One of the more disingenuous articles I’ve read about this topic. It makes a classic conservative rhetorical choice - to acknowledge gun violence as a thing that exists (which, hey - better than the NRA!) and then, in an instant, hand-wave it away in favor of some complex re-framing of the problem.
“There are lots of popular explanations for this disparity. As Matt has observed, some of it is attributable to the large number of guns we own.”
Sorry - that’s it? 25x the rate of gun violence of comparable countries and a single sentence attributing ‘some’ of it to guns is all we get? Until ‘data-driven’ conservatives stop treating guns as a sacred cow, it’s going to be very difficult for me to take seriously their more elaborate and causally uncertain proposals.
Of all these potential areas to address, it seems like prisons would be most malleable to legislative/administrative action. After all, the state or federal government (as appropriate) has almost total control over what goes on in prisons if they care to exercise it.
Personally, I think not letting gangs run prisons should be a very, very high priority. When MattY was posting about El Savador last week, he noted how very dangerous it is to allow prison gangs power of life and death over prisoners. It means they can "run crime" in the outside. Then on the other wide of it, we're always talking about structuring incentives for teachers based on how well their students perform. Why not give "grades" to prisons based on whether their prisoners reoffend after release or something like that?
Excellent overview. I made a rough list of eight problems Lehman discusses that impact violent crime. He might also have discussed a ninth problem- economic inequality-which almost certainly has a major impact on crime, especially property crime, but I take his point about focusing on policy rather than root causes.
The eight problems Lehman lists are:
1. Low expenditure on public safety and criminal justice.
2. Gun prevalence.
3. Honor culture, etc.
4. Decentralization.
5. Poor data collection and analysis.
6. Slow courts.
7. Poor police recruitment.
8. Poor prisons.
Of these eight problems, we can assume that gun prevalence and culture are difficult if not impossible nuts to crack by means of top down policy. Decentralization, which I think is a major impediment to reform, is a very difficult, but perhaps not impossible, problem. (??).
That leaves five problems which are more or less amenable to policy: low (historically) expenditure, poor data collection, slow courts, poor police recruitment (and training?) and poor prisons.
It would be interesting to read a separate and detailed essay on each one of these five problems- or maybe they already exist?
It is important to at least separate Federal policy from State and Local policies. Crime is probably not a big enough problem for it to be very high on the federal agenda. It's there only because Republicans found that it was electorally advantageous to bring it up.
The _Federal_ Government could register and track gun sales, gather data, analyze and disseminate best practices, and subsidize S&L expenditures on police, prosecutors and courts. But the heavy lifting has to come from the S&L governments whose citizens bear the costs of crime.
The Federal Government could also enter the arena of developing and disseminating best practices on police training, since it already is involved in higher level police training (FBI National Academy, etc.). This would be one small step toward standardization of law enforcement, a goal which most advanced democracies take for granted.
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.
I understand the impulse to publish this piece, Matt, but I find M.I. in bad faith. The "bi-partisan" bills cited at the end occurred before the Rs went scorched-earth. The Manhattan Institute promotes scorched-earther Chris Rufo. It will publish these bien-passant policy pieces but not actually try to get Rs to change from screaming "Ds defund the police" to even tough-on-crime good policy. What did Reihan influence from 2017-2019 when Rs had the majority? How about in R-controlled state governments?
I'm not judging MI/CJ as a "publication". I'm judging them as a /player/. I think the purpose of CJ is to peel off some small-l libertarian / centrist policy wonks such as Matt, and that it answers to the larger MI effort to go MAGA. The purpose of "good writing and analysis" on public policy should be /to influence policy/. Matt is admirably focused on that. The evidence suggests that CJ's paymasters at MI have no interest in supporting CJ's editorial PoV on these matters.
A good way to vet my hypothesis would be to ask what centrist / libertarian policy wins Reihan (or the Koch-funded Tyler Cowen) has seen for his decades of services to the MAGA+vote restriction+cut taxes on rich+gridlock on everything else GOP governing coalition? Which of Reihan's books has affected what Mitch McConnell signed off on in final negotiations of any consequence?
"The Koch-funded Tyler Cowen" Yeah! Poison that well!
Jokes aside, aren't you doing exactly what Wigan insinuated, again? You're just picking the worst possible piece of information vaguely associated with an individual, and then you're throwing it out there in a cynically-worded attempt to link the individual and his arguments to a moral sense of "bad" so that those arguments are discarded out of hand. Why not judge the actual arguments? Why not read the post, ruminate over the content, and respond thoughtfully?
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.
The reason to focus on root causes is the solutions may scale well while. Ideas like raising the efficiency of courts sound good but the yield is just abysmal. The pitfall for root causes has been that everyone argues for one of their hobby horses.
I don’t like horses, so I don’t have any suggestions.
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.
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).
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.
these are great recommendations, and it is refreshing to mostly bypass the tired phrenology of "the foundations of crime" and go straight to the fundable solutions
however it is important to at least sketch where this lack of funding comes from
-being tough on crime is not yet winning campaigns, and occasionally starting riots.
