incapacitation and deterrence. How does the U.S. compare to other countries in regards to
Michelle_Michy
20191204054433crime_readings_2019_2020.docRequired Readings:
What Explains U.S. Mass Shootings? International Comparisons Suggest an Answer
By MAX FISHER and HYPERLINK "https://www.nytimes.com/by/josh-keller" \o "More Articles by JOSH KELLER" JOSH KELLER NOV. 7, 2017
When the world looks at the United States, it sees a land of exceptions: a time-tested if noisy democracy, a crusader in foreign policy, an exporter of beloved music and film.
But there is one quirk that consistently puzzles America’s fans and critics alike. Why, they ask, does it experience so many mass shootings?
Perhaps, some speculate, it is because American society is unusually violent. Or its racial divisions have frayed the bonds of society. Or its citizens lack proper mental care under a health care system that draws frequent derision abroad.
These explanations share one thing in common: Though seemingly sensible, all have been debunked by research on shootings elsewhere in the world. Instead, an ever-growing body of research consistently reaches the same conclusion.
The only variable that can explain the high rate of mass shootings in America is its astronomical number of guns.
What Explains Mass Shootings
The top-line numbers suggest a correlation that, on further investigation, grows only clearer.
Americans make up about 4.4 percent of the global population but own 42 percent of the world’s guns. From 1966 to 2012, 31 percent of the gunmen in mass shootings worldwide were American, according to a 2015 study by Adam Lankford , a professor at the University of Alabama.
Adjusted for population, only Yemen has a higher rate of mass shootings among countries with more than 10 million people — a distinction Mr. Lankford urged to avoid outliers. Yemen has the world’s second-highest rate of gun ownership after the United States.
Worldwide, Mr. Lankford found, a country’s rate of gun ownership correlated with the odds it would experience a mass shooting. This relationship held even when he excluded the United States, indicating that it could not be explained by some other factor particular to his home country. And it held when he controlled for homicide rates, suggesting that mass shootings were better explained by a society’s access to guns than by its baseline level of violence.
What Doesn’t: Crime, Race or Mental Health
If mental health made the difference, then data would show that Americans have more mental health problems than do people in other countries with fewer mass shootings. But the mental health care spending rate in the United States, the number of mental health professionals per capita and the rate of severe mental disorders are all in line with those of other wealthy countries.
A 2015 study estimated that only 4 percent of American gun deaths could be attributed to mental health issues. And Mr. Lankford, in an email, said countries with high suicide rates tended to have low rates of mass shootings — the opposite of what you would expect if mental health problems correlated with mass shootings.
Whether a population plays more or fewer video games also appears to have no impact . Americans are no more likely to play video games than people in any other developed country.
Racial diversity or other factors associated with social cohesion also show little correlation with gun deaths. Among European countries, there is little association between immigration or other diversity metrics and the rates of gun murders or mass shootings.
A Violent Country
America’s gun homicide rate was 33 per million people in 2009, far exceeding the average among developed countries. In Canada and Britain, it was 5 per million and 0.7 per million, respectively, which also corresponds with differences in gun ownership.
Americans sometimes see this as an expression of deeper problems with crime, a notion ingrained, in part, by a series of films portraying urban gang violence in the early 1990s. But the United States is not actually more prone to crime than other developed countries, according to a landmark 1999 study by Franklin E. Zimring and Gordon Hawkins of the University of California, Berkeley.
Rather, they found, in data that has since been repeatedly confirmed , that American crime is simply more lethal. A New Yorker is just as likely to be robbed as a Londoner, for instance, but the New Yorker is 54 times more likely to be killed in the process.
They concluded that the discrepancy, like so many other anomalies of American violence, came down to guns.
More gun ownership corresponds with more gun murders across virtually every axis: among developed countries , among American states , among American towns and cities and when controlling for crime rates. And gun control legislation tends to reduce gun murders, according to a recent analysis of 130 studies from 10 countries.
This suggests that the guns themselves cause the violence.
Mass Shootings Happen Everywhere
Skeptics of gun control sometimes point to a 2016 study . From 2000 and 2014, it found, the United States death rate by mass shooting was 1.5 per one million people. The rate was 1.7 in Switzerland and 3.4 in Finland, suggesting American mass shootings were not actually so common.
But the same study found that the United States had 133 mass shootings. Finland had only two, which killed 18 people, and Switzerland had one, which killed 14. In short, isolated incidents. So while mass shootings can happen anywhere, they are only a matter of routine in the United States.
As with any crime, the underlying risk is impossible to fully erase. Any individual can snap or become entranced by a violent ideology. What is different is the likelihood that this will lead to mass murder.
In China, about a dozen seemingly random attacks on schoolchildren killed 25 people between 2010 and 2012. Most used knives; none used a gun.
By contrast, in this same window, the United States experienced five of its deadliest mass shootings, which killed 78 people. Scaled by population, the American attacks were 12 times as deadly.
Beyond the Statistics
In 2013, American gun-related deaths included 21,175 suicides, 11,208 homicides and 505 deaths caused by an accidental discharge. That same year in Japan, a country with one-third America’s population, guns were involved in only 13 deaths.
This means an American is about 300 times more likely to die by gun homicide or accident than a Japanese person. America’s gun ownership rate is 150 times as high as Japan’s. That gap between 150 and 300 shows that gun ownership statistics alone do not explain what makes America different.
