle-class job that's attainable and attractive to young men, and doesn't require a 4-year degree. Investing in police roles is probably as beneficial to these groups, as say, public investment in manufacturing or coal mining jobs.
I would argue that one key reform is to stop treating police work, at least above the level of beat cop/patrolman, as a blue collar career path.
Treat it as the sort of enlisted soldier-style “job” that has folks spend 5-10 years doing it and then move on, overseen and constrained by a culturally different long-haul officer corps with wildly divergent interests and incentives.
Half the problem of today seems to be how to square the circle between “civilian control over law enforcement” and “pay and prestige sufficient to attract good candidates.”
Turn the whole thing into a prestige gig like the military, with similar post-enlistment benefits, and a professionalized officer corps inculcated up to the gills in civic ethos and deference to elected governments.
We’re currently at the intersection of some police throwing an unjustified bitch fit at the prospect of accountability and others (and potential candidates) taking one look at the working conditions and lack of prestige and saying, “don’t care if pay is good.”
Out of curiosity, have you read this? https://seanburns-democracy.medium.com/militarize-the-police-a-thought-experiment-4f65269b764f
I'm pretty skeptical of focusing on poverty reduction because poverty rates have not correlated with these crime problems, poverty seems to have been stable in the 90's and has *decreased* in the last few years, while after the 2008 GFC there was a spike in poverty but not a spike in crime and murder.
Right - murder and crime went down after the great recession. I'm old enough to remember everyone I knew and read at the time predicting the opposite.
We'd also expect crime to be dropping over the last 100 years or so as we've gotten vastly more wealthy. And we'd expect a lot more crime in Appalachia and the Rio Grande Valley if poverty was the prime factor behind crime.
"One question that is sometimes raised is if spending directly on public safety is more or less effective than indirect poverty reduction or targeted help for would be criminals. Do you have any insight/data on these type of trade offs?"
The difficulty in answering these questions is that they operate on different time scales and neither is immediate. If you catch violent criminals at a faster rate, for example, it may still take years for a much larger percentage to be off the street. But welfare investments take even longer to wind through the environment. Maybe better school lunches or lead removal can decrease violence, but if so we probably have to wait 15-20 years to see it.
That all said - poverty reduction is a good thing on its own terms but I've never seen evidence that it can do much to prevent criminality. As one reference point, El Paso, Texas is the poorest very large city in the USA but also the safest.
Another piece of evidence is the effect of fatherhood on crime. When a young man becomes a father he becomes, almost definitionally, poorer because he has a little mouth to feed. His material needs have grown. But what we find is that men who have any role in their children's lives as parents tend to reduce their criminal activity and spend more time on legitimate work.
I could have wished the author discussed the role of changes in prosecutorial policy. If part of the problem is that many crimes are not prosecuted, or are prosecuted very leniently, then increases in police funding will have much less impact than they could have.
We have kind of been running the experiment since the Floyd protests, and so far it looks like prosecutorial policy doesn't have much of an impact. The increase in crime across the United States had been pretty generally distributed since the pandemic; if prosecutorial policy was the key factor, you would expect to see places that elected liberal prosecutors in 2020 showing these big spikes, while places with conservative prosecutors would see crime flat or falling or at least not rising as much.
That's not quite what I see in the data. While I haven't tried sorting cities and counties by the politics of specific DAs, I have been able to sort by overall blue / red voting and other proxies for liberal, like whether a county is urban or rural. When I do that the data is pretty clear that homicides have risen everywhere, but much more in blue counties and cities than in rural and red county areas.
On a more anecdotal level, the big cities I know of that have taken a very liberal approach to crime have had huge problems with crime and disorder. Check out this story on the LA Metro, for example: https://www.joshbarro.com/p/the-subway-is-for-transportation or Philadelphia's record breaking homicide numbers.
I think this is kind of the problem: to test the prosecutorial hypothesis, you really WOULD have to sort by the politics of specific DAs, and you would also need to sort by actual policy choices, rather than rhetoric, so you would need to look at some basket of metrics, like number of prosecutions, types of plea deals struck, etc.
You are also going to need to distinguish between progressive DA policy and law enforcement actions, like the work-to-rule policing that some cities saw after the Floyd protests. Those were essentially labor actions, but they obviously have at least the potential to impact crime rates, assuming you believe that officer staffing impacts crime (which I do). Not sure, obviously, but if you told me that it was changes in police officer behavior that landed St. Louis atop the 2021 rankings, I would certainly find that a plausible explanation.
