I feel like this article misses the core question, which is why exactly capacity has fallen so much across so many systems simultaneously. It would make sense to say "ah, police are quietly protesting after the BLM protests, that is why policing capacity has fallen", but how does that explain missed trash pickups or school truancy? Just saying "we should allocate more resources to fix capacity problems" feels perilous when we don't seem to have a solid understanding of why it has fallen so much, so quickly, in so many (at least superficially) unrelated domains.
I don't have a good answer, but spit balling some theories that come to mind:
1. What if all these systems are way more connected than they seem at first blush? A failure in one cascades to the others, reverbating back and forth in a vicious cycle. Fewer cops means that no one locates truant students which means kids have more time to fare hop on WMATA and so on. I'm not sure how this trickles all the way down to trash collection though.
2. Post-COVID malaise? Everyone just kinda realized how much they could coast during COVID, and that social fellow feeling has not fully recovered. The sort of minimum standard of trying to not feel ashamed of yourself has been hollowed out during COVID, and this shows up all across the board: why should I dot my I's/go to school/do that extra trash pickup/write this fare hopping ticket and so on.
3. Maybe the city budget isn't adjusted for inflation somehow? So all services are 25%+ more expensive to provide, resulting in a commensurate drop in capacity. Relatedly, I'm not sure where DC's tax revenue comes from, but maybe WFH has hit its tax revenues harder than other cities? Though intuitively I'd imagine that government is LESS prone to WFH than most other white collar work...
4. Maybe corruption increased during COVID? I could be mistaken, but I think DC has had issues with this in the past. A large new corruption tax could degrade the capacity of all systems simultaneously.
One major problem that I’m not seeing here is that many of DC’s public services exist as jobs programs first, public works and services second. This pops up a lot with WMATA.
However, I’m not sure this is the source of the sudden drop in capacity- the jobs program thing has been true since Barry. That system can kind of work if you have effective administration, but Bowser has, over the last 5 years, really leaned on hiring cronies who simply cannot manage their jobs. The collapse of OUC is a critical example of this, but you can see similar issues with DYRS, Contee at MPD (his replacement seems to have a tangible effect on policing), and the housing authority. When management ability is only incidental to management selection, and you have staff where competency is incidental, eventually you are going to have both incapable management and incapable staff, and therefore collapse.
I will say that since I’ve gotten individual desk phone numbers for managers at DC government agencies, I’ve been able to get things done. But it shouldn’t be on individuals to call the one person at, say, DPW who will get a truck out for a large item removal.
Re: your point 3– in a growing economy, labor-intensive and hard to automate services pretty much always have costs that grow relative to the price of everything else (because they’re competing for inputs against fields that can pay better because their output/unit of labor is increasing). Law enforcement, like education and nursing-type care, is one of the fields that’s affected; even on an inflation-adjusted basis, an economically growing society will generally need to spend more to put the same number of officers on the street.
True, but that seems like a nation-wide problem. Why is DC so uniquely susceptible to it? Or is it more that DC has an abnormal spike in homicide for one-off local reasons, but the rest of the crime trends are in like with other major cities? Fwiw, some of these things (increased transit fare evasion, slightly elevated property crime) seem to be prevalent in my city as well, while others (fake plates, school truancy) do not, so at first blush it seems like a lot of this is DC-specific. If that's the case, economy wide reasons like Baumol's cost disease can't be the only answer.
If you're really curious this guy has been breaking it down for years. I would say the number 1 cause might be the simultaneous failure of all key leadership posts, linked to DC's weird governance- a city council that wanted less enforcement, a DA that wanted to prosecute less, a mayor that's only interested in passing the buck, several police chiefs who wanted to just appease the above,
Some of these leaders are responsive to the voting public ( which was unusually bought into Defund rhetoric, being a mix of extremely low socioeconomic and extremely high economic left-wing types ) but others are appointed federally, like DA Graves.
I suspect the fact that DC being the "most liberal" city and electing its politicians based on that, while much of the actual governance is controlled by an especially polarized Congress is a large part of the explanation. When local people get elected based on opposition to the national government, and can credibly blame said national government for all their problems (including locally self-made ones), that's a recipe for ensuring no one is held accountable for incompetence. Moreover, conservatives in Congress don't seem willing to extend any help fixing up a government whose problems they can point to as an example of what "Democrat governance" looks like. I think the citizens of DC are localized victims of the decline in "national" trust and increased polarization.
DC has a lot less control over the set of resources that get allocated to crime and policing than US cities in general do because of its unusual legal status— Congress needs to approve its budget in an appropriations bill.
Most US cities facing an increase in crime will increase their budgets for policing and prosecution and eat the cost disease-related increased expense (usually by either raising taxes or cutting something else). Some cities experimented with not doing this in 2020-2021, but the results have been unpopular and the elected officials responsible have mostly either changed tack or lost elections to officials who would.
DC’s electeds have more difficulty pivoting than their counterparts in other cities and also an easier time avoiding blame for problems, so they’re both less willing and less able to course correct.
Until Comer’s hearing congress legitimately had no clue how much Graves had taken his foot off the pedal, and I think that hearing was a real inflection point in DC. There were audible gasps when the mayor said the charging rate was in the 60s
With regards to #3, the Biden administration has been remarkably ineffective at achieving a stated goal to get the government workforce back into the office. They being a MASSIVE % of the DC workforce, it has led to a serious issues for the city in terms of businesses that support office workers and tax revenues. Per the WSJ this led to a 500 million dollar gap in the districts budget last year.
Work from home is here to stay and there’s no going back. In a tight labor market, forcing people to come into the office more means that they’re simply going to quit and switch to more flexible employers. There’s also been a massive change in how people work that’s hard to unwind. I don’t won’t for the government, but do back office white collar work for a bank. Since COVID, every single meeting has been moved to Zoom, so even when I go to the office, it feels like I’m still working from home.
"Work from home is here to stay and there’s no going back."
IMO/E -- I think we need to wait to see what happens in a 6-8% unemployment market before we can stick a fork in the corp. office. Every corp. exec peer I know thinks their culture has taken a huge hit -- especially lack of mentorship for early career employees - and the middle management layer is stretched way too thin with the added burden to micro-manage the individual contributors (e.g., is Taylor actually working today?).
Micromanaging is an abject managing failure, though.
I've never managed someone who was thought to have "needed" micromanagement who wasn't in truth just not actually cut out for the job.
Similarly, I've never seen micromanagement IMPROVE an escalation. Without fail, it induces a managerial myopia at the very moment when the team actually needs a manager to see "the big picture" and look ahead to the future so everyone can avoid dead-end wild-goose-chases.
That's a strange reaction. If a manager has 10 direct reports and can look out across the cubes and see all 10 there ... they at least know they're all there. Work quality -- sure that's a different issue and that's still there but now with WFH -- it creates far more pressure on managers to just track attendance / effort. To me - that's micromanaging. Maybe you're reacting to a different form of it.
Please don’t take this the wrong way, but do you have any direct management experience? Just trying to understand where you’re coming from here.
What you describe is what I’d just call basic nuts and bolts of management. But as someone who has managed both remote teams and in person, I’ve seen very little difference. There was no more pressure to monitor remote reports’ progress than in-person ones; the entire job is just always aligning with people on the work.
Tracking performance simply was rarely ever about WHETHER someone had done their work; it was much more intensively about keeping them unblocked and their scope clear.
We will see! Employees clearly value work from home and are willing to accept somewhat less money for the flexibility vs going into the office. In a downturn, I think that companies will be tempted to cut direct costs, like salaries, but keep a valuable perk with zero direct costs, working from home.
I think they'll be much more tempted to go where labor is cheapest now that the market for it is global. They'll definitely keep WFH - it's just that that home will be of a new employee in Romania, not the one currently occupied by their former American white collar worker.
I don’t think that the corporate office is dead by any means, but economically, “recruit employees from any geography where we have a legal entity, often for less money than we’d have to pay to get the same talent in our main office’s location” is too good a deal too much of the time to pass up entirely.
As someone whose industry has very unwillingly corraled him into basically forced WFH, this is all mind blowing to me. Besides agreeing with David_in_Chicago below that this almost self-evidently damages team-wide (note: not necessarily individual!) performance, coordination, and morale, it just seems so odd how many of my colleagues are willing to walk into this primed trap? Yes: it's a perk for you now, but that same perk is what will be used as the justification to send your job overseas at a moment's notice. If you confidently claim to your managers that you can do your job just as well from the next county over as you can from the office, their immediate next though will be "well why don't I pay this Colombian with perfect English and two grad degrees a tenth of you wage? 10 miles or 1000 miles from the office is all the same over Zoom!" Even if I liked WFH (again, I hate it, so maybe my bias is clouding my judgment), it seems clear to me that everyone who so merrily supports it is digging their own grave.
1. Colombia does not in fact product enough double-advanced-degree graduates with perfect English.
2. Coordination between international teams is a LOT more difficult than domestic remote ones. Most of the work that is currently outsourced is low-value for this reason — higher value projects cannot tolerate the coordination costs. Companies that overrely on outsourced knowledge work are already naturally competed out of the market or downwards in it.
1. Maybe I was being too flippant here, so allow me expand on my hyperbole: the supply of highly educated, English-speaking workers in low cost of living countries has dramatically expanded in since the last time there was a big offshoring push of PMC labor in the early 2000s, and the friction with employing these folks has gone down dramatically. In my industry, there is now a large population of Indians/Ukrainians/Romanians/Brazilians who, in my experience, are roughly as competent and capable as my American colleagues, but much less entitled. I specifically picked Colombia because it obviates the time zone issues that are still genuinely difficult for some of these locales, but I think the basic point still stands: if you claim that some white collar job can be done be a smart, competent English speaker in Bozeman, I claim that it can be done just as well (or 80% as well, which is enough) by a smart, competent English speaker in Warsaw/Jakarta/[INSERT_MIDDLE_INCOME_METROPOLIS_HERE] for 10% the wage. And there are literally hundreds of millions of people in the latter group.
2. I agree at the margin, but isn't this just a special case of the argument against remote work in general? "Coordination is hard, we should maximize our ability to coordinate" seems like a great argument against WFH across timezones... but also a great argument against WFH at all. I think coordination exists on a spectrum between "fully synchronous and colocated" on one end and "fully asynchronous and distributed" on the other, and it feels a bit suspicious to me that team WFH always claims that the optimal point on this spectrum is one that happens to conveniently align with their ideal lifestyle preference...
To be clear, I’m not a WFH evangelist, I am just a general skeptic and think it’s a lot easier for any of us to overstate narrow cases on big trends that haven’t finished playing out.
My personal dog in the fight is just that I want to understand what are the dynamics that might resolve the trends in either direction, not arguing the inherent strength of any given direction.
So, you bring up a lot of good points; I just think that we’ve already seen enough asymmetry and divergence between sectors that WFH is here to stay, and the real question is “where will it trend up vs where will it trend down, and why does it trend differently for each?”.
There are a lot of jobs where that 80% replacement just isn’t enough to get the job done.
And the workers who would have done those jobs aren’t going to take it lying down. As we saw from the 2000s crash you mentioned, a lot of those engineers went out and started the next generation of businesses. With America’s easy access to capital and large talent pool, those knowledge workers are most liable to pioneer the next rung of the value chain that purports to replace them.
Now, granted, this could result in anything from wild prosperity to not being enough to cancel out the offshoring. But a priori, I think we at least have enough evidence on hand to conclude that this looks more like Web 2.0 than the China shock.
"Work from home is here to stay and there’s no going back."
I'm not super convinced of that based on my anecdotal observation that, over the past 18 months or so, my law firm's management has clearly successfully pushed the vast majority of not just staff, not just associates, but *partners* into once more coming into the office on a daily basis. The only people who appear to be working remotely a majority of the time these days are senior counsel (i.e., former partners who are now semi-retired).
I don't know how a person could look at a miles-driven plot like this ( https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M12MTVUSM227NFWA/ ) and not conclude that not only are the majority of workers likely back full-time, most of them have been for quite some time.
Very interesting data point and I think it proves the point you wanted to make. But is "the majority" a bit smaller of a majority than first glance would imply"
The point we are at now is lower than the original trend line, and even the huge dip in 2020 is less drastic than the WFH % at the time would have suggested. I wonder how much of the miles drive number comes from #1: activities other than work and #2 Trucking. Neither of those slowed down much, so a higher share of the dip could be attributed to WFH than it would first appear.
Just an idea. The new equilibrium has some % of WFH, even if there has been a rebound.
Definitely it's not a complete recovery--even at my very tight-laced organization (we were back in June... of 2020), there's an increased tolerance for "if you're feeling poopy but you can get work done, don't come share your bug today".
But I get the sense that there's a largely white-collar cohort that just has no idea how unusual their situation is. The world's been basically normal again for years.