The United States also has some of the world’s weakest controls over who may buy a gun and what sorts of guns may be owned.
Switzerland has the second-highest gun ownership rate of any developed country, about half that of the United States. Its gun homicide rate in 2004 was 7.7 per million people — unusually high, in keeping with the relationship between gun ownership and murders, but still a fraction of the rate in the United States.
Swiss gun laws are more stringent, setting a higher bar for securing and keeping a license, for selling guns and for the types of guns that can be owned. Such laws reflect more than just tighter restrictions. They imply a different way of thinking about guns, as something that citizens must affirmatively earn the right to own.
The Difference Is Culture
The United States is one of only three countries, along with Mexico and Guatemala, that begin with the opposite assumption: that people have an inherent right to own guns.
The main reason American regulation of gun ownership is so weak may be the fact that the trade-offs are simply given a different weight in the United States than they are anywhere else.
After Britain had a mass shooting in 1987, the country instituted strict gun control laws. So did Australia after a 1996 incident. But the United States has repeatedly faced the same calculus and determined that relatively unregulated gun ownership is worth the cost to society.
That choice, more than any statistic or regulation, is what most sets the United States apart.
“In retrospect Sandy Hook marked the end of the US gun control debate,” Dan Hodges, a British journalist, wrote in a post on Twitter two years ago, referring to the 2012 attack that killed 20 young students at an elementary school in Connecticut. “Once America decided killing children was bearable, it was over.”
spring 2002 contexts 25
crime decline in context
feature article richard rosenfeld
After rising to a peak in the early 1990s, crime rates in the United States have been falling for almost a decade. The turnaround was sudden, unexpected, and years later remains something of a puzzle. Some observers attribute most of the drop to tougher sentences and rising rates of imprisonment. Others believe more vigilant policing of loitering, public drunkenness, and other so-called quality-of-life offenses is responsible. Still others point to shrinking drug markets or the booming economy of the 1990s. No strong consensus exists regarding the sources of the crime drop.
Even if we cannot say with certainty what is responsible for the crime decline of the 1990s, it is possible to rule out some of the usual causes and identify some of the real factors in the crime drop. But the first step in unraveling the mystery of the crime decline is to determine whether it happened at all.
real crime decline?
Several years after the rate of crime began declining, most Americans continued to rank crime among the nation’s most serious public problems and to believe that crime rates were still going up. A relatively small percentage of Americans have direct experience with serious crime. The primary source of public information about crime is the mass media. Given the constant media drumbeat of murder and mayhem, it is not surprising that people would be unaware or skeptical of claims that crime rates were dropping. But they were and still are. The crime decline is real, not an artifact of changes in the rate at which crimes are reported to or recorded by the police. It is significant, long, and deep enough to qualify as a trend and not just a short-run statistical anomaly. It is pervasive, cutting across major offense categories and population groups. Finally, it is time-limited. Crime rates cannot be negative, so the rate of decline curve should slow in the coming years. And it is possible, of course, that crime rates will increase, as they did in the 1980s. Predicting the future is always hazardous, but the best guesses about the next decade will be based on an informed assessment of the recent past.
documenting the decline
A “crime rate” is the number of offenses of a specified type divided by the population of some jurisdiction. By taking population size into account, crime rates can be compared across places and times with different populations. The nation has two “official” crime rates. One consists of offenses known to the police. These are compiled in the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports (UCR). The other is based on reports by victims to the Justice Department’s annual National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS). Both of the crime indicators include information on serious violent and property offenses, such as assault, rape, robbery, burglary and auto theft. The UCR also records homicides which, of course, are not counted in victim surveys. Both the FBI report and the Justice Department survey are limited to so-called street crimes and omit serious white-collar, corporate, and governmental offenses (e.g., price-fixing, violations of workplace safety rules, pollution, corruption, antitrust violations and false advertising). National indicators for such “suite” crimes do not exist, so no one knows whether they have been rising or falling.
The FBI statistics indicate that street crime has substantially decreased over the past decade. In 1991 the FBI counted 24,700 criminal homicides in the United States, or 9.8 homicides for every 100,000 Americans. By the end of 1999, the number of homicides had dropped to 15,500, and the rate fell to 5.7 per 100,000, a 42 percent decline. The nation’s robbery rate also fell by about 40 percent and the burglary rate dropped by one-third during the 1990s. The decreases were less steep, but still appreciable, for rape and aggravated assault (assaults involving serious injury or the use of a weapon), both of which declined by about 20 percent. There is some reason to believe that the declines in nonlethal violence are even sharper than those reported in the FBI report because victims became bolder about reporting such incidents to the police and the police recorded more of them. However, the drop registered in the FBI report and police statistics is mirrored in Justice Department survey results that are unaffected by patterns in reporting and recording.
So the declines in crime are real, but are they meaningful? The simple answer is yes. By the year 2000, homicide and burglary rates were lower than at any time since the mid-1960s. Victimization rates have fallen for youth, adults, blacks, whites, males, and females, in large cities and rural areas, in every region of the country. But the timing and magnitude of these changes differ across population groups, and those differences offer important clues regarding the causes of the crime decline.