This is why I think that anecdotal policy analysis is basically worthless. I live in Philly, so I have some thoughts on the rise in crime, which impacts my own neighborhood. But I also have some thoughts on policing in Philly, which has been plagued in recent years by a series of scandals. And I can absolutely affirm that the police department in Philly is, in at least some quarters, basically actively feuding with the DA and the progressive parts of the city's political apparatus more generally.
I don't think any of this is great, but putting on my academic researcher hat, I also think that it makes teasing out particular causes very, very dicey. My own expertise is more in public health, and I have become somewhat skeptical, or at least cognizant of the limits, of this kind of research. That said, there are folks trying to do this type of analysis. See, for example: https://munkschool.utoronto.ca/research/violent-crime-and-public-prosecution.
I don't actually think the Munk authors have a slam dunk case, for the reasons I alluded to above. But I feel like if someone DID have a slam-dunk case--meaning, such an obvious signal in the data that you couldn't help but see it--that would have been trumpeted to the heavens by the appropriate partisan actors in a competitive political and information economy.
So that's why I'm skeptical of the prosecutorial policy hypothesis. It feels to me like "one weird trick" analysis: a simplistic analysis that confirms a particular group's priors.
Thanks for the link. This is all fine and a good, well-thought out comment. One thing I'm reflecting on is the data only says so much, it doesn't say why a trend happened, only that it did. You would really need to do what you say and what munk is apparently trying to disentangle prosecutors from other factors.
One thing I still want to point out though is this from your original comment "The increase in crime across the United States had been pretty generally distributed since the pandemic"
That part isn't correct - it really is rising higher in large cities and medium cities compared to red rural areas and suburban counties. And it really is rising more among Black and Native American communities compared to Latinos and especially White and Asian ones. The data doesn't tell us why, but it is quite clear that the divergence started in May/June 2020.
Important disclaimer: I'm wading out of my depth at this point, in terms of my knowledge of the literature not being that deep. But my impression is that the data is just kind of all over the place and can be sliced in lots of ways to suit various arguments. Just to take one example outside of the density context: Mississippi has a really high homicide rate.
So is that about Mississippi being a Republican-run state? Or about the racial composition of the state? Or about the socioeconomic conditions of the state? Or about the state's gun ownership rates? Or is it about cultural factors in the South? Or does it relate to particular policing and prosecutorial practices in the state? How does the state's prison system factor in? What are recidivism rates? Drug abuse rates? How does the nature of the state's economy (i.e. manufacturing to food production to services to mining, etc.) figure in?
And probably the answer is half or more of those plus two dozen other things; basically, I think the homicide rate is an emergent property of a complex system.
So when you say to me, "it really is rising in X vs. Y," it's not that I disagree; it's just that I think that is not really telling you a lot. It's kind of the lies, damn lies, and statistics school of analysis. All of this data is deeply, deeply squishy, down to "what constitutes urban" (parts of Detroit have low density and where, precisely, is the edge of "Houston"?) and what does it mean to be a "Black community" (I live in West Philadelphia; where does it stop being White and become Black, and how do you draw the gentrification line?).
I'm not a nihilist; I do think it is possible to draw these kinds of lines and learn genuinely interesting stuff and do real, rigorous analysis. But I think it is very hard, rarely done, and usually less conclusive than people think, so I have a really high bar on my BS-o'meter in these kinds of discussions, even assuming that all parties are engaging in good faith. And I also tend to assume that success, for the large majority of policy solutions, is basically going to look like bumping the numbers by one or two percentage points. And that's important! We should be trying to do that! But that's also why people hate these kinds of problems (I say, as a public health person). Winning is more of a grind than a transformation, which makes the politics very unrewarding.
I understand that the complexities makes this really, really challenging when talking about causes and especially when talking about solutions. If one were to "solve the equation" of crime it would probably look like what you're suggesting with dozens of inputs and outputs and feedback loops.
But you can still learn something by boiling things down to their simplest levels. The May/June homicide spike is real. **Something** happened for sure. And it happened more in Blue areas, in cities, among males, among Black populations and among young adults. I've pivot-tabled the data so many times that there's almost nothing else to conclude **something** happened and it impacted those demographics more.
At the same time **something** happened that increase traffic fatalities, drug overdoses and alcohol deaths at the exact same time and disproportionately to the exact same demographics. And all of these deaths rose, disproportionately in the same demographics, in 2015 when the Ferguson protests kicked off.
I agree with you that these things are complex and it's easy to selectively find data that would seem to support whatever you want. But I don't think that's what I'm doing. My starting point is "what kinds of deaths have increased since 2020 and who is most impacted". I don't really as much to say about why this happened or what should be done, but I think many of the suggestions you make about Mississippi can be just about ruled out given the simplest birds-eye views of the data.