Yes, I know a lot of people who work in big law and they go into the office. It seems like specialty fields, especially intense and very well compensated ones, have had the most success getting people back into the office.
I have a generic white collar office job, think PowerPoints, Excel, answering emails, etc. and my company has had little success getting people back to the office. Generally seems to be the case for everyone I know doing similar jobs at other companies.
The typical government jobs seems to be pretty similar to my job, generic white collar office work, so I’m expecting similar results on work from home.
My wierd take on remote work and "bullshit jobs" is that they reflect a growing disconnect between industrial-era labor norms and the fundamentals of the new information economy.
Knowledge work simply isn't very time-intensive for the most part. As we've seen for the last 30 years, it has tolerated a remarkable degree of distraction (via the internet) and lollygagging that would have been unthinkable before.
The problem is, our labor laws are all built around the 40-hour industrial era workweek. And because knowledge workers are much better paid than most physical laborers, it'd be epically embarrassing for the nation's executives, managers, HR departments, and the knowledge workers themselves to admit that they maybe get 4-8 hours of real work done per "40-hour" week.
We basically have the beginnings of the leisure economy that Keynes and others theorized, but it's massively socially inequitable AND a massive violation of the letter of the law -- can you imagine the legal mess if whole companies decided their knowledge workers were basically defrauding them for 80-90% of their salaries?
Remote work conveniently allows everyone involved to keep up the charade while further loosening the informal strictures holding back the leisure economy.
The real question isn't "when are people going back to the office", but rather "whether, when, and how will the inequalities of the leisure economy expand or contract, and how will this stress or relieve its growing tensions with an obsolete legal apparatus?".
I wonder how this take will age through a weak labor market though. I don't think your claim is universally true: there are plenty of people who clearly do work 8 hours days at white collar jobs, or close to it. I think it's easier to pick out the 4 hour contributors from the 8 hour ones than we the keyboard class like to think.
EDIT: originally said "tight" instead of "weak" labor market, on accident.
It may be easy to pick them out, but it’s not exactly a perfectly bifurcated pair of curves RE ultimate productivity. Firing all the 4-hour workers might not make your company any better if those were a decent chunk of your smartest workers — even IF the majority of them were still genuinely lazy.
RE The market, this tight labor market is clearly not decisively killing the leisure economy. Productivity hasn’t skyrocketed due to supposedly declining lollygagging from the partial return to office.
If anything, the tight labor market is improving the fits between leisure-economy workers and employers best suited for them. Plentiful jobs means that workers can be picky, and employers have to make compromises if they want the right talent.
If you were trying to imply the opposite — a *weak* labor market — well, the simple fact that lollygagging is not even a R>0.5 heuristic for individual productivity means that managers can’t realize any efficiencies merely by rooting out lollygaggers, and lollygaggers can still wield real market power relative to other workers. Lollygaggers will face a slight disadvantage, but not enough to kill off remote work or the trend towards the leisure economy.
Addendum RE lollygagging: Productivity has remained more or less constant despite the rise of distractions; this indicates that knowledge work is resilient to distractions. Absent the distractions, productivity would actually have gone up!
Doesn't it also suggest that if we were to find a way to reduce lollygagging (like, say, by compelling folks to come into the office, thereby reducing distraction and encouraging them to focus on work), we'd be able to accomplish the same amount of knowledge work with fewer workers, or more knowledge work with the same amount?
IMO, most of the distractions in knowledge work come from other knowledge workers treating your time like it’s free. My people used to get sucked into “drive-by” conversations - now you actually have to bother to message/email/call someone, and that’s a higher barrier than happening to pass by someone’s cubicle or in the hall.
In addition to productivity gains elsewhere, maybe people are taking more work home than they used to? I know I make up for my lollygagging time by putting in more hours.
I doubt this is going on on a large scale. Perhaps a large minority, but I suspect not a plurality. I'd imagine that most people's natural inclination is to just leave the work at work.
The zoom thing is the worst for going into the office. Theoretically the biggest reason for me to go to the office is in-person meetings, but a zoom meeting at my desk at the office is _more_ disruptive than in my home, where I have quiet.
I did 1 day a week in office during summer, but it was specifically the day I had no meetings.
Yeah, even before the pandemic we would often have trouble getting people to use actual meeting rooms while in the office.
I think there's too much variation of circumstances among industries to make too many blanket declarations about the future of remote work, but I think that variance also means that there are some industries where it's not simply NOT a disadvantage, but actually an outright ADVANTAGE, and will thus continue to thrive and grow.
"The Biden administration told Congress in April that it is working toward a goal in which those eligible for telework are in the office at least 50% of the time."
Biden's goal was to get people back in the office 50% of the time, not 100% and even 50% hasn't been close to achieved. Nor do I think people are likely to change jobs as 1) many private employers are requiring being in the office more or much more; 2) the labor market for these mid to high income jobs isn't as tight as it is for the bottom of the labor market.
I work at JPMorgan Chase and we’ve faced these exact issues. Our CEO has made repeated public statements about the need for people to return to the office. The internal goal is 60% of the time, but sick days and vacation count as in-office days. You can also request single day exemptions to work from home if you’re sick/have the plumber coming/etc. that only require manager approval. You also don’t face any repercussions until you’re significantly below the threshold. It’s also common to see people come in for only part of a day, like only the afternoon, which counts as an in-office day.
So in practice, the actual amount of time people are physically in office is much less than half.
I would imagine the government is facing many of these same issues, since they are also a very large, multilayered bureaucracy. If JPMC hasn’t fixed this, I’m pretty skeptical random government agencies will.
I think it comes down to the $$. Its widely understood in my firm/industry that WFH is available, but if you want to get paid/promoted you better have the face time & make the connections which isn't really feasible from home. Primarily because you might be able to get as much or even more work done at home, but you won't get better the way you will working in the office and we rely heavily on people developing skills & networks.
*Its also clear that if they need to layoff people at some point, a quick and simple category is which people are in the office as requested.
I mean my friend at JPM says mandatory 5 days is coming next year as soon as Jamie Dimon’s temple to himself is finished. “He didn’t spend $3Bn on it for no one to be in it.”
We will see! I’ve worked at JPMC for the past 3 years and there’s been continuous rumors that in office policies will become stricter “next year”. That hasn’t happened yet and in the meantime remote work becomes more and more central to how teams operate and any COVID related rationale is further in the rear view mirror.
I've definitely noticed the pressure dropping over the past year on the fed back to the office push. No longer a priority? Lack of capacity at higher levels?
The sanitation enforcement stat referenced in the article isn't about missed trash pickups, it's a call to 311 to report that someone else is breaking the rules on trash disposal. So I think that does fit into your first theory, and a general culture of lawlessness.
So I’ve talked to my ANC and my councilmember about 311. They (311) kick it out to the agency, and then either the agency takes care of it or they push it to a contractor. For things like large item removal, once they call the contractor they mark it as “closed” regardless of whether the issue gets resolved. In some cases 311 gets to close the issue once it gets sent to the agency.
A sincere thanks for an insightful comment. Between the article and your critique we have the makings of a resonant and impactful investigative story for major publications.
"I feel like this article misses the core question, which is why exactly capacity has fallen so much across so many systems simultaneously."
It doesn't matter *why* capacity fell; it only matters how we can currently increase it. (See https://www.slowboring.com/p/ask-how-to-solve-problems-not-why) Sometimes the former can give insight into the latter, but we shouldn't wait to pick up the low-hanging fruit Lehman has identified here in order to answer the more theoretical question.
I think there is a big difference between most of the examples in that article, which are long standing problems featuring philosophical debates about their origins, and the highlighted issue, where we are just seeking to return to a previously acceptable steady state. In the latter case, we probably want to know why we fell out of that previously good state, since if reversing that cause is possible, it will likely be the fastest way back to the good place. If I go to the doctor with a rash, and she responds with "well we need to do more study on why rashes occur in the human body before I can help you", I would justifiably be annoyed for the reason mentioned in the Slow Boring article you linked. But if she said, "well, what's changed since you started developing that rash, maybe that can help us identify the discreet cause and allow us to reverse it?", that would feel like an appropriate investigation to undertake before trying remedies, even ones that usually work.
Ultimately, Lehman's suggestion boils down to "we should throw more money at these problems". But without having a plausible theory of what has caused this degradation in public services, we risk just lighting money on fire for no reason, a la San Francisco and its ever-ballooning anti-homelessness budget.
Part of it may be that refocusing on bringing down homicides may reduce police activity by whatever measure is used, since homicides and related crimes are less frequent than things like traffic violations. No idea how much it might explain though.
As a DC resident who experienced the post Floyd/Covid crime wave first hand, I have some thoughts here -
1. MPD's less aggressive enforcement was mainly driven by top down pressure from the District Council. They wanted less enforcement, less pretextual stops, and made it clear they'd legislate that way and were overtly hostile to any proactive policing from MPD. When crime spiked, councilmembers conveniently forgot this part and started asking why "MPD isn't doing their jobs?".
2. I can't find the original source, but I remember seeing something about a policy change at MPD on how they respond to calls. In essence it was that in order to avoid situations where one officer is trying to subjugate a suspect and might have to use increasing force, their policy is to now have multiple officers for every police interaction to cut down on those scenarios. If you drive around town, you'll notice any time MPD responds to something, no matter how minor, there's at least 3-4 squad cars there. This would obviously cut down on arrests if you have 5 officers doing something that 1-2 used to be able to do.
3. As noted, the US Attorney basically stopped enforcement against any misdemeanors. Retail theft exploded when it became apparent that there were no consequences. Drug dealing came back to areas I hadn't seen it in for at least a decade. Judges release known violent defendants back into the community where they continue to commit crimes while awaiting trial. There are some very obvious and easy solutions that could curb crime dramatically here.
4. The city's GPS monitoring of people on release (DC eliminated bail many years ago) is basically fake. It's not being monitored 24/7 and is not an impediment to committing additional crimes.
5. When the city legalized marijuana, it coincided with a complete stop of prosecution for people using it in public (which is still illegal!). It is extremely common to see people driving vehicles while smoking weed, which is bad.
6. Trash pickup got really bad during covid, which was weird because DPW has always been one of the best run city services. It seems to be back to mostly normal now, but its drop off and addition to the general sense of malaise in the city was curious.
7. Progressive activists made a huge deal out of the homeless sweep at McPherson Square and how devastating it would be to the local people experiencing unhousedness community. However now that it's done I haven't seen any follow up showing how devastating it truly was, and the park is now usable for all city residents and workers again, which is nice. Additionally, there was very little backlash from anyone outside of the usual DSA/Anarchist/Lefty groups. I think it showed the city that the activists claimed to speak for many more people than they actually do.
8. Things seem to be slowly getting back on the right track. Fare enforcement on Metro has been popular, the previously mentioned McPherson Square cleanup, and I've even seen an uptick in traffic enforcement. I'm cautiously optimistic that the 2020 collective fever is slowly breaking, and that we can get back to being a world class city.
This is all true. Pre-Covid, especially circa 2017, there was a massive pressure campaign from local activists to limit MPD activity. One way this manifested was the NEAR Act. One thing the NEAR Act did for example was add extra paper work for officers to fill out anytime they made a stop. Also pressure from Councilmembers at oversight hearings towards MPD and the Mayor, basically to cut back on stopping and arresting brown people. Then there were the BLM protests. I’m not surprised MPD would roll back their enforcement activities as a result.
17% down in patrol officers but almost 50% down in enforcement activity? Proposed solutions focused on hiring and retention, but I didn't see anything about why beat officers are just not doing their job and what to do about it? Is it still police sensitivity to post-BLM local politics (or, uncharitably, is it a wildcat strike?)
I don't think DC is the only urban PD that has seen a drop off in enforcement activity. What gives?
I wouldn't expect arrests to scale linearly with staffing. If staffing falls below a point where officers are now driving from emergency to emergency and triage decisions are made on which are attended to you are going to see arrests collapse as little time can be devoted to individual cases of mobile crime (e.g. carjackings as mentioned in the article), officers not being on passive patrol means they have longer response times meaning criminals get away and so on. There are likely a multitude of causes but I would expect the relationship between arrests and staffing to be somewhat sigmoid outside of the extremes.
Add in "fewer of those arrested are getting charged." It's possible there's pressure or incentive to not bother with as many arrests if they're not getting prosecuted anyway.
Eh, this is sort of true, but only sort of. First, it's actually probably not a choice.
Second, this stuff frequently isn't logical. Like, I had a story about why my work as an intern at SSA OGC defending the agency from claims they'd improperly denied disability benefits was all upside. If I win, I win and they obviously didn't need the benefits and I was protecting the federal fisc. If I lose, then they obviously do need benefits and will get them! Great, all upside.