Consider the difference in the timing of the decrease in youth and adult homicide victims. The victimization rates for people over the age of 24 have fallen more or less continuously since 1980. On the other hand, youth homicide followed a more cyclical pattern, falling during the early 1980s, rising from the mid-1980s to a peak in 1993 and then falling again since then. The increase in youth homicide during the 1980s and early 1990s was so dramatic that it gave rise to concerns about a national youth violence “epidemic.” The victimization rate for 14- to 17-year-olds nearly tripled, and that for 18- to 24-year-olds almost doubled between 1984 and 1993. The fall from the 1993 peak in youth homicide has been equally pronounced. The trends in the rates at which teenagers and young adults committed homicide were almost identical to the victimization trends.
I focus on criminal homicide in this discussion because more accurate and detailed information about the characteristics of victims and offenders exists for homicide than for other crimes and because it is the most serious. However, the same basic patterns also characterize serious nonlethal criminal violence
A credible explanation of the homicide decline, then, must explain why the time trends were different for adult and youth homicides, the first dropping steadily since 1980, the second fluctuating. Another notable pattern in the homicide drop involves the differing time trends for offenses committed with and without firearms. Roughly two-thirds of homicides in the United States are committed with a gun. Both the increase in youth homicide during the 1980s and early 1990s and the decrease over the last several years are restricted largely to the firearm category. Youth homicides involving other weapons or no weapons exhibit a gradual downward shift over the past 20 years, and adult homicide rates have decreased in both the firearm and nonfirearm categories. The “action,” then, in the national homicide rate for the last two decades is a consequence of rising and falling rates of youths killing and being killed with guns. A sufficient explanation of recent homicide trends cannot ignore the prominent role of guns in the cycle of youth violence.
The cycling up and down in youth firearm violence occurred earliest and was most pronounced in the largest cities and among young African-American males. The same changes happened in smaller cities and among white teenagers and young adults, but happened a year or two later and the fluctuations were smaller. Persons of “other races” constitute only 2 to 3 percent of the nation’s homicide victims.) A sufficient explanation of the recent homicide trends should accommodate these race, sex, and city-size differences as well.
An explanation of the crime drop should account for why the trends differ for youth and adults and why they are most evident in firearm homicides, in the large cities and among young black men. Serious explanations should account for both the rise and the decline in crime rates since the 1980s.And the best explanation will connect those recent changes to longer-term trends and to the social conditions that make the United States the murder capital of the industrial world, the crime decline notwithstanding.
drug markets and the spread of firearms
No single explanation of the crime decline has been proposed that meets all of these conditions. One of the more promising, however, attributes the increase in youth homicide rates beginning in the mid-1980s to the diffusion of violence in and around urban crack markets. The high demand for crack led drug dealers to recruit young inner-city males as sellers and arm them to fend off attacks from rival dealers and protect themselves from street robbers. A classic arms race resulted as other young people acquired guns in an increasingly threatening urban environment. The diffusion of firearms fueled escalating rates of youth homicide, with the sharpest increases occurring in the largest cities where the crack epidemic began. The increases in youth homicide, in turn, drove up the total homicide rate.
If this explanation of the increase also applies to the homicide decline, the turning point and drop in youth homicide should have been preceded by corresponding changes in the urban crack markets. That is exactly what happened. The crack epidemic crested around 1990 and the drug markets began to shrink, the process occurring first in the largest cities. The fire arms diffusion hypothesis squares with most of the basic facts underlying the crime decline. It accounts for why the drop occurred in the larger cities before the smaller ones, why it has been concentrated among young African Americans and why it has involved firearms. (Drug dealers do not use fists, sticks, or knives to settle disputes.) Most important, it highlights the changes among adolescents and young adults, and thereby situates the crime decline of the 1990s in the context of earlier increases.
what about adults?
The firearm-diffusion story does not explain everything we want to know about the crime decline. It is silent on the longterm decrease in homicide among adults. What little we know about that decline suggests it is driven in part by a marked decrease in “intimate partner” homicides—killings involving husbands, wives, boyfriends, and girlfriends—and in part by the explosive increase in incarceration since 1980. But neither of these factors explains the adult homicide decline in its entirety, and the reduction in intimate partner homicide itself requires explanation.
Recent research suggests that plummeting marriage rates and the growth of hot lines, shelters, legal advocacy, and other domestic violence prevention resources have contributed to the drop in intimate partner killings. One study found the greatest declines in intimate partner homicides over the last 25 years occurred in those cities with the largest drops in marriage rates, the largest increases in divorce rates, and the most rapid growth in shelters and legal advocacy programs for domestic violence victims. Interestingly, the largest homicide drops occurred in the rate at which women kill their husbands or boyfriends and not, as might be expected, in the rate at which women are killed by their male partners. Researchers speculate that domestic violence programs, by offering women a nonviolent means of escaping abusive relationships, make it less likely they will have to kill their way out. However, because prevention programs are designed to assist women, their growth should have little effect on male behavior. Although interesting, such speculations remain just that. In general, criminologists know even less about the causes of the 20-year adult homicide drop than about the youth homicide epidemic.