-a recent nationwide and successful campaign to elect judges and other justice officials on platforms such as removing cash bail and not charging non-violent offenses (such as illegal guns)
-things that a municipal police department could get away with in the 90s (primarily giving chase) will get you slapped with a federal consent decree today, which will drastically decrease your productivity. Many cities are currently under one, including
The federal consent decree in Seattle actually ended last month. It's still complying with new accountability protocols put in place by the settlement with the DOJ though, so your point regarding productivity might still apply.
Peter Moskos had a great interview with a former Seattle police officer who resigned to go to law school. He discussed that one of issues with police reform is you'll get a good idea (we need lots more police data for science and accountability) that get implemented by people who are police abolitionists and do not care about downsides. For Seattle, this was explained as the several forms every officer has to fill out if they are on a call and a use of force incident happens. Seems reasonable, until he explains that the following scenario: a police officer is dispatched to deal with a mentally disturbed person waving a pipe around. The officer arrives, tried to descalate, calls for 5 more officers for backup, and then tackles the person to stop them from hitting someone. He puts them in handcuffs and everything is okay. All 6 officers now need to go back to be station and spend 1-3 hours on duplicitive use of force forms because they were "on a call" where a "police violence incident" occured. They can't take other calls for service and the remaining cops have to cover their slack. This is ineffective, annoyes officers and encourages then not to be proactive.
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.
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.
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.
Interesting to note that even though prison mortality has worsened, compared to controls who are not imprisoned, it appears to have some beneficial effect on mortality, at least until 2017.
It's actually jaw-droppingly shocking how safe prison is. When I've looked up prison homicide numbers, I've never seen a statistic that is even double the US general population murder rate. The number is actually usually closer to the rate for the population at large. Which is stunning when you consider who is locked up: mostly young men with violent histories from high-murder neighborhoods.
More anecdotally, my uncle was a prison guard and I've heard him talk about how frequently prisoners die in the months right after release. Drug OD is the big post-release killer, but plenty die from all the other killer of young men; motorcycle accidents, homicide, suicide, etc..
I have no idea what the rate "should" be. The population is extra violent and harder to punish(they're already in jail) but the environment is also more controlled and guarded.
🙂
One of the more disingenuous articles I’ve read about this topic. It makes a classic conservative rhetorical choice - to acknowledge gun violence as a thing that exists (which, hey - better than the NRA!) and then, in an instant, hand-wave it away in favor of some complex re-framing of the problem.
“There are lots of popular explanations for this disparity. As Matt has observed, some of it is attributable to the large number of guns we own.”
Sorry - that’s it? 25x the rate of gun violence of comparable countries and a single sentence attributing ‘some’ of it to guns is all we get? Until ‘data-driven’ conservatives stop treating guns as a sacred cow, it’s going to be very difficult for me to take seriously their more elaborate and causally uncertain proposals.
Of all these potential areas to address, it seems like prisons would be most malleable to legislative/administrative action. After all, the state or federal government (as appropriate) has almost total control over what goes on in prisons if they care to exercise it.
Personally, I think not letting gangs run prisons should be a very, very high priority. When MattY was posting about El Savador last week, he noted how very dangerous it is to allow prison gangs power of life and death over prisoners. It means they can "run crime" in the outside. Then on the other wide of it, we're always talking about structuring incentives for teachers based on how well their students perform. Why not give "grades" to prisons based on whether their prisoners reoffend after release or something like that?
Excellent overview. I made a rough list of eight problems Lehman discusses that impact violent crime. He might also have discussed a ninth problem- economic inequality-which almost certainly has a major impact on crime, especially property crime, but I take his point about focusing on policy rather than root causes.
The eight problems Lehman lists are:
1. Low expenditure on public safety and criminal justice.
2. Gun prevalence.
3. Honor culture, etc.
4. Decentralization.
5. Poor data collection and analysis.
6. Slow courts.
7. Poor police recruitment.
8. Poor prisons.
Of these eight problems, we can assume that gun prevalence and culture are difficult if not impossible nuts to crack by means of top down policy. Decentralization, which I think is a major impediment to reform, is a very difficult, but perhaps not impossible, problem. (??).
That leaves five problems which are more or less amenable to policy: low (historically) expenditure, poor data collection, slow courts, poor police recruitment (and training?) and poor prisons.
It would be interesting to read a separate and detailed essay on each one of these five problems- or maybe they already exist?
It is important to at least separate Federal policy from State and Local policies. Crime is probably not a big enough problem for it to be very high on the federal agenda. It's there only because Republicans found that it was electorally advantageous to bring it up.
The _Federal_ Government could register and track gun sales, gather data, analyze and disseminate best practices, and subsidize S&L expenditures on police, prosecutors and courts. But the heavy lifting has to come from the S&L governments whose citizens bear the costs of crime.