Except that wasn't what I actually felt when I won on the argument 'this woman with a set of confirmed ailments that would make me curl up in a ball in my bed and cry, helps take care of her grandkids part time and can sometimes clean her house rather than 100% relying on her children to do it (or so she claims in her paperwork), so clearly she can work as a part time house cleaner/child care worker'. And though people can get back benefits (I think, never came up in my time there) that doesn't actually counteract not getting them at the time.
Similarly, if you arrest someone and then they walk free...you weren't making an arrest that might stick. There's an opportunity cost there and the cop's goal is most likely a safer community which a failed arrest doesn't actually effect.
I occasionally handled SSDI appeals for the 11th circuit. The government always won. The standard for getting disability is so strict I can’t believe anyone who is ambulatory or can type can get benefits. And yet people do get benefits.
I’ve read that ALJs vary wildly in their award rates, and the claims officers who process applications before an ALJ sees them are probably just as variable. If you don’t get benefits by the ALJ stage, you are probably screwed. How often did the claimant win an administrative appeal?
No idea. My work was handling it once it got to the Office of General Counsel and writing the brief that the District Court would rely on to determine if we should be reversed. The conversation I had with my supervisor however was...enlightening. He told me, quite proudly about the one (or maybe two) times in the 5-10 years he'd been there where he thought the ALJ had gotten it wrong and sua sponte went to his boss and managed to get OGC to pass it back down for reconsideration.
In the ~10 weeks I was working ~10 hours a week, I handled two cases, quite slowly, as you can imagine, given I was a law student who'd never worked in this area. You can calculate how many cases he must have tried in that time.
ETA: That, by the by, may be one of the worse jobs in the federal government for lawyers. It's entirely the same work over and over again, dealing with very sick/sad people, for significantly less money than is standard in other agencies, all while being part of the bastard stepchild part of the organization which transparently does not care about your side of the house (I got the distinct impression that the Social Security side of the house was much more...happy/effective than the disability side). But I shouldn't overstate, as I said, I was there for one quarter while in law school
I'm pretty sure Graham (of grahamfactor.substack.com) has explicitly disagreed with your take, although now that his substack is paywalled I don't know how to search for where he said so.
The broader concern with police is that if the DA stops enforcing a rule, the cop is risking a violent confrontation over something the justice system has said isn't important. You can go hassle the fare evader, but if it turns out he has a gun and things go sideways, your job and possibly your life is on the line over a decision to write a ticket that would be thrown out before the ink was dry. I saw this happen with all sorts of crimes when I worked (non sworn) at a police department. Compound that with command staff needing to triage limited resources and you'll quickly get an understanding that making yourself unavailable for the next shots fired call because you were stopping suspected DWI cars is frowned upon, and you see cops pulling back on all sorts of proactive behavior.
In Chicago, it's mostly just propagating up the funnel from Kim Foxx's case rejection rate. Her office > doubled the case rejection rate to such a degree for some classes (e.g., retail theft, driving on a suspended license) that enforcement just stopped. What's the point? If DC has a "progressive" DA ... then I'm sure it's the same story.
From what I read at DC Crime Facts substack, DC is even more of an outlier for major crimes. DA Graves just isn't all that interested in convictions unless and until he's under political pressure to do so.
Government jobs aren’t attractive during a good economy. Prosecutorial turnover is so high in Fulton County judges make snide remarks on the bench about the “prosecutor of the month” etc. Those jobs have never been high end, but they used to be good enough for a Georgia State grad to stay a couple years.
As to why not a perennial problem: it's a mirror image of the increase in other crimes: the awareness that there are no practical consequences for bad behavior goes from abstract thought to practical common knowledge, resulting in a new (worse) equilibrium. It's not like shoplifting enforcement was ever actually any good (or shopkeeper's privilege worth a damn), and in fact AIUI loss prevention will fire employees for attempting to interfere with it due to liability risks, but it's only post-pandemic that this became common knowledge enough that all the deodorant is locked up in display cases.
In the case of the cops, it turns out that they're impossible to fire for non-performance, and while this has always been true due to the union, it wasn't previously equilibriated as common knowledge.
That would be the hypothesis, at any rate. Not confident enough of it to make a firm assertion as to its causal explanatory power, hence the question mark on the top level comment.
I think this is basically correct; making people aware they can "get away with" stuff increases both crime and workers (in this case, police) doing less. Social media also makes a lot of things "common knowledge" much faster than in previous eras, and allows "bad actors" to project their message just as loudly as good ones. Then, with COVID, we had a massive disruption to "normal" life that resulted in a lot of different "norms" being renegotiated in real time. Unfortunately, I don't think there's an "easy" fix for this; we'll need to reassert and then actually demonstrate the importance of maintaining standards across a bunch of institutions at the same time.
Suppose [phones/bad vibes/legal changes/etc.] widen the gap between slackers and hard workers. Now any constraints on dealing with slackers hurt you more than they used to.
Public Sector Unions are something of a red herring when it comes to these issues. With or without a union, you can fire an officer for illegally refusing to make an arrest. You can't fire someone for not engaging in proactive policing while working an understaffed shift.
The 17% decrease in beat cops but 50% decrease in arrests seems compatible with "shirking and facing no consequences," and people don't like getting fired (plus, risk of their pension). I'm skeptical that you can't actually fire someone who is non-unionized for visibly slacking off (and/or threaten to do so unless their numbers go up), even if the force is understaffed.
Alternatively to "shirking with no consequences," the nonlinear force size/arrest curve seems like it may also be compatible with something like the proposed sigmoid staffing-arrest curve discussed upthread, which itself seems consistent with, e.g., the first-offender model of enforcement response discussed inter alia by Bryan Caplan. But note that that argument depends specifically on the amount of *time* spent on each arrest going up (which is indeed what James proposed), because the nominal capacity to make arrests should in the null hypothesis remain linear in the number of officers even if there's more total crime due to the aforementioned lower risk of being caught plus criminals' risk-preference. While the amount of time per arrest going up is conceivable--e.g., if serious crimes take longer to make arrests in but are prioritized, and serious crime went up--it's a load-bearing epicycle that makes that hypothesis less probable (although not necessarily incorrect) ceteris paribus.
"but almost 50% down in enforcement activity...why beat officers are just not doing their job"
What's the right level of stops or enforcement? If they were doing twice as many as 2019 per officer, would that be the right level? Or would that be too many?
Cops all over the country have just decided they don't actually want to do their jobs. Until we actually have local government control over the police we aren't going to fix this or any of the other problems discussed here.
Uncharitable to blame the police when the public made it crystal clear that we wanted less enforcement. In many cases this was explicitly asked for by the mayors, directed by police chiefs (on the record, in public) and reinforced by DAs that deprioritized whole categories of crimes.
DC convicted two cops of murder (Karon Hylton) where they didn’t even touch the guy (he got hit by a van evading police. Manslaughter? Sure, I can see it. Murder when he’s hit by an unrelated vehicle? Hm). They are lucky anyone even shows up to work.
It looks like only one was convicted of second degree murder and the other of obstruction.
Still, insane. Why would any police officer pursue a suspect if it could literally ruin their own life? There was debate about DC Police’s formal policies around pursuit of suspects but I know I’d be keeping that cruiser at 25mph no matter what the rulebook or city council says.
This reminds me of a case I read about in Louisiana (I think) where a police officer tried to arrest the wrong person, and when physically subdued the guy when he resisted. The guy had a heart attack died and the cop was charged with murder.
Now - the cop screwed up, and arresting the wrong guy should be somewhat of a big deal. It should probably come up on your annual performance review, maybe involve some time off work. But never at my job have I had to worry that a screwup would result in a murder charge.
Eh, I'd want to know a lot more about the case, but the obstruction and conspiracy charges make me think that the cover-up is what may have gotten them charged. 'Car chase for lack of helmet gets someone killed' is probably bad judgment that should probably result in discipline 'police try to cover-up that their car chase for lack of helmet gets someone killed,' is a crime and should be fucking punished as such, though not necessarily as second-degree murder.
In 2020 it wasn't just fringe activists though, it's clear there's not a majority for significant depolicing but the zeitgeist in 2020 was different and that was true among huge swathes of more normy dem voters. They weren't in the defund/abolish camp neccesarily but there was a real shift on views on policing that has thankfully recovered somewhat. In a heavily dem city in 2020 (where the other half of the national electorate that's very pro-police is largely excluded) it's not hard to get the feelling that the public in 2020 really was a lot less sympathetic to cops than they had been previously.
And this is hard to quantify (except maybe by reference total payouts over time?) but the impression I have is that we are seeing more lawsuits against municipalities for alleged police misconduct, larger jury verdicts against those municipalities, and higher settlement offer amounts to make cases go away. I think those all would follow from city jury pools becoming increasingly anti-cop.
Huge grain of salt because I haven’t looked closely enough, but I was told liability insurance is going down for departments with body cameras as cops are almost overwhelmingly in the right in most situations.
Kim Foxx's office in Chicago has rejected ~ 50% of felony retail theft cases. The prior office (Alvarez) rejected 15-20%. At a 50% rejection rate ... why bother even arresting?
The biggest component there is the second element, concerning the courts and prosecution. Pursuing an arrest which won't result in any real consequences means taking risks-injury, liability, career advancement, etc, which have gotten more prevalent in the past several years-with reduced incapacitation and determent benefits will result in reduced proactivity.
Another element, which has been touched on by James, is that staffing and activity aren't linearly related, both in relation to engaging in proactive policing and making discretionary arrests on calls for service. Arrests take time and resources, which may or may not be needed while I'm in jail.
Third element, which is more of a suspicion, is that when he referred to a 17% decrease in district level staffing, that likely includes mitigation from specialized units being dissolved and returned to patrol. So the officers on the traffic unit-recall the mention of traffic violations and DUI arrest-are instead responding to calls like every other unit. When I see someone run a red light while on my way to a domestic disorder, the domestic disorder remains priority.
Relating all of this into capacity: to give an example-let's assume an area has a baseline staffing of 20 officers working at a time, which has been reduced to 17 on shift-a 15% decrease compared to the 17% decrease mentioned. Which means that if 17 officers are tied up on calls, where there used to be 3 officers still in service, there are now none. Meaning if I'm one of the officers working, and I have the option of attempting to resolve the issue without an arrest, I have a lot of motivation to do so. Meanwhile, the three officers who no longer exist aren't proactively policing. Reduce it further, and the pressure gets even stronger-I've heard someone announce to the undercover/unmarked drug units that there simply weren't enough units working that day to make stops. At that point, unless you're dealing with a felony, arrests simply aren't happening.
I can't find the articles I wanted to link, but based on what I've read it's often not nearly as hard we are usually led to believe. The power of Police Unions is also very state dependent.
In any case, it may well be "easy" to find a new job, but an "easy" job search is still a pretty hard thing! You might have to relocate, lose the years you worked towards your pension and you probably aren't climbing the career ladder if you're last job ended in an expensive lawsuit and firing.
I'm sure in many cases they are pulling back, often because it's what their city council / mayor / police chief is asking for. In other cases it's feeling that if they make mistake they'll be unsupported that leads to less proactive policing.
I don't think fear of being fired is why there is less policing in many depts. They can often be fired for clearly violating rules, like being late for work or failing drug tests. But probably not for not making enough arrests. That kind of thing more likely has more to do with trying to get promoted, or just wanting to do the job they signed up for.
Phones. We all became a little more anti-social and a little more addicted to looking at our phones. Cops weren't immune to this. Its not unique to cops either.
I think that there’s a more boring explanation— homicides and carjackings are more resource-intensive to investigate and make arrests on than say, traffic offenses are. If your city has more serious crime in general, its enforcement efficiency will probably drop because officers will spend more of their time dealing with more serious but harder-to-resolve cases.
Shout out to https://dccrimefacts.substack.com/ which covers everything in this article (and much more) in-depth. It's really top-level analysis and probably the best SubStack I know of in terms of completely nailing it's subject.
Small editorial suggestion: You might want to write “DC’s police department, called the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD),” on first reference, as MPD is never defined and people who don’t live here are probably not expecting an M to be in the name, and simply spelling it out may lead them to think it is a regional force.
Worth mentioning that DC has some of the most racially disproportionate crime-related statistics in the nation, with Blacks 6x more likely than non-Blacks to die in a traffic accident, 10x more likely to die of a drug overdose, and 30x more likely to die of homicide. (prior to 2020 these numbers were "only" 4x, 9x and 25x).
So it ends up being the case that enforcement in the city is largely about stopping, arresting and convicting Black people. But AD Graves and progressives seem to have forgotten that it's also largely about protecting Black people.
Simply observing the disparity (and realizing it plugs into policing controversies) is the easy part. Understanding the drivers is much harder. If I understand you're take on that, I don't think I wholly agree, simply because there are many other populations in the US with similar education / unemployment / HHI that don't have the same set of social problems.