criminal justice, the economy and firearms policy
Even allowing for some lag between shrinking drug markets and falling rates of youth firearm violence, the crime decline is far longer and deeper than can be explained by the waning of the crack epidemic alone. It seems certain that other factors are at work, and there is no lack of alternative explanations, some of which are truly inspired. For example, economists Steven Levitt and John Donahue have proposed that the drop in youth violence during the 1990s is due in large part to the legalization of abortion in the 1970s. Their logic is that the increase in abortions, especially among poor women, led to fewer births of unwanted children who, had they been born, would have contributed more than their share of criminal violence as teenagers in the 1990s. Although Levitt and Donahue offer some intriguing evidence for their thesis, proving the counterfactual—that is, demonstrating that something would have happened (more crime) had something else not happened (legal abortions)—is inherently difficult. And even if they are correct about how the increase of abortion might have led to the contraction of youth crime, their argument is silent on the long-term decline in adult crime, as well as on the abrupt increase in youth crime during the 1980s. Finally, who is to say how many children, once born, remain “unwanted”?
The “more abortions, less crime” thesis is, not surprisingly, controversial. It is also quite new, and replication studies by other researchers have not yet appeared. Several other explanations for the crime drop have received greater research attention. Four are particularly prominent in both scholarly and policy circles: better policing, growing imprisonment, the booming economy and firearms policies.
Policing. Some analysts believe that smart and tough policing is behind the crime drop. That is the reason former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and former police commissioner William Bratton gave for the dramatic drop in New York City’s homicide rate during the 1990s. However, homicide rates also have decreased sharply in cities that did not noticeably alter their policing policies, such as Los Angeles, or that instituted very different changes from those in New York, such as San Diego. Aggressive policing against minor offenses may have contributed to the crime decline in New York and elsewhere but, as Orlando Patterson and Christopher Winship have pointed out, at the price of heightened police-citizen tension and violence.
Prison Expansion. The other criminal justice response that has been touted as responsible for the crime drop is the massive expansion in incarceration. The prison population has quadrupled since 1980 and now numbers more than 1.3 million inmates. It would be surprising if incarceration growth of that magnitude had no effect on the crime rate. But little agreement exists on the size of that effect. Also, whatever crime suppression effects incarceration may have must be reckoned against possible crime increases resulting from the diminished economic prospects of ex-prisoners and the disruptions in the local community when so many men are away in prison. Prison expansion has been accompanied by a growth in the number of sentenced offenders subject to the death penalty and a dramatic rise in executions since the revival of capital punishment in the United States in the 1970s. By the end of 1999, more than 3,500 inmates were on death row, and nearly 600 had been executed. However, whatever the merits of the death penalty, less violent crime does not appear to be one of them. No credible evidence supports the use of capital punishment to reduce homicide or other forms of criminal violence.
The Economy. One benign alternative to expanded imprisonment is expanded employment. There seems little doubt that the record drops in unemployment rates, including those for minority teenagers, during the economic boom of the 1990s contributed in some way to the crime decline over the same period. But in what way? The relationship between employment and crime is far from simple and is the subject of ongoing debate among social scientists. Do crime rates fall during periods of economic growth because more people are working or because working people are making more money? And if people are earning more and buying more, that creates more opportunities for theft and the violence that sometimes accompanies it. Moreover, a drop in the unemployment rate or an increase in wages may reduce crime only when illegitimate opportunities for making money, such as drug dealing, are disappearing. If that is true, it is the combination of rising legitimate and falling illegitimate opportunities that has made criminal activity a less attractive alternative to legal work for many low-income youth. A sizable fraction of teenagers, inner-city teenagers in particular, switch back and forth from low-end jobs in the legitimate and illegitimate labor markets, depending on shifts in prevailing opportunities. During periods of stagnation in the legitimate labor market and growth in illegitimate opportunities, such as the 1980s crack epidemic, we should observe increases in youth crime and violence. Likewise, we should observe drops in teenagers’ criminal involvement when their legitimate opportunities are expanding and their illegitimate opportunities are shrinking, as during the economic boom and crack market crash of the 1990s. Both observations fit the temporal pattern of serious youth violence over the past two decades.
Firearms Policy. Given the significant role of guns in serious criminal violence, it is not surprising that the crime decline has been linked to changes in firearm regulations. Some analysts believe that granting persons permission to carry firearms in public deters violent crime by making offenders wary of armed victims. Others favor background checks and waiting periods, such as those required by the 1994 Brady Act, as a way to reduce criminal misuse of handguns. Some people think, in the words of one pro-gun enthusiast, that more guns lead to less crime, while others believe that fewer guns, or fewer guns in the “wrong” hands, will reduce serious criminal violence. Evidence regarding the effectiveness of either policy is mixed. Some firearm initiatives, such as the popular gun buyback programs that have sprung up over the past decade, clearly do not reduce levels of firearm violence. More promising strategies include longer prison sentences for using a gun in a crime and police “gun patrols” in which seizures of illegal guns are focused in high-risk areas. However, we do not know how much of the crime decline can be attributed to either of these factors.
the big picture
What is the significance of these various partial accounts of the 1990s crime decline? First, none of them is a complete explanation for the crime drop. That is not just because researchers lack sufficient evidence; more important is that major social phenomena, such as serious crime, are rarely driven by a single factor. A comprehensive explanation of the crime decline will have to encompass multiple, interacting factors. Second, we cannot create a comprehensive explanation simply by adding together the various causal actors highlighted in these partial accounts, because we lack a theory that tells us just how it is that law enforcement, imprisonment, economic expansion, drug markets, and firearm diffusion—not to mention abortion— combine to reduce crime in the context of long-term trends. We badly need such an account if we are to anticipate and prepare for, much less forestall, the next increase.