The Federal Government could also enter the arena of developing and disseminating best practices on police training, since it already is involved in higher level police training (FBI National Academy, etc.). This would be one small step toward standardization of law enforcement, a goal which most advanced democracies take for granted.
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.
I understand the impulse to publish this piece, Matt, but I find M.I. in bad faith. The "bi-partisan" bills cited at the end occurred before the Rs went scorched-earth. The Manhattan Institute promotes scorched-earther Chris Rufo. It will publish these bien-passant policy pieces but not actually try to get Rs to change from screaming "Ds defund the police" to even tough-on-crime good policy. What did Reihan influence from 2017-2019 when Rs had the majority? How about in R-controlled state governments?
I think judging publications by the worst of their writers will lead to dismissing too much good writing and analysis.
I'm not judging MI/CJ as a "publication". I'm judging them as a /player/. I think the purpose of CJ is to peel off some small-l libertarian / centrist policy wonks such as Matt, and that it answers to the larger MI effort to go MAGA. The purpose of "good writing and analysis" on public policy should be /to influence policy/. Matt is admirably focused on that. The evidence suggests that CJ's paymasters at MI have no interest in supporting CJ's editorial PoV on these matters.
A good way to vet my hypothesis would be to ask what centrist / libertarian policy wins Reihan (or the Koch-funded Tyler Cowen) has seen for his decades of services to the MAGA+vote restriction+cut taxes on rich+gridlock on everything else GOP governing coalition? Which of Reihan's books has affected what Mitch McConnell signed off on in final negotiations of any consequence?
"The Koch-funded Tyler Cowen" Yeah! Poison that well!
Jokes aside, aren't you doing exactly what Wigan insinuated, again? You're just picking the worst possible piece of information vaguely associated with an individual, and then you're throwing it out there in a cynically-worded attempt to link the individual and his arguments to a moral sense of "bad" so that those arguments are discarded out of hand. Why not judge the actual arguments? Why not read the post, ruminate over the content, and respond thoughtfully?
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.
The reason to focus on root causes is the solutions may scale well while. Ideas like raising the efficiency of courts sound good but the yield is just abysmal. The pitfall for root causes has been that everyone argues for one of their hobby horses.
I don’t like horses, so I don’t have any suggestions.
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.
Why not both?
You said it better, later.
I strongly disagree with using three different shades of blue on the line graph.
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).
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.
these are great recommendations, and it is refreshing to mostly bypass the tired phrenology of "the foundations of crime" and go straight to the fundable solutions
however it is important to at least sketch where this lack of funding comes from
-being tough on crime is not yet winning campaigns, and occasionally starting riots.
-a recent nationwide and successful campaign to elect judges and other justice officials on platforms such as removing cash bail and not charging non-violent offenses (such as illegal guns)
-things that a municipal police department could get away with in the 90s (primarily giving chase) will get you slapped with a federal consent decree today, which will drastically decrease your productivity. Many cities are currently under one, including
Seattle
Portland
New Orleans
Detroit
Cleveland
Albuquerque
The federal consent decree in Seattle actually ended last month. It's still complying with new accountability protocols put in place by the settlement with the DOJ though, so your point regarding productivity might still apply.
Peter Moskos had a great interview with a former Seattle police officer who resigned to go to law school. He discussed that one of issues with police reform is you'll get a good idea (we need lots more police data for science and accountability) that get implemented by people who are police abolitionists and do not care about downsides. For Seattle, this was explained as the several forms every officer has to fill out if they are on a call and a use of force incident happens. Seems reasonable, until he explains that the following scenario: a police officer is dispatched to deal with a mentally disturbed person waving a pipe around. The officer arrives, tried to descalate, calls for 5 more officers for backup, and then tackles the person to stop them from hitting someone. He puts them in handcuffs and everything is okay. All 6 officers now need to go back to be station and spend 1-3 hours on duplicitive use of force forms because they were "on a call" where a "police violence incident" occured. They can't take other calls for service and the remaining cops have to cover their slack. This is ineffective, annoyes officers and encourages then not to be proactive.
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
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.
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.
I appreciate Charles trying to be persuasive to centrist-y progressives rather than provocative. Completely agree with his points!
Great piece :)
Interesting to note that even though prison mortality has worsened, compared to controls who are not imprisoned, it appears to have some beneficial effect on mortality, at least until 2017.
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=364471
It's actually jaw-droppingly shocking how safe prison is. When I've looked up prison homicide numbers, I've never seen a statistic that is even double the US general population murder rate. The number is actually usually closer to the rate for the population at large. Which is stunning when you consider who is locked up: mostly young men with violent histories from high-murder neighborhoods.
More anecdotally, my uncle was a prison guard and I've heard him talk about how frequently prisoners die in the months right after release. Drug OD is the big post-release killer, but plenty die from all the other killer of young men; motorcycle accidents, homicide, suicide, etc..
I have no idea what the rate "should" be. The population is extra violent and harder to punish(they're already in jail) but the environment is also more controlled and guarded.