It's not at all clear that education and unemployment drive drugs, crime and careless driving rather than the reverse, or that instead there's some hidden 3rd factor (culture?) that sometimes drives all of them in similar directions.
Just to give some examples: Hispanics in the RGV have high rates of poverty and low rates of education, but El Paso and the Tex / Mex border are low crime / low drug use areas. Or take the area where I live in Western PA, where the White population has been fine on education / poverty metrics but nearly leading the country in terms of overdoses. Or Native Americans on many reservations, who often have terrible poverty and education indicators, but have much lower murder rates than Black people in DC, yet way higher drug and alcohol OD rates (and way higher rates of sexual abuse).
Anyways, the point of listing these out is to try to make the case that it's not always clear what causes what when we see these correlations. If DC suddenly became full of low-ed / skill refugees from Somalia or Pakistan I wouldn't expect them to have the same drug / murder numbers as low income Black people in DC have, as a group, right now.
The thing about DC that’s interesting is DC knows who all these people are. Not kidding, they spent a lot of money identifying the 600 or so people who are most likely to commit violent crime. I feel pretty sure that they aren’t far off either. Now, DC has a very weird problem where they know who these people are, but no real idea what to do about it (I mean they tried People of Promise, and the jury is out, but something like 48 of the people in the program were dead or in jail by the end of the year)
It's wild trying to figure out how far you have to get away from DC to find white working class areas.
There's none in Arlington or Fairfax or Loudoun. Manassas used to be and I guess kind of still is, but is heavily Latino. Maybe Fredericksburg/Stafford? For those note familiar with the area, that's 50+ miles away from DC.
On the Maryland side, the PG County inner suburb white enclaves like Hyattsville and Adelphi basically no longer exist. Bowie arguably the last hold out but is being gentrified by affluent black families. Montgomery County has some bounded by the agricultural reserve like Damascus but mainly you have to get all the way out to Frederick and Hagerstown to find them.
Previous incarnations of the machine for large-scale violent oppression of Black people were also justified in terms of “it’s for their own good” and “look at what a nice society we can have as a result.” I don’t think that type of argument is going to convince skeptics that this time is different.
I'm not quite sure what specific portion of history you're referencing or what specific solution you think I'm suggesting (I'm leaving it pretty vague mostly because the devil is always in the details). But whichever they are I'm sure you're conflating two very different things with a very thin rhetorical argument.
I think there are a lot "smarter" win-win approaches to reducing violent crime in DC, many of which would simply make DC less of an outlier compared to peers or are capacity-related, like getting their drug lab reaccredited, getting serious house arrest, having their DA choose to prosecute a similar level of arrests as peers, taking truancy seriously, having their city counsel target more arrests instead of fewer, redistributing policing resources away from wealthy neighborhoods to high-crime ones, etc..
A lot of these will involve some level of increased enforcement (some won't), and much of the enforcement will disproportionately "target" Black people, for example getting serious about truancy. And because of that, some people will have takes like "being strict about truancy is equivalent to the violence of Jim Crow".
But I think that's just an utterly ridiculous take. It really is the case that punishing some people is good for society, and even for the people themselves. We have truancy rules in my mostly non-Black school district, for example, and most people think they are a good thing, not a bad one. The skeptics just have to be made to realize they are wrong and their "but slavery punished black people, too" logic is wrong and unhelpful.
a) issuing and collecting fines from automated traffic enforcement (speeding and excessive muffler noise) including rewards for citizens who report the location for booting and towing of vehicles with large unpaid fines (including out of state vehicles).
b) time of day specific street parking fees, the goal being that for a price one should almost always find a street paring spot.
c) land use regulation and building code reform to allow builders to meet demand for residential and commercial properties, including conversions from one use to another.
d) property taxes on assets of non-local NGOs, lobbyists, trade associations.
I rarely agree with you 100%, but I guess today is a unicorn of a day. Cheers!
Just want to point out that fines need to be reduced if we're going to automated enforcement. The idea is to penalize everyone just a little bit, and ramp up the impact on the "whales" who cause the most damage.
I don’t take CJA cases and I’m getting the impression that not enough do. They don’t pay enough (I’m aware that DC pays more than most jurisdictions but it’s one of the highest cost jurisdictions to practice in — especially when CJA attorneys are required to have a physical office in the district.)
And the January 6th cases have clogged up the system for 3 years now. (Yes they are mainly or all in federal district court but the counsel are coming from the same general pool as District CJA counsel.)
CJA = experienced private counsel taking government compensation to represent indigent defendants at a set rate to supplement public defenders. They exist in most jurisdictions.
The hourly rate in cia cases isn’t horrible, but the caps on how many hours you can bill mean you would get screwed if a case went to trial or even pled after you’d done the prep work.
I just checked my local district. The hourly rate is $172 and the max $13,200 for any felony. I would never defend a complex felony for that max, but I’d totally do a drug or gun case. I may sign up.
To explain further, not enough attorneys, cases get delayed. And very busy attorneys have very busy schedules which means they may not have calendar availability for an existing case for months. Given enough delays, “pleading down” the offense makes a lot of sense for both sides.
An important consideration is not just how much crime but where it is happening. When people are afraid to drive into D.C. for fear of carjacking or ride the Metro or attend a concert or baseball game, you will hear a far greater outcry than when it's concentrated in historically underserved areas. Case in point: I lived in D.C. throughout its Murder Capital/Crack City days. Although I experienced crime, because I lived in high-crime areas (mostly 14th St. corridor), I never personally witnessed a shooting. My kids, on the other hand, recently witnessed one in the Metro. They've seen repeated police activity at Tyson's, which is starting to look like a war zone with the apparently necessary security presence. Gradually, I'm starting to change my own behavior patterns around a city I've long known and always loved. Yeah, it's all anecdotal, but perception is huge. Especially for an area whose economy depends on workers coming back into town and tourists spending their money here year round.
Good diagnoses but bad recommendations for the police force. Too bought in on credentialism and proceduralism.
Can’t hire enough cops? Get rid of the new college hours requirement.
Transparency in promotions? That just privileges legible traits and credentials over illegible ones, which is already overdone in government hiring and promotions.
Also, the retention survey showed way more departing cops talking about morale than opportunities for advancement.
Just give them cash, hire more people, and make it clear that it’ll be a revolving door on the chief’s office until someone comes in who figures out how to get them back to work.
I recently switched to a management position, and one of the first things I learned was “transparency in promotions” actually means “lots more paperwork to justify the decision you would have made anyway”
At some level, management just needs the trust and confidence of the workforce (and vice versa!). People will make mistakes, but we generally try to mitigate them and learn from them, and generally just try to do a good job.
Rules are not a substitute for earnestness and competence.
I would really like to read a take on the underratedness of earnestness (competence is, I hope, still something people aspire to). In so many places, including SB, I see it dismissed as cringe. Maybe owing to my midwestern origins and oldness, I think this, and the all-irony, all the time context that many seem to prefer, is unfortunate. Both irony and earnestness have their place, IMO, and I think the world could use a bit more of the latter right now.
What we sometimes do is describe the position being offered and qualities of a desired applicant in a way that really only fits the desired candidate/s.
Those solutions have been tried and are failing. I posted a very long blog entry (non-monetized) in a comment to the article. It explains it, using the actual experience of someone whose career was in law enforcement.
From your linked report: "Another important component of professional development is education. Cops who are more educated are tactically more effective but are also less likely to use force."
You then use this correlation to argue that MPD should pay to send officers to university.
If the studies you cite haven't disentangled treatment from selection/aging effects, please note that they aren't useful evidence that sending cops to school will help anything except university budgets.
I'd be very leery of recreating the situation we have now with Masters of Education programs for teachers, which have been shown to have no effect on student achievement, and therefore represent an enormous amount of pure waste.
Some people here have noted that the drop in enforcement seems greater than the drop in staff, implying that some police may just be refusing to do their jobs. I have no clue if that's true in DC, but anecdotally it's true in Portland. Or at least to put it more charitably, they feel they've been given mixed signals as to whether or not the city actually wants them to do their jobs. It's another city where the homicide rate has NOT fallen to pre-pandemic levels, even though it's fallen from its 2022 peak. Anecdote: my coworker was T-boned and had her car totalled in October 2022 and the other driver tried to flee but he couldn't because he crashed in to a fire hydrant. The police told her they were only there because the other driver hit the fire hydrant. Even if that's true, that feels vindictive to say out loud. (I heard this information second hand, so take with a grain of salt but I've heard similar stories from others)
A lot of takes want to make this about national issues but some of this is clearly DC specific. Homicides fell a lot in 2022, 2023, and (so far, according to the evidence we have) 2024 in most of the country. This doesn't seem to have been true in DC. But it was true in, say, NYC, which has bail reform, progressive DAs, BLM agitation, etc. NYPD arrest activity is back up too. Gotta look at the local angles
Even Philly prosecutes 94% of arrests. DC prosecutes something like 60%. This is a maybe the most notable disparity, but it’s important to emphasize just how big the gaps are even to other very progressive places.
Those rates sound high to me (if the denominator is "all arrests") but that's my sense too of where a lot of the disparity is. So why is that happening? If Larry Krasner and Alvin Bragg are prosecuting more aggressively the natural ideological story seems less compelling
This is a tangential issue, but I was wondering if the fact that the FBI is in DC affects local police hiring and retention. If you're the type of person growing up in the DMV area who is interested in working in law enforcement and you're also ambitious, you have more chances to meet FBI agents growing up, walk by the Hoover building, etc., which all make a career in the FBI seem feasible. If you're in any other metro area, the FBI is more remote to you, so you may choose instead to work for local law enforcement. Does the presence of the FBI in DC soak up talent that would otherwise go to local law enforcement?
I'm a bit confused on how much of this is actually about capacity versus how much is an actual *policy choice*.
Something like the US Attorney choosing to plead cases down to a misdemeanor instead of prosecuting, for example, isn't because the USA's office lacks the ability to prosecute - it's an active choice not to prioritize those cases, right? Similarly, I'm not sure how to tell whether fewer arrests are because MPD has gotten worse at their jobs, or because MPD has chosen not to pursue particular types of crime - and I think that's a really, really important distinction. Does the government lack the ability to do anything about these crimes, or have the actors chosen to do something different?
I think the actual argument Lehman is making reads a lot that the relevant actors have made suboptimal policy choices, and the public needs to hold those actors accountable for their bad choices - which I agree with wholeheartedly! But that's a different argument than the system in DC lacking the ability to do anything about crime (which is what capacity makes me think of).
Fun fact - DC is the only city in the world where I got mugged (near the Greyhound union station). It was a scary experience. Fortunately, I had a decent amount of cash on me so I didn't suffer any physical harm. I was afraid that if some other muggers caught me till I reached the metro station, I would get beaten up because I didn't have any money left to give. Fortunately, my $400+ SLR that was inside a bag survived. This was my very first visit to the US, a 3 month business trip from India, almost 25 years ago.
PS: Being the naive foreigner that I was, I told a cop about getting mugged and asked him if he would give me a ride to the metro station. He said - "I'm not a cab driver. Call a cab.". :-)
I feel like this article misses the core question, which is why exactly capacity has fallen so much across so many systems simultaneously. It would make sense to say "ah, police are quietly protesting after the BLM protests, that is why policing capacity has fallen", but how does that explain missed trash pickups or school truancy? Just saying "we should allocate more resources to fix capacity problems" feels perilous when we don't seem to have a solid understanding of why it has fallen so much, so quickly, in so many (at least superficially) unrelated domains.
I don't have a good answer, but spit balling some theories that come to mind:
1. What if all these systems are way more connected than they seem at first blush? A failure in one cascades to the others, reverbating back and forth in a vicious cycle. Fewer cops means that no one locates truant students which means kids have more time to fare hop on WMATA and so on. I'm not sure how this trickles all the way down to trash collection though.
2. Post-COVID malaise? Everyone just kinda realized how much they could coast during COVID, and that social fellow feeling has not fully recovered. The sort of minimum standard of trying to not feel ashamed of yourself has been hollowed out during COVID, and this shows up all across the board: why should I dot my I's/go to school/do that extra trash pickup/write this fare hopping ticket and so on.
3. Maybe the city budget isn't adjusted for inflation somehow? So all services are 25%+ more expensive to provide, resulting in a commensurate drop in capacity. Relatedly, I'm not sure where DC's tax revenue comes from, but maybe WFH has hit its tax revenues harder than other cities? Though intuitively I'd imagine that government is LESS prone to WFH than most other white collar work...
4. Maybe corruption increased during COVID? I could be mistaken, but I think DC has had issues with this in the past. A large new corruption tax could degrade the capacity of all systems simultaneously.
One major problem that I’m not seeing here is that many of DC’s public services exist as jobs programs first, public works and services second. This pops up a lot with WMATA.