Although such a theory has not yet been produced, productive first steps have been taken. Gary LaFree argues that changes in crime rates reflect the rise and fall of institutional legitimacy in a society. The basic function of institutions such as the family, economy, and political system is to regulate social behavior in the service of basic human needs. When institutions function properly, they enjoy high levels of legitimacy. People believe in the institutions, play by the rules, and crime rates decline. At other times, people question whether institutions are getting the job done—for example, when divorce and unemployment rates rise. Institutions lose people’s allegiance and the capacity to control people’s behavior, and crime rates go up. LaFree has applied his theory to the dramatic rise in crime rates that occurred during the late 1960s and in the 1970s, a period of significant social upheaval, political scandal and institutional challenge. Crime rates stabilized in the 1980s, in part, LaFree suggests, because some of the changes that had wrenched the family and economy slowed or reversed (divorce rates stopped climbing, the economy began to grow), and also because policy makers responded to the increase in crime by expanding other institutions, such as the social welfare and criminal justice systems. Those expansions helped to head off further crime increases.
When LaFree published his argument, the crime decline of the 1990s had just begun, yet if the theory of institutional legitimacy is correct, crime rates will fall when the economy is booming, consumer confidence (an indicator of economic “legitimacy”) is climbing, and prisons are expanding—all trademark characteristics of the roaring nineties. These changes evidently were sufficient to offset the effects of the Clinton scandals on political legitimacy and to permit a substantial downsizing of the welfare rolls.
Legitimacy theory, however, is both too broad and too narrow to fully explain the crime decline and the longer trend of which it is a part. It is too broad because it tells us little about the youth violence epidemic of the 1980s and the social conditions in the cities that nourish drug markets and high levels of firearm violence. And it is too narrow because it does not explain why, even during periods of strong institutional The basic function of institutions such as the family, economy, and political system is to regulate social behavior in the service of basic human needs. When institutions function properly, they enjoy high levels of legitimacy. People believe in the institutions, play by the rules and crime rates decline. legitimacy such as the 1950s, rates of criminal violence in the United States remain higher than those in most other developed nations .
The sharp increase in youth homicide rates in the late1 980s, as noted earlier, was brought about by the firearm violence emanating in and around the inner-city crack markets. But why were the crack markets so heavily concentrated in already distressed urban areas, and why were they so violent? The insights of a number of sociologists shed light on these issues. Crack sellers were attracted to those neighborhoods where residents were least able to keep them out. William Julius Wilson describes such areas as being subject to multiple “dislocations” in the form of chronically high levels of joblessness, family disruption and extreme social isolation. Their residents are often unable to engage in the kind of cooperative and supervisory activities that Robert Sampson and his colleagues term “collective efficacy.” Collective efficacy enables communities to contain street crime and resist the predations of drug dealers—in fact, it very much defines what we mean by the word community. Along with isolation from mainstream patterns of conduct, alienation from formal institutions of justice, and diminished personal security comes the development of an alternative “code of the street” that, according to Elijah Anderson, encourages violent responses, particularly among young men, to perceived slights, insults and disrespect.
Prolonged joblessness and reduced collective efficacy explain why illicit drug markets emerge when and where they do; isolation, alienation, and the code of the street explain why they are so violent. These ideas help to fill in the gaps in LaFree’s theory, but they do not contradict its basic premise that crime rates increase with the loss of institutional legitimacy. On the contrary, it is hard to imagine a better illustration of that premise than the barren institutional landscape typical of so many high-crime inner-city neighborhoods.
If the ideas of Wilson, Sampson, Anderson, and others help to narrow the focus of the legitimacy theory on the isolated ghetto poverty areas of the inner cities, we should remember that even at its low points, criminal violence in the United States remains very extensive by international standards. The U.S. homicide rate in particular—even the white homicide rate alone—is higher than that of every other developed nation. Some analysts have, reasonably enough, tied the high level of lethal violence to the limited regulation and widespread possession of firearms in the United States. Certainly firearms are deadly implements, but still we must ask why they are so unrestricted and plentiful in comparison with other nations, and more basically, why they are so often used to kill people.
An influential theory proposes that people use violence as a means of “self-help” when they lack lawful means of resolving conflicts or protecting themselves. Abused women’s use of violence when they lack alternative ways to protect themselves from abusive partners is one example. Now consider the role of gun violence in illicit drug markets. Unable to use the police and courts for resolving disputes with suppliers, competitors, and customers, dealers use violence to enforce discipline, secure territory and supplies, collect debts, and protect against theft. Once guns enter the picture, the violence that begins as an enforcement code in drug markets can quickly diffuse throughout a community as people seek to protect themselves by any means necessary.