We could list those factors out point-by-point and find that most of them have a weak or non- existing correlation with homicide rate. It doesn't mean they don't play any role, I'm not a nihilist on solutions either. But I'm also not a nihilist on learning something from the simplest, strongest correlations visible in the data.
"We have kind of been running the experiment since the Floyd protests, and so far it looks like prosecutorial policy doesn't have much of an impact."
"This is why I think that anecdotal policy analysis is basically worthless."
One of these things is not like the other :)
googling the issue brings up a lot of questionable statements on both sides of this issue. it could be that its too soon to say: cash bail started to get zuck level $ end of 2017
i don't think you need police or political data: there are fairly recent progressive ideas that you could find in prosecution data:
these are
-lower or non-existent cash bail
-% of charges refused
-# of non-violent charges (with special interest in illegal guns)
I know Urban is a proxy for liberal but I think the urban thing matters more than the liberal here, so you need to compare urban to urban.
Are there cities that aren't liberal? I'm not sure there are enough of them to even get a meaningful comparison. How many cities vote less than 60% D? And 60% is enough to start pushing the justice system in much more left-leaning directions
I'd still expect to see large difference between Austin, SF, Boston vs Houston, Salt Lake City etc.
I keep hearing this, can you provide a source?
Google is your friend, and an academic library is an even better one, if you have access (I do, but I get that most people don't). There is one study linked in my response Wigan, if you want a starting place, but this is the kind of subject where one study is basically just a starting place. Depending on how good you are with computer analysis, you can pull down the FBI statistics from 2021 on your own, but you will need to do some work with it.
Hope that helps.
Public Service Loan Forgiveness should be granted for 5, not 10, years of service. Many more doctors and lawyers would take lower-paid or otherwise harder (rural hospitals etc) jobs for 5 years to get their loans forgiven and it would make a real difference in recruitment for these key positions.
I can't speak across all specialties but in many cases the rural flyover state hospitals are paying much more than the coastal metropolises, because they need to in order to get candidates. So it's not a lack of financial incentive.
I strongly disagree with using three different shades of blue on the line graph.
This post seems well-thought out and has some good charts. But how come every day I have to see and hear 38 year old graduate students saying things like "there's literally no empirical evidence that the police prevent crime!" or "there's no link between punishment and determent!" or whatever. And then they get quoted in the paper.
There seems to be a real disagreement about the basics of this whole thing.
Because unfortunately there are many people who are stupid.
I dunno, it feels like stupid people have a clearer view of this than smart people. Smart people have spent a lot of mental energy over the past several years figuring out how to blame "the pandemic" for people being shot at night clubs, illegal street racing events, etc.
I’m talking about the grad students who think policing doesn’t work.
This statement made me stop and ponder:
"Violence, that is, is a policy choice."
Now . . . is it? This touches on a first order question: how much are complicated, often deep seated social phenomena subject to management through policy? What's the most benefit we can reasonably expect from policy? When can we really know which policies may work best?
Okay, take crime. It's arguable that the most effective policy we've had in decades is lead abatement. Obviously, there's not a consensus on this, but let's stipulate that this is indeed true for sake of argument. Back when lead abatement was being discussed and implemented, who was arguing that not only is a major reason to do so crime prevention in the coming decades, but that this would be the best strategy for doing so? Without googling, I'll say . . . no one.
The world's complicated! Things are so interweaved that you can't disentangle causality and pick out the right thread to follow to the glorious sunlit uplands.
Clearly, the link between policy and desired outcomes is more straightforward in certain cases. Old people don't have enough money, so let's create Social Security and give them money. We want to get to the moon, so let's get together a bunch of engineers and give them money to develop rockets that can go to the moon.
But others are a lot harder and can't be solved even with the best of, say, social science research. The studies are usually too small and give us no sense what can or can't scale. Instead, we have to be satisfied with muddling through (or, bore through some hard boards) and be either/both modest in our direct policy goals and greatly ambitious in our largest ones. By which I mean, don't think that you can design policies that will solve some specific hard problem, like crime, but instead focus on pursuing the biggest policy goals by aspiring to building on a productive economy through smart, modest management and just doing things that are obviously good, like funding R&D and hoping that will keep your economy vibrant through the years.
You said it better, later.
Why not both?
Great article! Another impact, which is hard to calculate due to the fragmentation of police but is very real, is that an increasing percentage of police funds have been directed to internal auditing, investigations, and accountability. This is not necessarily bad as, if those institutions fulfil their purpose, they make agencies better over time. That said, they can also grow fairly large in size in some jurisdictions and have been growing relative to general police funding. Thus, they consume a larger share of a shrinking budgetary pie. Again, not bad, but it further crowds out funding for crime prevention work.