However, I’m not sure this is the source of the sudden drop in capacity- the jobs program thing has been true since Barry. That system can kind of work if you have effective administration, but Bowser has, over the last 5 years, really leaned on hiring cronies who simply cannot manage their jobs. The collapse of OUC is a critical example of this, but you can see similar issues with DYRS, Contee at MPD (his replacement seems to have a tangible effect on policing), and the housing authority. When management ability is only incidental to management selection, and you have staff where competency is incidental, eventually you are going to have both incapable management and incapable staff, and therefore collapse.
I will say that since I’ve gotten individual desk phone numbers for managers at DC government agencies, I’ve been able to get things done. But it shouldn’t be on individuals to call the one person at, say, DPW who will get a truck out for a large item removal.
Re: your point 3– in a growing economy, labor-intensive and hard to automate services pretty much always have costs that grow relative to the price of everything else (because they’re competing for inputs against fields that can pay better because their output/unit of labor is increasing). Law enforcement, like education and nursing-type care, is one of the fields that’s affected; even on an inflation-adjusted basis, an economically growing society will generally need to spend more to put the same number of officers on the street.
True, but that seems like a nation-wide problem. Why is DC so uniquely susceptible to it? Or is it more that DC has an abnormal spike in homicide for one-off local reasons, but the rest of the crime trends are in like with other major cities? Fwiw, some of these things (increased transit fare evasion, slightly elevated property crime) seem to be prevalent in my city as well, while others (fake plates, school truancy) do not, so at first blush it seems like a lot of this is DC-specific. If that's the case, economy wide reasons like Baumol's cost disease can't be the only answer.
https://dccrimefacts.substack.com/
If you're really curious this guy has been breaking it down for years. I would say the number 1 cause might be the simultaneous failure of all key leadership posts, linked to DC's weird governance- a city council that wanted less enforcement, a DA that wanted to prosecute less, a mayor that's only interested in passing the buck, several police chiefs who wanted to just appease the above,
Some of these leaders are responsive to the voting public ( which was unusually bought into Defund rhetoric, being a mix of extremely low socioeconomic and extremely high economic left-wing types ) but others are appointed federally, like DA Graves.
I suspect the fact that DC being the "most liberal" city and electing its politicians based on that, while much of the actual governance is controlled by an especially polarized Congress is a large part of the explanation. When local people get elected based on opposition to the national government, and can credibly blame said national government for all their problems (including locally self-made ones), that's a recipe for ensuring no one is held accountable for incompetence. Moreover, conservatives in Congress don't seem willing to extend any help fixing up a government whose problems they can point to as an example of what "Democrat governance" looks like. I think the citizens of DC are localized victims of the decline in "national" trust and increased polarization.
DC has a lot less control over the set of resources that get allocated to crime and policing than US cities in general do because of its unusual legal status— Congress needs to approve its budget in an appropriations bill.
Most US cities facing an increase in crime will increase their budgets for policing and prosecution and eat the cost disease-related increased expense (usually by either raising taxes or cutting something else). Some cities experimented with not doing this in 2020-2021, but the results have been unpopular and the elected officials responsible have mostly either changed tack or lost elections to officials who would.
DC’s electeds have more difficulty pivoting than their counterparts in other cities and also an easier time avoiding blame for problems, so they’re both less willing and less able to course correct.
Until Comer’s hearing congress legitimately had no clue how much Graves had taken his foot off the pedal, and I think that hearing was a real inflection point in DC. There were audible gasps when the mayor said the charging rate was in the 60s
With regards to #3, the Biden administration has been remarkably ineffective at achieving a stated goal to get the government workforce back into the office. They being a MASSIVE % of the DC workforce, it has led to a serious issues for the city in terms of businesses that support office workers and tax revenues. Per the WSJ this led to a 500 million dollar gap in the districts budget last year.
https://www.wsj.com/real-estate/washington-dc-office-market-trouble-058d4fdf?st=3nr5rc4z6r7wf5v
Work from home is here to stay and there’s no going back. In a tight labor market, forcing people to come into the office more means that they’re simply going to quit and switch to more flexible employers. There’s also been a massive change in how people work that’s hard to unwind. I don’t won’t for the government, but do back office white collar work for a bank. Since COVID, every single meeting has been moved to Zoom, so even when I go to the office, it feels like I’m still working from home.
"Work from home is here to stay and there’s no going back."
IMO/E -- I think we need to wait to see what happens in a 6-8% unemployment market before we can stick a fork in the corp. office. Every corp. exec peer I know thinks their culture has taken a huge hit -- especially lack of mentorship for early career employees - and the middle management layer is stretched way too thin with the added burden to micro-manage the individual contributors (e.g., is Taylor actually working today?).
Micromanaging is an abject managing failure, though.
I've never managed someone who was thought to have "needed" micromanagement who wasn't in truth just not actually cut out for the job.
Similarly, I've never seen micromanagement IMPROVE an escalation. Without fail, it induces a managerial myopia at the very moment when the team actually needs a manager to see "the big picture" and look ahead to the future so everyone can avoid dead-end wild-goose-chases.
That's a strange reaction. If a manager has 10 direct reports and can look out across the cubes and see all 10 there ... they at least know they're all there. Work quality -- sure that's a different issue and that's still there but now with WFH -- it creates far more pressure on managers to just track attendance / effort. To me - that's micromanaging. Maybe you're reacting to a different form of it.
Please don’t take this the wrong way, but do you have any direct management experience? Just trying to understand where you’re coming from here.
What you describe is what I’d just call basic nuts and bolts of management. But as someone who has managed both remote teams and in person, I’ve seen very little difference. There was no more pressure to monitor remote reports’ progress than in-person ones; the entire job is just always aligning with people on the work.
Tracking performance simply was rarely ever about WHETHER someone had done their work; it was much more intensively about keeping them unblocked and their scope clear.
We will see! Employees clearly value work from home and are willing to accept somewhat less money for the flexibility vs going into the office. In a downturn, I think that companies will be tempted to cut direct costs, like salaries, but keep a valuable perk with zero direct costs, working from home.
I think they'll be much more tempted to go where labor is cheapest now that the market for it is global. They'll definitely keep WFH - it's just that that home will be of a new employee in Romania, not the one currently occupied by their former American white collar worker.
I don’t think that the corporate office is dead by any means, but economically, “recruit employees from any geography where we have a legal entity, often for less money than we’d have to pay to get the same talent in our main office’s location” is too good a deal too much of the time to pass up entirely.
As someone whose industry has very unwillingly corraled him into basically forced WFH, this is all mind blowing to me. Besides agreeing with David_in_Chicago below that this almost self-evidently damages team-wide (note: not necessarily individual!) performance, coordination, and morale, it just seems so odd how many of my colleagues are willing to walk into this primed trap? Yes: it's a perk for you now, but that same perk is what will be used as the justification to send your job overseas at a moment's notice. If you confidently claim to your managers that you can do your job just as well from the next county over as you can from the office, their immediate next though will be "well why don't I pay this Colombian with perfect English and two grad degrees a tenth of you wage? 10 miles or 1000 miles from the office is all the same over Zoom!" Even if I liked WFH (again, I hate it, so maybe my bias is clouding my judgment), it seems clear to me that everyone who so merrily supports it is digging their own grave.
1. Colombia does not in fact product enough double-advanced-degree graduates with perfect English.
2. Coordination between international teams is a LOT more difficult than domestic remote ones. Most of the work that is currently outsourced is low-value for this reason — higher value projects cannot tolerate the coordination costs. Companies that overrely on outsourced knowledge work are already naturally competed out of the market or downwards in it.
1. Maybe I was being too flippant here, so allow me expand on my hyperbole: the supply of highly educated, English-speaking workers in low cost of living countries has dramatically expanded in since the last time there was a big offshoring push of PMC labor in the early 2000s, and the friction with employing these folks has gone down dramatically. In my industry, there is now a large population of Indians/Ukrainians/Romanians/Brazilians who, in my experience, are roughly as competent and capable as my American colleagues, but much less entitled. I specifically picked Colombia because it obviates the time zone issues that are still genuinely difficult for some of these locales, but I think the basic point still stands: if you claim that some white collar job can be done be a smart, competent English speaker in Bozeman, I claim that it can be done just as well (or 80% as well, which is enough) by a smart, competent English speaker in Warsaw/Jakarta/[INSERT_MIDDLE_INCOME_METROPOLIS_HERE] for 10% the wage. And there are literally hundreds of millions of people in the latter group.
2. I agree at the margin, but isn't this just a special case of the argument against remote work in general? "Coordination is hard, we should maximize our ability to coordinate" seems like a great argument against WFH across timezones... but also a great argument against WFH at all. I think coordination exists on a spectrum between "fully synchronous and colocated" on one end and "fully asynchronous and distributed" on the other, and it feels a bit suspicious to me that team WFH always claims that the optimal point on this spectrum is one that happens to conveniently align with their ideal lifestyle preference...
To be clear, I’m not a WFH evangelist, I am just a general skeptic and think it’s a lot easier for any of us to overstate narrow cases on big trends that haven’t finished playing out.
My personal dog in the fight is just that I want to understand what are the dynamics that might resolve the trends in either direction, not arguing the inherent strength of any given direction.
So, you bring up a lot of good points; I just think that we’ve already seen enough asymmetry and divergence between sectors that WFH is here to stay, and the real question is “where will it trend up vs where will it trend down, and why does it trend differently for each?”.
Oh, one more rebuttal:
There are a lot of jobs where that 80% replacement just isn’t enough to get the job done.
And the workers who would have done those jobs aren’t going to take it lying down. As we saw from the 2000s crash you mentioned, a lot of those engineers went out and started the next generation of businesses. With America’s easy access to capital and large talent pool, those knowledge workers are most liable to pioneer the next rung of the value chain that purports to replace them.
Now, granted, this could result in anything from wild prosperity to not being enough to cancel out the offshoring. But a priori, I think we at least have enough evidence on hand to conclude that this looks more like Web 2.0 than the China shock.
"Work from home is here to stay and there’s no going back."
I'm not super convinced of that based on my anecdotal observation that, over the past 18 months or so, my law firm's management has clearly successfully pushed the vast majority of not just staff, not just associates, but *partners* into once more coming into the office on a daily basis. The only people who appear to be working remotely a majority of the time these days are senior counsel (i.e., former partners who are now semi-retired).
I don't know how a person could look at a miles-driven plot like this ( https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M12MTVUSM227NFWA/ ) and not conclude that not only are the majority of workers likely back full-time, most of them have been for quite some time.
Very interesting data point and I think it proves the point you wanted to make. But is "the majority" a bit smaller of a majority than first glance would imply"
The point we are at now is lower than the original trend line, and even the huge dip in 2020 is less drastic than the WFH % at the time would have suggested. I wonder how much of the miles drive number comes from #1: activities other than work and #2 Trucking. Neither of those slowed down much, so a higher share of the dip could be attributed to WFH than it would first appear.
Just an idea. The new equilibrium has some % of WFH, even if there has been a rebound.
Definitely it's not a complete recovery--even at my very tight-laced organization (we were back in June... of 2020), there's an increased tolerance for "if you're feeling poopy but you can get work done, don't come share your bug today".
But I get the sense that there's a largely white-collar cohort that just has no idea how unusual their situation is. The world's been basically normal again for years.
Yes, I know a lot of people who work in big law and they go into the office. It seems like specialty fields, especially intense and very well compensated ones, have had the most success getting people back into the office.
I have a generic white collar office job, think PowerPoints, Excel, answering emails, etc. and my company has had little success getting people back to the office. Generally seems to be the case for everyone I know doing similar jobs at other companies.
The typical government jobs seems to be pretty similar to my job, generic white collar office work, so I’m expecting similar results on work from home.
My wierd take on remote work and "bullshit jobs" is that they reflect a growing disconnect between industrial-era labor norms and the fundamentals of the new information economy.
Knowledge work simply isn't very time-intensive for the most part. As we've seen for the last 30 years, it has tolerated a remarkable degree of distraction (via the internet) and lollygagging that would have been unthinkable before.
The problem is, our labor laws are all built around the 40-hour industrial era workweek. And because knowledge workers are much better paid than most physical laborers, it'd be epically embarrassing for the nation's executives, managers, HR departments, and the knowledge workers themselves to admit that they maybe get 4-8 hours of real work done per "40-hour" week.
We basically have the beginnings of the leisure economy that Keynes and others theorized, but it's massively socially inequitable AND a massive violation of the letter of the law -- can you imagine the legal mess if whole companies decided their knowledge workers were basically defrauding them for 80-90% of their salaries?
Remote work conveniently allows everyone involved to keep up the charade while further loosening the informal strictures holding back the leisure economy.