As the demand for crack diminished, so did the markets that supplied the drug and generated the violence, and the crime drop began. Multiple factors caused the crime decline of the 1990s, as well as the increase that preceded it. These factors tend to be cyclical. While cycles in the demand for particular drugs, in economic conditions, and in police aggressiveness in going after guns can reduce crime, those reductions are cyclically limited. Lasting and deeper reductions in crime will require correspondingly major reductions in the chronic economic insecurity, social isolation, and alienation found in our nation’s most violent communities. The current decline in crime offers opportunities for social change that are not available when people are too afraid to participate in their communities. But time is running out. n
recommended resources
Anderson, Elijah. Code of the Street: Decency, Violence, and the Moral
Life of the Inner City. New York: W. W. Norton, 1999.
Blumstein, Alfred, and Joel Wallman, eds. The Crime Drop in America.
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
LaFree, Gary. Losing Legitimacy. Street Crime and the Decline of Social
Institutions in America. Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1998.
Sampson, Robert J., Stephen W. Raudenbush, and Felton Earls.
“Neighborhoods and Violent Crime: A Multilevel Study of Collective
Efficacy.” Science 277 (1997): 918–24.
Wilson, William Julius. When Work Disappears: The World of the New
Urban Poor. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996.
Deterrence in Criminal
Justice
Evaluating Certainty vs. Severity of
Punishment
Valerie Wright, Ph.D.
November 2010
This report was written by Valerie Wright, Ph.D., Research Analyst at
The Sentencing Project.
The Sentencing Project is a national non-profit organization engaged
in research and advocacy on criminal justice policy issues.
Copyright © 2010 by
Over the past several decades state and federal incarceration rates have
increased dramatically. As a consequence of more punitive laws and
harsher sentencing policies 2.3 million people are incarcerated in the
nation’s prisons and jails, and the U.S. leads the world in its rate of incarceration.
Sentencing systems and incarceration traditionally have a variety of goals, which
include incapacitation, punishment, deterrence and rehabilitation. In recent decades,
sentencing policy initiatives have often been enacted with the goal of enhancing the
deterrent effect of the criminal justice system. Under the rubric of “getting tough on
crime,” policies such as mandatory minimums, truth in sentencing, and “three strikes
and you’re out” have been designed to deter with the threat of imposing substantial
terms of imprisonment for felony convictions.
While the criminal justice system as a whole provides some deterrent effect, a key
question for policy development regards whether enhanced sanctions or an enhanced
possibility of being apprehended provide any additional deterrent benefits. Research
to date generally indicates that increases in the certainty of punishment, as opposed to
the severity of punishment, are more likely to produce deterrent benefits. This
briefing paper provides an overview of criminological research on these relative
impacts as a guide to inform future policy consideration.
In broad terms punishment may be expected to affect deterrence in one of two ways.
First, by increasing the certainty of punishment, potential offenders may be deterred
by the risk of apprehension. For example, if there is an increase in the number of
state troopers patrolling highways on a holiday weekend, some drivers may reduce
their speed in order to avoid receiving a ticket. Second, the severity of punishment
may influence behavior if potential offenders weigh the consequences of their actions
and conclude that the risks of punishment are too severe. This is part of the logic
behind “three strikes,” and “truth in sentencing” policies, to utilize the threat of very
severe sentences in order to deter some persons from engaging in criminal behavior.
One problem with deterrence theory is that it assumes that human beings are rational
actors who consider the consequences of their behavior before deciding to commit a
crime; however, this is often not the case. For example, half of all state prisoners
were under the influence of drugs or alcohol at the time of their offense.1 Therefore,
it is unlikely that such persons are deterred by either the certainty or severity of
punishment because of their temporarily impaired capacity to consider the pros and
cons of their actions.
Another means of understanding why deterrence is more limited than often assumed
can be seen by considering the dynamics of the criminal justice system. If there was
100% certainty of being apprehended for committing a crime, few people would do
so. But since most crimes, including serious ones, do not result in an arrest and
conviction, the overall deterrent effect of the certainty of punishment is substantially
reduced. Clearly, enhancing the severity of punishment will have little impact on
people who do not believe they will be apprehended for their actions.
Economists often come to different conclusions than criminologists on the value of
harsher sentences in reducing crime. While criminologists tend to regard various
legal threats as the result of a complex and unpredictable process, economists
approach the issue along the lines of a rational choice perspective that considers the
risk and benefits of engaging in crime; sanctions merely represent the expected price
of engaging in criminal behavior. In critiquing this perspective, Michael Tonry, a
leading scholar on crime and punishment, contends that “Such research is incapable
of taking into account whether and to what extent purported policy changes are
implemented, whether and to what extent their adoption or implementation is
perceived by would-be offenders, and whether and to what extent offenders are
susceptible to influence by perceived changes in legal threats. At the very least,
macro-level research on deterrent effects should test the null hypothesis of no effect
rather than the price theory assumption that offenders’ behavior will change in
response to changes in legal threats.”2
Another problem in assessing deterrence is that in order for sanctions to deter,
potential offenders must be aware of sanction risks and consequences before they
commit an offense. In this regard, research illustrates that the general public tends to
underestimate the severity of sanctions generally imposed.3, 4 This is not surprising
given that members of the public are often unaware of the specifics of sentencing
policies. Potential offenders are also unlikely to be aware of modifications to
sentencing policies, thus diminishing any deterrent effect. The absence of such data
on awareness of punishment risks makes it difficult to draw conclusions regarding the
deterrent effects of sanction levels and prospects. Below we explore these outcomes
in greater detail.