The real question isn't "when are people going back to the office", but rather "whether, when, and how will the inequalities of the leisure economy expand or contract, and how will this stress or relieve its growing tensions with an obsolete legal apparatus?".
I wonder how this take will age through a weak labor market though. I don't think your claim is universally true: there are plenty of people who clearly do work 8 hours days at white collar jobs, or close to it. I think it's easier to pick out the 4 hour contributors from the 8 hour ones than we the keyboard class like to think.
EDIT: originally said "tight" instead of "weak" labor market, on accident.
It may be easy to pick them out, but it’s not exactly a perfectly bifurcated pair of curves RE ultimate productivity. Firing all the 4-hour workers might not make your company any better if those were a decent chunk of your smartest workers — even IF the majority of them were still genuinely lazy.
RE The market, this tight labor market is clearly not decisively killing the leisure economy. Productivity hasn’t skyrocketed due to supposedly declining lollygagging from the partial return to office.
If anything, the tight labor market is improving the fits between leisure-economy workers and employers best suited for them. Plentiful jobs means that workers can be picky, and employers have to make compromises if they want the right talent.
If you were trying to imply the opposite — a *weak* labor market — well, the simple fact that lollygagging is not even a R>0.5 heuristic for individual productivity means that managers can’t realize any efficiencies merely by rooting out lollygaggers, and lollygaggers can still wield real market power relative to other workers. Lollygaggers will face a slight disadvantage, but not enough to kill off remote work or the trend towards the leisure economy.
Addendum RE lollygagging: Productivity has remained more or less constant despite the rise of distractions; this indicates that knowledge work is resilient to distractions. Absent the distractions, productivity would actually have gone up!
Doesn't it also suggest that if we were to find a way to reduce lollygagging (like, say, by compelling folks to come into the office, thereby reducing distraction and encouraging them to focus on work), we'd be able to accomplish the same amount of knowledge work with fewer workers, or more knowledge work with the same amount?
IMO, most of the distractions in knowledge work come from other knowledge workers treating your time like it’s free. My people used to get sucked into “drive-by” conversations - now you actually have to bother to message/email/call someone, and that’s a higher barrier than happening to pass by someone’s cubicle or in the hall.
In addition to productivity gains elsewhere, maybe people are taking more work home than they used to? I know I make up for my lollygagging time by putting in more hours.
I doubt this is going on on a large scale. Perhaps a large minority, but I suspect not a plurality. I'd imagine that most people's natural inclination is to just leave the work at work.
I mean, yeah, that is clearly a lot of it.
The zoom thing is the worst for going into the office. Theoretically the biggest reason for me to go to the office is in-person meetings, but a zoom meeting at my desk at the office is _more_ disruptive than in my home, where I have quiet.
I did 1 day a week in office during summer, but it was specifically the day I had no meetings.
Yeah, even before the pandemic we would often have trouble getting people to use actual meeting rooms while in the office.
I think there's too much variation of circumstances among industries to make too many blanket declarations about the future of remote work, but I think that variance also means that there are some industries where it's not simply NOT a disadvantage, but actually an outright ADVANTAGE, and will thus continue to thrive and grow.
Yeah if your company is a bunch of anti-social engineers.
I mean, it’s a stereotype for a reason, but there can be a LOT of other good reasons to go remote. Embedding customer service strikes me as one.
"The Biden administration told Congress in April that it is working toward a goal in which those eligible for telework are in the office at least 50% of the time."
Biden's goal was to get people back in the office 50% of the time, not 100% and even 50% hasn't been close to achieved. Nor do I think people are likely to change jobs as 1) many private employers are requiring being in the office more or much more; 2) the labor market for these mid to high income jobs isn't as tight as it is for the bottom of the labor market.
I work at JPMorgan Chase and we’ve faced these exact issues. Our CEO has made repeated public statements about the need for people to return to the office. The internal goal is 60% of the time, but sick days and vacation count as in-office days. You can also request single day exemptions to work from home if you’re sick/have the plumber coming/etc. that only require manager approval. You also don’t face any repercussions until you’re significantly below the threshold. It’s also common to see people come in for only part of a day, like only the afternoon, which counts as an in-office day.
So in practice, the actual amount of time people are physically in office is much less than half.
I would imagine the government is facing many of these same issues, since they are also a very large, multilayered bureaucracy. If JPMC hasn’t fixed this, I’m pretty skeptical random government agencies will.
I think it comes down to the $$. Its widely understood in my firm/industry that WFH is available, but if you want to get paid/promoted you better have the face time & make the connections which isn't really feasible from home. Primarily because you might be able to get as much or even more work done at home, but you won't get better the way you will working in the office and we rely heavily on people developing skills & networks.
*Its also clear that if they need to layoff people at some point, a quick and simple category is which people are in the office as requested.
I mean my friend at JPM says mandatory 5 days is coming next year as soon as Jamie Dimon’s temple to himself is finished. “He didn’t spend $3Bn on it for no one to be in it.”
We will see! I’ve worked at JPMC for the past 3 years and there’s been continuous rumors that in office policies will become stricter “next year”. That hasn’t happened yet and in the meantime remote work becomes more and more central to how teams operate and any COVID related rationale is further in the rear view mirror.
>If JPMC hasn’t fixed this, I’m pretty skeptical random government agencies will.<
Fixed what? Your net income's up about 25% over the last year! That's a five fold differential over the nominal growth of the economy.
But without making any progress on their claimed work-from-office goals.
I've definitely noticed the pressure dropping over the past year on the fed back to the office push. No longer a priority? Lack of capacity at higher levels?
The sanitation enforcement stat referenced in the article isn't about missed trash pickups, it's a call to 311 to report that someone else is breaking the rules on trash disposal. So I think that does fit into your first theory, and a general culture of lawlessness.
So I’ve talked to my ANC and my councilmember about 311. They (311) kick it out to the agency, and then either the agency takes care of it or they push it to a contractor. For things like large item removal, once they call the contractor they mark it as “closed” regardless of whether the issue gets resolved. In some cases 311 gets to close the issue once it gets sent to the agency.
A sincere thanks for an insightful comment. Between the article and your critique we have the makings of a resonant and impactful investigative story for major publications.
"I feel like this article misses the core question, which is why exactly capacity has fallen so much across so many systems simultaneously."
It doesn't matter *why* capacity fell; it only matters how we can currently increase it. (See https://www.slowboring.com/p/ask-how-to-solve-problems-not-why) Sometimes the former can give insight into the latter, but we shouldn't wait to pick up the low-hanging fruit Lehman has identified here in order to answer the more theoretical question.
I think there is a big difference between most of the examples in that article, which are long standing problems featuring philosophical debates about their origins, and the highlighted issue, where we are just seeking to return to a previously acceptable steady state. In the latter case, we probably want to know why we fell out of that previously good state, since if reversing that cause is possible, it will likely be the fastest way back to the good place. If I go to the doctor with a rash, and she responds with "well we need to do more study on why rashes occur in the human body before I can help you", I would justifiably be annoyed for the reason mentioned in the Slow Boring article you linked. But if she said, "well, what's changed since you started developing that rash, maybe that can help us identify the discreet cause and allow us to reverse it?", that would feel like an appropriate investigation to undertake before trying remedies, even ones that usually work.
Ultimately, Lehman's suggestion boils down to "we should throw more money at these problems". But without having a plausible theory of what has caused this degradation in public services, we risk just lighting money on fire for no reason, a la San Francisco and its ever-ballooning anti-homelessness budget.
Part of it may be that refocusing on bringing down homicides may reduce police activity by whatever measure is used, since homicides and related crimes are less frequent than things like traffic violations. No idea how much it might explain though.
As a DC resident who experienced the post Floyd/Covid crime wave first hand, I have some thoughts here -
1. MPD's less aggressive enforcement was mainly driven by top down pressure from the District Council. They wanted less enforcement, less pretextual stops, and made it clear they'd legislate that way and were overtly hostile to any proactive policing from MPD. When crime spiked, councilmembers conveniently forgot this part and started asking why "MPD isn't doing their jobs?".
2. I can't find the original source, but I remember seeing something about a policy change at MPD on how they respond to calls. In essence it was that in order to avoid situations where one officer is trying to subjugate a suspect and might have to use increasing force, their policy is to now have multiple officers for every police interaction to cut down on those scenarios. If you drive around town, you'll notice any time MPD responds to something, no matter how minor, there's at least 3-4 squad cars there. This would obviously cut down on arrests if you have 5 officers doing something that 1-2 used to be able to do.
3. As noted, the US Attorney basically stopped enforcement against any misdemeanors. Retail theft exploded when it became apparent that there were no consequences. Drug dealing came back to areas I hadn't seen it in for at least a decade. Judges release known violent defendants back into the community where they continue to commit crimes while awaiting trial. There are some very obvious and easy solutions that could curb crime dramatically here.
4. The city's GPS monitoring of people on release (DC eliminated bail many years ago) is basically fake. It's not being monitored 24/7 and is not an impediment to committing additional crimes.
5. When the city legalized marijuana, it coincided with a complete stop of prosecution for people using it in public (which is still illegal!). It is extremely common to see people driving vehicles while smoking weed, which is bad.
6. Trash pickup got really bad during covid, which was weird because DPW has always been one of the best run city services. It seems to be back to mostly normal now, but its drop off and addition to the general sense of malaise in the city was curious.
7. Progressive activists made a huge deal out of the homeless sweep at McPherson Square and how devastating it would be to the local people experiencing unhousedness community. However now that it's done I haven't seen any follow up showing how devastating it truly was, and the park is now usable for all city residents and workers again, which is nice. Additionally, there was very little backlash from anyone outside of the usual DSA/Anarchist/Lefty groups. I think it showed the city that the activists claimed to speak for many more people than they actually do.
8. Things seem to be slowly getting back on the right track. Fare enforcement on Metro has been popular, the previously mentioned McPherson Square cleanup, and I've even seen an uptick in traffic enforcement. I'm cautiously optimistic that the 2020 collective fever is slowly breaking, and that we can get back to being a world class city.
This is all true. Pre-Covid, especially circa 2017, there was a massive pressure campaign from local activists to limit MPD activity. One way this manifested was the NEAR Act. One thing the NEAR Act did for example was add extra paper work for officers to fill out anytime they made a stop. Also pressure from Councilmembers at oversight hearings towards MPD and the Mayor, basically to cut back on stopping and arresting brown people. Then there were the BLM protests. I’m not surprised MPD would roll back their enforcement activities as a result.
17% down in patrol officers but almost 50% down in enforcement activity? Proposed solutions focused on hiring and retention, but I didn't see anything about why beat officers are just not doing their job and what to do about it? Is it still police sensitivity to post-BLM local politics (or, uncharitably, is it a wildcat strike?)
I don't think DC is the only urban PD that has seen a drop off in enforcement activity. What gives?
I wouldn't expect arrests to scale linearly with staffing. If staffing falls below a point where officers are now driving from emergency to emergency and triage decisions are made on which are attended to you are going to see arrests collapse as little time can be devoted to individual cases of mobile crime (e.g. carjackings as mentioned in the article), officers not being on passive patrol means they have longer response times meaning criminals get away and so on. There are likely a multitude of causes but I would expect the relationship between arrests and staffing to be somewhat sigmoid outside of the extremes.
Add in "fewer of those arrested are getting charged." It's possible there's pressure or incentive to not bother with as many arrests if they're not getting prosecuted anyway.
The cop gets a squirt of dopamine for cuffing the bad guy. If the prosecutor dismissed it, he can feel morally superior or put upon. His choice.
Eh, this is sort of true, but only sort of. First, it's actually probably not a choice.
Second, this stuff frequently isn't logical. Like, I had a story about why my work as an intern at SSA OGC defending the agency from claims they'd improperly denied disability benefits was all upside. If I win, I win and they obviously didn't need the benefits and I was protecting the federal fisc. If I lose, then they obviously do need benefits and will get them! Great, all upside.
Except that wasn't what I actually felt when I won on the argument 'this woman with a set of confirmed ailments that would make me curl up in a ball in my bed and cry, helps take care of her grandkids part time and can sometimes clean her house rather than 100% relying on her children to do it (or so she claims in her paperwork), so clearly she can work as a part time house cleaner/child care worker'. And though people can get back benefits (I think, never came up in my time there) that doesn't actually counteract not getting them at the time.
Similarly, if you arrest someone and then they walk free...you weren't making an arrest that might stick. There's an opportunity cost there and the cop's goal is most likely a safer community which a failed arrest doesn't actually effect.
I occasionally handled SSDI appeals for the 11th circuit. The government always won. The standard for getting disability is so strict I can’t believe anyone who is ambulatory or can type can get benefits. And yet people do get benefits.
I’ve read that ALJs vary wildly in their award rates, and the claims officers who process applications before an ALJ sees them are probably just as variable. If you don’t get benefits by the ALJ stage, you are probably screwed. How often did the claimant win an administrative appeal?
No idea. My work was handling it once it got to the Office of General Counsel and writing the brief that the District Court would rely on to determine if we should be reversed. The conversation I had with my supervisor however was...enlightening. He told me, quite proudly about the one (or maybe two) times in the 5-10 years he'd been there where he thought the ALJ had gotten it wrong and sua sponte went to his boss and managed to get OGC to pass it back down for reconsideration.
In the ~10 weeks I was working ~10 hours a week, I handled two cases, quite slowly, as you can imagine, given I was a law student who'd never worked in this area. You can calculate how many cases he must have tried in that time.
ETA: That, by the by, may be one of the worse jobs in the federal government for lawyers. It's entirely the same work over and over again, dealing with very sick/sad people, for significantly less money than is standard in other agencies, all while being part of the bastard stepchild part of the organization which transparently does not care about your side of the house (I got the distinct impression that the Social Security side of the house was much more...happy/effective than the disability side). But I shouldn't overstate, as I said, I was there for one quarter while in law school
I'm pretty sure Graham (of grahamfactor.substack.com) has explicitly disagreed with your take, although now that his substack is paywalled I don't know how to search for where he said so.
The broader concern with police is that if the DA stops enforcing a rule, the cop is risking a violent confrontation over something the justice system has said isn't important. You can go hassle the fare evader, but if it turns out he has a gun and things go sideways, your job and possibly your life is on the line over a decision to write a ticket that would be thrown out before the ink was dry. I saw this happen with all sorts of crimes when I worked (non sworn) at a police department. Compound that with command staff needing to triage limited resources and you'll quickly get an understanding that making yourself unavailable for the next shots fired call because you were stopping suspected DWI cars is frowned upon, and you see cops pulling back on all sorts of proactive behavior.
If there is a shots fired call, it’s perfectly ok to suspend the dui investigation with “you just caught a huge break, call an uber and go home.”
In Chicago, it's mostly just propagating up the funnel from Kim Foxx's case rejection rate. Her office > doubled the case rejection rate to such a degree for some classes (e.g., retail theft, driving on a suspended license) that enforcement just stopped. What's the point? If DC has a "progressive" DA ... then I'm sure it's the same story.
From what I read at DC Crime Facts substack, DC is even more of an outlier for major crimes. DA Graves just isn't all that interested in convictions unless and until he's under political pressure to do so.
Government jobs aren’t attractive during a good economy. Prosecutorial turnover is so high in Fulton County judges make snide remarks on the bench about the “prosecutor of the month” etc. Those jobs have never been high end, but they used to be good enough for a Georgia State grad to stay a couple years.
Public sector unions precluding municipal capacity to credibly threaten firing for not doing their job?
I'm not a public-sector union fan but why wouldn't this have been a perennial problem?
Plausibly, if you're 17% down in patrol officers, then you're more reluctant to fire anyone, but that should be union independent?
As to why not a perennial problem: it's a mirror image of the increase in other crimes: the awareness that there are no practical consequences for bad behavior goes from abstract thought to practical common knowledge, resulting in a new (worse) equilibrium. It's not like shoplifting enforcement was ever actually any good (or shopkeeper's privilege worth a damn), and in fact AIUI loss prevention will fire employees for attempting to interfere with it due to liability risks, but it's only post-pandemic that this became common knowledge enough that all the deodorant is locked up in display cases.
In the case of the cops, it turns out that they're impossible to fire for non-performance, and while this has always been true due to the union, it wasn't previously equilibriated as common knowledge.
That would be the hypothesis, at any rate. Not confident enough of it to make a firm assertion as to its causal explanatory power, hence the question mark on the top level comment.
I think this is basically correct; making people aware they can "get away with" stuff increases both crime and workers (in this case, police) doing less. Social media also makes a lot of things "common knowledge" much faster than in previous eras, and allows "bad actors" to project their message just as loudly as good ones. Then, with COVID, we had a massive disruption to "normal" life that resulted in a lot of different "norms" being renegotiated in real time. Unfortunately, I don't think there's an "easy" fix for this; we'll need to reassert and then actually demonstrate the importance of maintaining standards across a bunch of institutions at the same time.
Suppose [phones/bad vibes/legal changes/etc.] widen the gap between slackers and hard workers. Now any constraints on dealing with slackers hurt you more than they used to.
Public Sector Unions are something of a red herring when it comes to these issues. With or without a union, you can fire an officer for illegally refusing to make an arrest. You can't fire someone for not engaging in proactive policing while working an understaffed shift.
The 17% decrease in beat cops but 50% decrease in arrests seems compatible with "shirking and facing no consequences," and people don't like getting fired (plus, risk of their pension). I'm skeptical that you can't actually fire someone who is non-unionized for visibly slacking off (and/or threaten to do so unless their numbers go up), even if the force is understaffed.
Alternatively to "shirking with no consequences," the nonlinear force size/arrest curve seems like it may also be compatible with something like the proposed sigmoid staffing-arrest curve discussed upthread, which itself seems consistent with, e.g., the first-offender model of enforcement response discussed inter alia by Bryan Caplan. But note that that argument depends specifically on the amount of *time* spent on each arrest going up (which is indeed what James proposed), because the nominal capacity to make arrests should in the null hypothesis remain linear in the number of officers even if there's more total crime due to the aforementioned lower risk of being caught plus criminals' risk-preference. While the amount of time per arrest going up is conceivable--e.g., if serious crimes take longer to make arrests in but are prioritized, and serious crime went up--it's a load-bearing epicycle that makes that hypothesis less probable (although not necessarily incorrect) ceteris paribus.
"but almost 50% down in enforcement activity...why beat officers are just not doing their job"
What's the right level of stops or enforcement? If they were doing twice as many as 2019 per officer, would that be the right level? Or would that be too many?
Cops all over the country have just decided they don't actually want to do their jobs. Until we actually have local government control over the police we aren't going to fix this or any of the other problems discussed here.
Uncharitable to blame the police when the public made it crystal clear that we wanted less enforcement. In many cases this was explicitly asked for by the mayors, directed by police chiefs (on the record, in public) and reinforced by DAs that deprioritized whole categories of crimes.
DC convicted two cops of murder (Karon Hylton) where they didn’t even touch the guy (he got hit by a van evading police. Manslaughter? Sure, I can see it. Murder when he’s hit by an unrelated vehicle? Hm). They are lucky anyone even shows up to work.
It looks like only one was convicted of second degree murder and the other of obstruction.
Still, insane. Why would any police officer pursue a suspect if it could literally ruin their own life? There was debate about DC Police’s formal policies around pursuit of suspects but I know I’d be keeping that cruiser at 25mph no matter what the rulebook or city council says.
This reminds me of a case I read about in Louisiana (I think) where a police officer tried to arrest the wrong person, and when physically subdued the guy when he resisted. The guy had a heart attack died and the cop was charged with murder.
Now - the cop screwed up, and arresting the wrong guy should be somewhat of a big deal. It should probably come up on your annual performance review, maybe involve some time off work. But never at my job have I had to worry that a screwup would result in a murder charge.
It's a tough job, imho.
Eh, I'd want to know a lot more about the case, but the obstruction and conspiracy charges make me think that the cover-up is what may have gotten them charged. 'Car chase for lack of helmet gets someone killed' is probably bad judgment that should probably result in discipline 'police try to cover-up that their car chase for lack of helmet gets someone killed,' is a crime and should be fucking punished as such, though not necessarily as second-degree murder.
I think you are confusing “the public” with activists.
In 2020 it wasn't just fringe activists though, it's clear there's not a majority for significant depolicing but the zeitgeist in 2020 was different and that was true among huge swathes of more normy dem voters. They weren't in the defund/abolish camp neccesarily but there was a real shift on views on policing that has thankfully recovered somewhat. In a heavily dem city in 2020 (where the other half of the national electorate that's very pro-police is largely excluded) it's not hard to get the feelling that the public in 2020 really was a lot less sympathetic to cops than they had been previously.
And this is hard to quantify (except maybe by reference total payouts over time?) but the impression I have is that we are seeing more lawsuits against municipalities for alleged police misconduct, larger jury verdicts against those municipalities, and higher settlement offer amounts to make cases go away. I think those all would follow from city jury pools becoming increasingly anti-cop.
Huge grain of salt because I haven’t looked closely enough, but I was told liability insurance is going down for departments with body cameras as cops are almost overwhelmingly in the right in most situations.
Kim Foxx's office in Chicago has rejected ~ 50% of felony retail theft cases. The prior office (Alvarez) rejected 15-20%. At a 50% rejection rate ... why bother even arresting?
I'm basically Kent Brockman pilled on state level offices and below for this reason.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xop8QLIJCpY
The biggest component there is the second element, concerning the courts and prosecution. Pursuing an arrest which won't result in any real consequences means taking risks-injury, liability, career advancement, etc, which have gotten more prevalent in the past several years-with reduced incapacitation and determent benefits will result in reduced proactivity.
Another element, which has been touched on by James, is that staffing and activity aren't linearly related, both in relation to engaging in proactive policing and making discretionary arrests on calls for service. Arrests take time and resources, which may or may not be needed while I'm in jail.
Third element, which is more of a suspicion, is that when he referred to a 17% decrease in district level staffing, that likely includes mitigation from specialized units being dissolved and returned to patrol. So the officers on the traffic unit-recall the mention of traffic violations and DUI arrest-are instead responding to calls like every other unit. When I see someone run a red light while on my way to a domestic disorder, the domestic disorder remains priority.
Relating all of this into capacity: to give an example-let's assume an area has a baseline staffing of 20 officers working at a time, which has been reduced to 17 on shift-a 15% decrease compared to the 17% decrease mentioned. Which means that if 17 officers are tied up on calls, where there used to be 3 officers still in service, there are now none. Meaning if I'm one of the officers working, and I have the option of attempting to resolve the issue without an arrest, I have a lot of motivation to do so. Meanwhile, the three officers who no longer exist aren't proactively policing. Reduce it further, and the pressure gets even stronger-I've heard someone announce to the undercover/unmarked drug units that there simply weren't enough units working that day to make stops. At that point, unless you're dealing with a felony, arrests simply aren't happening.
What real incentive do patrol officers have to do their job? I'm serious.
not being fired. same as a phlebotomist of any other semi-skilled trade.
Cops are heavily unionized and it’s very hard to fire them. And when it does happen, they typically just get a job on another force.
I can't find the articles I wanted to link, but based on what I've read it's often not nearly as hard we are usually led to believe. The power of Police Unions is also very state dependent.
In any case, it may well be "easy" to find a new job, but an "easy" job search is still a pretty hard thing! You might have to relocate, lose the years you worked towards your pension and you probably aren't climbing the career ladder if you're last job ended in an expensive lawsuit and firing.
What if it's all (or even a majority) of the cops on the force who are pulling back?
I'm sure in many cases they are pulling back, often because it's what their city council / mayor / police chief is asking for. In other cases it's feeling that if they make mistake they'll be unsupported that leads to less proactive policing.
I don't think fear of being fired is why there is less policing in many depts. They can often be fired for clearly violating rules, like being late for work or failing drug tests. But probably not for not making enough arrests. That kind of thing more likely has more to do with trying to get promoted, or just wanting to do the job they signed up for.
Phones. We all became a little more anti-social and a little more addicted to looking at our phones. Cops weren't immune to this. Its not unique to cops either.
I think that there’s a more boring explanation— homicides and carjackings are more resource-intensive to investigate and make arrests on than say, traffic offenses are. If your city has more serious crime in general, its enforcement efficiency will probably drop because officers will spend more of their time dealing with more serious but harder-to-resolve cases.
Casey: I have just posted a comment here with a non-monetized blog entry in it. It explains your question completely. It's long.
Shout out to https://dccrimefacts.substack.com/ which covers everything in this article (and much more) in-depth. It's really top-level analysis and probably the best SubStack I know of in terms of completely nailing it's subject.
Seconding this. It's a treasure and a master class on reportage.
Small editorial suggestion: You might want to write “DC’s police department, called the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD),” on first reference, as MPD is never defined and people who don’t live here are probably not expecting an M to be in the name, and simply spelling it out may lead them to think it is a regional force.
I inferred the meaning, but yeah, this kind of thing is maddening. How can writers be so oblivious to it?
Worth mentioning that DC has some of the most racially disproportionate crime-related statistics in the nation, with Blacks 6x more likely than non-Blacks to die in a traffic accident, 10x more likely to die of a drug overdose, and 30x more likely to die of homicide. (prior to 2020 these numbers were "only" 4x, 9x and 25x).
So it ends up being the case that enforcement in the city is largely about stopping, arresting and convicting Black people. But AD Graves and progressives seem to have forgotten that it's also largely about protecting Black people.