Criminological research over several decades and in various nations generally
concludes that enhancing the certainty of punishment produces a stronger deterrent
effect than increasing the severity of punishment. Key findings in this regard include
the following:
*The Institute of Criminology at Cambridge University was commissioned by
the British Home Office to conduct a review of research on major studies of
deterrence. Their 1999 report concluded that “…the studies reviewed do not
provide a basis for inferring that increasing the severity of sentences generally
is capable of enhancing deterrent effects.”5 In addition, in reviewing macrolevel
studies that examine offense rates of a specific population, the
researchers found than an increased likelihood (certainty) of apprehension
and punishment was associated with declining crime rates.6
Daniel Nagin and Greg Pogarsky, leading scholars on deterrence, conclude
that “punishment certainty is far more consistently found to deter crime than
punishment severity, and the extra-legal consequences of crime seem at least
as great a deterrent as the legal consequences.”7
Similar findings are observed in micro-level studies on deterrence that assess the
likelihood of individuals engaging in crime. People who perceive that sanctions are
more certain tend to be less likely to engage in criminal activity. Scenario-based
research using self-reports that examine the effect of certainty of punishment on
individual behavior has shown that as the perceptions of the risk of arrest for petty
theft, drunk driving, and tax evasion increases, individuals report they would be less
likely to offend.
Researchers have also compared the relative importance of both certainty and severity
as dimensions of punishment. In a 2001 study published in the journal Criminology,
researchers utilized a sample of college students to assess the likelihood of drinking
and driving. The authors found that the certainty of punishment was a more robust
predictor of deterrence than severity. Increasing the probability of apprehension by
10% was predicted to reduce the likelihood of drunk driving by 3.5%, while the
effect of severity eroded when the effects of certainty and severity were combined.8
In another study, researchers compared crime and punishment trends in the U.S.,
England, and Sweden, and failed to find an effect for severity. 9 The statistical
associations were weak and even when there was a negative relationship between
severity of punishment and crime rates, the findings were not strong enough to
achieve statistical significance. This finding is noteworthy because it reflected
varying degrees of punitiveness in the sentencing policies of the three nations.
While most studies suggest that certainty of punishment is related to reductions in
crime rates, some researchers speculate that increasing the likelihood of arrest and/or
incarceration for both serious and minor offenses could cause sanctions, particularly
imprisonment, to be viewed as less stigmatizing.10 Nagin also emphasizes that
sanctions have the potential to erode the deterrent effects of a policy because as he
states, “[f]or an event to be stigmatizing it must be relatively uncommon.”11
8 Ibid.
The logic behind supporting harsher sentences is simple: locking up people for
longer periods of time should enhance public safety. From this view, putting people
in prison for years or even decades should prevent offenders from re-offending by
incapacitating them and/or deterring would-be-offenders from committing crimes.
However, contrary to deterrence ideology and “get tough” rhetoric, the bulk of
research on the deterrent effects of harsher sentences fails to support these
assertions.12
A series of studies have examined the public safety effects of imposing longer periods
of imprisonment.13, 14, 15 Ideally, from a deterrence perspective, the more severe the
imposed sentence, the less likely offenders should be to re-offend. A 1999 study
tested this assumption in a meta-analysis reviewing 50 studies dating back to 1958
involving a total of 336,052 offenders with various offenses and criminal histories.
Controlling for risk factors such as criminal history and substance abuse, the authors
assessed the relationship between length of time in prison and recidivism, and found
that longer prison sentences were associated with a three percent increase in
recidivism. Offenders who spent an average of 30 months in prison had a recidivism
rate of 29%, compared to a 26% rate among prisoners serving an average sentence of
12.9 months. The authors also assessed the impact of serving a prison sentence
versus receiving a community-based sanction. Similarly, being incarcerated versus
remaining in the community was associated with a seven percent increase in
recidivism.16
Researchers also find an increased likelihood that lower-risk offenders will be more
negatively affected by incarceration.17 Among low-risk offenders, those who spent
less time in prison were 4% less likely to recidivate than low-risk offenders who
served longer sentences.18 Thus, when prison sentences are relatively short, offenders
are more likely to maintain their ties to family, employers, and their community, all
of which promote successful reentry into society. Conversely, when prisoners serve
longer sentences they are more likely to become institutionalized, lose pro-social
contacts in the community, and become removed from legitimate opportunities, all
of which promote recidivism.19
The Bureau of Justice Statistics has reported on a nationally representative sample of
prisoners assessing the impact of time served in prison on recidivism rates.