I think if you look at median educational attainment, unemployment, and HHI by race, the reasons for that disparity become incredibly, starkly clear.
Auto deaths are a little weirder but PG has 13 deaths per 100k where moco and DC are at like 5 (and Arlington is less than 1!)
Simply observing the disparity (and realizing it plugs into policing controversies) is the easy part. Understanding the drivers is much harder. If I understand you're take on that, I don't think I wholly agree, simply because there are many other populations in the US with similar education / unemployment / HHI that don't have the same set of social problems.
It's not at all clear that education and unemployment drive drugs, crime and careless driving rather than the reverse, or that instead there's some hidden 3rd factor (culture?) that sometimes drives all of them in similar directions.
Just to give some examples: Hispanics in the RGV have high rates of poverty and low rates of education, but El Paso and the Tex / Mex border are low crime / low drug use areas. Or take the area where I live in Western PA, where the White population has been fine on education / poverty metrics but nearly leading the country in terms of overdoses. Or Native Americans on many reservations, who often have terrible poverty and education indicators, but have much lower murder rates than Black people in DC, yet way higher drug and alcohol OD rates (and way higher rates of sexual abuse).
Anyways, the point of listing these out is to try to make the case that it's not always clear what causes what when we see these correlations. If DC suddenly became full of low-ed / skill refugees from Somalia or Pakistan I wouldn't expect them to have the same drug / murder numbers as low income Black people in DC have, as a group, right now.
The thing about DC that’s interesting is DC knows who all these people are. Not kidding, they spent a lot of money identifying the 600 or so people who are most likely to commit violent crime. I feel pretty sure that they aren’t far off either. Now, DC has a very weird problem where they know who these people are, but no real idea what to do about it (I mean they tried People of Promise, and the jury is out, but something like 48 of the people in the program were dead or in jail by the end of the year)
The district proper essentially has no unemployed white people (or even poor, unless you count just out of college hill staffers; or blue collar).
Remove Queens, non-hipster Brooklyn, Staten Island and the north Bronx from NYC and you have something analogous to DC.
Just to add to this, I think the median HHI for white people in DC is 160k? There’s really nowhere else in this country like it
It's wild trying to figure out how far you have to get away from DC to find white working class areas.
There's none in Arlington or Fairfax or Loudoun. Manassas used to be and I guess kind of still is, but is heavily Latino. Maybe Fredericksburg/Stafford? For those note familiar with the area, that's 50+ miles away from DC.
On the Maryland side, the PG County inner suburb white enclaves like Hyattsville and Adelphi basically no longer exist. Bowie arguably the last hold out but is being gentrified by affluent black families. Montgomery County has some bounded by the agricultural reserve like Damascus but mainly you have to get all the way out to Frederick and Hagerstown to find them.
South Bronx = Anacostia in the analogy.
Previous incarnations of the machine for large-scale violent oppression of Black people were also justified in terms of “it’s for their own good” and “look at what a nice society we can have as a result.” I don’t think that type of argument is going to convince skeptics that this time is different.
I'm not quite sure what specific portion of history you're referencing or what specific solution you think I'm suggesting (I'm leaving it pretty vague mostly because the devil is always in the details). But whichever they are I'm sure you're conflating two very different things with a very thin rhetorical argument.
I think there are a lot "smarter" win-win approaches to reducing violent crime in DC, many of which would simply make DC less of an outlier compared to peers or are capacity-related, like getting their drug lab reaccredited, getting serious house arrest, having their DA choose to prosecute a similar level of arrests as peers, taking truancy seriously, having their city counsel target more arrests instead of fewer, redistributing policing resources away from wealthy neighborhoods to high-crime ones, etc..
A lot of these will involve some level of increased enforcement (some won't), and much of the enforcement will disproportionately "target" Black people, for example getting serious about truancy. And because of that, some people will have takes like "being strict about truancy is equivalent to the violence of Jim Crow".
But I think that's just an utterly ridiculous take. It really is the case that punishing some people is good for society, and even for the people themselves. We have truancy rules in my mostly non-Black school district, for example, and most people think they are a good thing, not a bad one. The skeptics just have to be made to realize they are wrong and their "but slavery punished black people, too" logic is wrong and unhelpful.
And the money for this could come from
a) issuing and collecting fines from automated traffic enforcement (speeding and excessive muffler noise) including rewards for citizens who report the location for booting and towing of vehicles with large unpaid fines (including out of state vehicles).
b) time of day specific street parking fees, the goal being that for a price one should almost always find a street paring spot.
c) land use regulation and building code reform to allow builders to meet demand for residential and commercial properties, including conversions from one use to another.
d) property taxes on assets of non-local NGOs, lobbyists, trade associations.
I rarely agree with you 100%, but I guess today is a unicorn of a day. Cheers!
Just want to point out that fines need to be reduced if we're going to automated enforcement. The idea is to penalize everyone just a little bit, and ramp up the impact on the "whales" who cause the most damage.
Attorneys — another capacity issue.
I don’t take CJA cases and I’m getting the impression that not enough do. They don’t pay enough (I’m aware that DC pays more than most jurisdictions but it’s one of the highest cost jurisdictions to practice in — especially when CJA attorneys are required to have a physical office in the district.)
And the January 6th cases have clogged up the system for 3 years now. (Yes they are mainly or all in federal district court but the counsel are coming from the same general pool as District CJA counsel.)
CJA = experienced private counsel taking government compensation to represent indigent defendants at a set rate to supplement public defenders. They exist in most jurisdictions.
The hourly rate in cia cases isn’t horrible, but the caps on how many hours you can bill mean you would get screwed if a case went to trial or even pled after you’d done the prep work.
I just checked the DC CJA cap — it’s 8500 for a felony and 3500 for a misdemeanor. Oy.
I just checked my local district. The hourly rate is $172 and the max $13,200 for any felony. I would never defend a complex felony for that max, but I’d totally do a drug or gun case. I may sign up.
Oof that makes DC look horrendous. CJA rates may indeed be part of the capacity issue.
Check how many cases you can turn down.
worst they can do is fire me, in which case my cia panel outcome would revert to its present level
is it that high for a minor felony?
That’s the dollar max for any felony without judicial approval. I’m not sure how their charging structure works.
To explain further, not enough attorneys, cases get delayed. And very busy attorneys have very busy schedules which means they may not have calendar availability for an existing case for months. Given enough delays, “pleading down” the offense makes a lot of sense for both sides.
An important consideration is not just how much crime but where it is happening. When people are afraid to drive into D.C. for fear of carjacking or ride the Metro or attend a concert or baseball game, you will hear a far greater outcry than when it's concentrated in historically underserved areas. Case in point: I lived in D.C. throughout its Murder Capital/Crack City days. Although I experienced crime, because I lived in high-crime areas (mostly 14th St. corridor), I never personally witnessed a shooting. My kids, on the other hand, recently witnessed one in the Metro. They've seen repeated police activity at Tyson's, which is starting to look like a war zone with the apparently necessary security presence. Gradually, I'm starting to change my own behavior patterns around a city I've long known and always loved. Yeah, it's all anecdotal, but perception is huge. Especially for an area whose economy depends on workers coming back into town and tourists spending their money here year round.
Good diagnoses but bad recommendations for the police force. Too bought in on credentialism and proceduralism.
Can’t hire enough cops? Get rid of the new college hours requirement.
Transparency in promotions? That just privileges legible traits and credentials over illegible ones, which is already overdone in government hiring and promotions.
Also, the retention survey showed way more departing cops talking about morale than opportunities for advancement.
Just give them cash, hire more people, and make it clear that it’ll be a revolving door on the chief’s office until someone comes in who figures out how to get them back to work.
I recently switched to a management position, and one of the first things I learned was “transparency in promotions” actually means “lots more paperwork to justify the decision you would have made anyway”
At some level, management just needs the trust and confidence of the workforce (and vice versa!). People will make mistakes, but we generally try to mitigate them and learn from them, and generally just try to do a good job.
Rules are not a substitute for earnestness and competence.
I would really like to read a take on the underratedness of earnestness (competence is, I hope, still something people aspire to). In so many places, including SB, I see it dismissed as cringe. Maybe owing to my midwestern origins and oldness, I think this, and the all-irony, all the time context that many seem to prefer, is unfortunate. Both irony and earnestness have their place, IMO, and I think the world could use a bit more of the latter right now.
What we sometimes do is describe the position being offered and qualities of a desired applicant in a way that really only fits the desired candidate/s.
Those solutions have been tried and are failing. I posted a very long blog entry (non-monetized) in a comment to the article. It explains it, using the actual experience of someone whose career was in law enforcement.
From your linked report: "Another important component of professional development is education. Cops who are more educated are tactically more effective but are also less likely to use force."
You then use this correlation to argue that MPD should pay to send officers to university.
If the studies you cite haven't disentangled treatment from selection/aging effects, please note that they aren't useful evidence that sending cops to school will help anything except university budgets.
I'd be very leery of recreating the situation we have now with Masters of Education programs for teachers, which have been shown to have no effect on student achievement, and therefore represent an enormous amount of pure waste.
Some people here have noted that the drop in enforcement seems greater than the drop in staff, implying that some police may just be refusing to do their jobs. I have no clue if that's true in DC, but anecdotally it's true in Portland. Or at least to put it more charitably, they feel they've been given mixed signals as to whether or not the city actually wants them to do their jobs. It's another city where the homicide rate has NOT fallen to pre-pandemic levels, even though it's fallen from its 2022 peak. Anecdote: my coworker was T-boned and had her car totalled in October 2022 and the other driver tried to flee but he couldn't because he crashed in to a fire hydrant. The police told her they were only there because the other driver hit the fire hydrant. Even if that's true, that feels vindictive to say out loud. (I heard this information second hand, so take with a grain of salt but I've heard similar stories from others)
Homicides per year:
2016: 16
2017: 25
2018: 27
2019: 36
2020: 57 (51 of those from June to December)
2021: 88
2022: 97
2023: 83
2024: 35 from January to June
Don't know about Portland, but I've been reading for a couple years now at:
https://dccrimefacts.substack.com/
The comments today from DC residents Jim_Ed and Eric pretty much nail what dccrimefacts has covered in-depth.
A lot of takes want to make this about national issues but some of this is clearly DC specific. Homicides fell a lot in 2022, 2023, and (so far, according to the evidence we have) 2024 in most of the country. This doesn't seem to have been true in DC. But it was true in, say, NYC, which has bail reform, progressive DAs, BLM agitation, etc. NYPD arrest activity is back up too. Gotta look at the local angles
Even Philly prosecutes 94% of arrests. DC prosecutes something like 60%. This is a maybe the most notable disparity, but it’s important to emphasize just how big the gaps are even to other very progressive places.
Those rates sound high to me (if the denominator is "all arrests") but that's my sense too of where a lot of the disparity is. So why is that happening? If Larry Krasner and Alvin Bragg are prosecuting more aggressively the natural ideological story seems less compelling
This is a tangential issue, but I was wondering if the fact that the FBI is in DC affects local police hiring and retention. If you're the type of person growing up in the DMV area who is interested in working in law enforcement and you're also ambitious, you have more chances to meet FBI agents growing up, walk by the Hoover building, etc., which all make a career in the FBI seem feasible. If you're in any other metro area, the FBI is more remote to you, so you may choose instead to work for local law enforcement. Does the presence of the FBI in DC soak up talent that would otherwise go to local law enforcement?
I'm a bit confused on how much of this is actually about capacity versus how much is an actual *policy choice*.
Something like the US Attorney choosing to plead cases down to a misdemeanor instead of prosecuting, for example, isn't because the USA's office lacks the ability to prosecute - it's an active choice not to prioritize those cases, right? Similarly, I'm not sure how to tell whether fewer arrests are because MPD has gotten worse at their jobs, or because MPD has chosen not to pursue particular types of crime - and I think that's a really, really important distinction. Does the government lack the ability to do anything about these crimes, or have the actors chosen to do something different?
I think the actual argument Lehman is making reads a lot that the relevant actors have made suboptimal policy choices, and the public needs to hold those actors accountable for their bad choices - which I agree with wholeheartedly! But that's a different argument than the system in DC lacking the ability to do anything about crime (which is what capacity makes me think of).
Fun fact - DC is the only city in the world where I got mugged (near the Greyhound union station). It was a scary experience. Fortunately, I had a decent amount of cash on me so I didn't suffer any physical harm. I was afraid that if some other muggers caught me till I reached the metro station, I would get beaten up because I didn't have any money left to give. Fortunately, my $400+ SLR that was inside a bag survived. This was my very first visit to the US, a 3 month business trip from India, almost 25 years ago.
PS: Being the naive foreigner that I was, I told a cop about getting mugged and asked him if he would give me a ride to the metro station. He said - "I'm not a cab driver. Call a cab.". :-)