Researchers found that recidivism rates did not vary substantially whether prisoners
were released anywhere in the range of six months to five years. While recidivism
rates were high in general, they fluctuated in the range of 62-68%, and did not
decline significantly for those spending more time in prison.20 Furthermore, findings
from a natural experiment investigating how prisoners respond to the manipulation
of prison sentences show that reduced sentences may reduce recidivism rates. The
Collective Clemency Bill passed by the Italian Parliament in July 2006 allowed for a
three-year sentence reduction for persons who committed their offense prior to May
DETERRENCE IN CRIMINAL JUSTICE |EVALUATING CERTAINTY VERSUS SEVERITY OF PUNISHMENT 8
2, 2006.21 The authors of the study concluded that the sentence commutations
significantly reduced the likelihood of recidivating.22
Fiscal crises and a growing emphasis on using evidence-based practices has caused
many policymakers to call into question the practicality of current sentencing policies
and the overreliance on incarceration. Incarceration is an expensive sanction and
sentencing people to longer prison terms has resulted in valuable resources being
devoured. It is estimated that federal, state, and local governments are spending $68
billion annually.23 A recent economic analysis estimates that reducing the number of
incarcerated non-violent offenders by half could save taxpayers $16.9 billion annually
without putting public safety at risk.24
Non-violent drug offenders comprise a substantial percentage of the prison
population and many studies have suggested that this number could be reduced if
more treatment alternatives were available. While there are costs associated with
treatment, research indicates that they tend to be far lower than the costs associated
with lengthy terms of incarceration that show little evidence of deterring future
offenses. For example, a recent study showed that spending on drug treatment in
community-based programs versus incarceration yields a higher return on the
investment while at the same time improving the life outcomes of drug users. The
study concluded that a dollar spent on treatment in prison yields about six dollars of
DETERRENCE IN CRIMINAL JUSTICE |EVALUATING CERTAINTY VERSUS SEVERITY OF PUNISHMENT 9
savings, but a dollar investment in community-based treatment yields nearly $20 in
costs savings.25
CONCLUSION
Existing evidence does not support any significant public safety benefit of the
practice of increasing the severity of sentences by imposing longer prison terms. In
fact, research findings imply that increasingly lengthy prison terms are
counterproductive. Overall, the evidence indicates that the deterrent effect of
lengthy prison sentences would not be substantially diminished if punishments were
reduced from their current levels. Thus, policies such as California’s Three Strikes
law or mandatory minimums that increase imprisonment not only burden state
budgets, but also fail to enhance public safety. As a result, such policies are not
justifiable based on their ability to deter.
Based upon the existing evidence, both crime and imprisonment can be
simultaneously reduced if policy-makers reconsider their overreliance on severity based
policies such as long prison sentences. Instead, an evidence-based approach
would entail increasing the certainty of punishment by improving the likelihood that
criminal behavior would be detected. Such an approach would also free up resources
devoted to incarceration and allow for increased initiatives of prevention and
treatment.
1705 DeSales Street, NW, 8th floor
Washington, DC 20036
Tel: 202.628.0871 • Fax: 202.628.1091
1 Christopher Mumola. “Substance Abuse and Treatment, State and Federal Prisoners, 1997.” Bureau of Justice
Statistics Special Report, 1999.
2 Michael Tonry. “Learning from the Limitations of Deterrence Research” in Crime and Justice: A Review of Research
edited by Michael Tonry. The University of Chicago Press, 2008.
3 Kirk R. Williams, Jack P. Gibbs, and Maynard L. Erickson, “Public Knowledge of Statutory Penalties: The Extent and
Basis of Accurate Perception,” Pacific Sociological Review, 23(1), 1980.
4 Andrew von Hirsch, Anthony Bottoms, Elizabeth Burney, and P-O. Wikstrom, “Criminal Deterrence and Sentence
Severity: An Analysis of Recent Research,” Oxford: Hart Publishing, 1999.
5 Ibid.
6 Ibid.
7 Daniel Nagin and Greg Pogarsky. “Integrating Celerity, Impulsivity, and Extralegal Sanction Threats into a Model of
General Deterrence: Theory and Evidence,” Criminology, 39(4), 2001.
9 David Farrington, Paul Langan, Per-Olof H. Wikstrom. “Changes in Crime and Punishment in America, England
and Sweden between the 1980s and the 1990s,” Studies in Crime Prevention, 3:104-131, 1994.
10 Paul J. Hirschfield, “The Declining Significance of Delinquent Labels in Disadvantaged Urban Communities,”
Sociological Forum, 23(3), 2008.
11 Daniel S. Nagin, “Criminal Deterrence Research at the Outset of the Twenty-First Century,” In Crime and Justice: A
Review of Research, edited by Michael Tonry. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.
12 Anthony Doob and Cheryl Webster, “Sentence Severity and Crime: Accepting the Null Hypotheses,” Crime and
Justice, 30:143-195, 2003.
13 Paul Gendreau, T. Little, and Claire Goggin, “A Meta-Analysis of Adult Offender Recidivism: What Works!”
Criminology, 34(3):575-607, 1996.
14 Martin A. Levin, “Policy Evaluation and Recidivism,” Law and Society Review, 6(1):17-46, 1971.
15 Lin Song and Roxanne Lieb, “Recidivism: The Effect of Incarceration and Length of Time Served,” Olympia, WA:
Washington State Institute of Public Policy, 1993
16 Paul Gendreau, Claire Goggin, and Francis T. Cullen, “The Effects of Prison Sentences on Recidivism,” Ottawa,
Ontario, Canada: Public Works and Government Services Canada, 1999.
17 Ibid.
18 Supra, note 15.
19 Thomas Orsagh and Jong-Rong Chen, “The Effect of Time Served on Recidivism: An Interdisciplinary Theory,”
Journal of Quantitative Criminology, 4(2):155-171, 1988.
20 Patrick Langan and David Levin. “Recidivism of Prisoners Released in 1994,” U.S. Department of Justice, Office of
Justice Programs, Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2002.
21 The Collective Clemency Bill (2006) states that if a former inmate commits a crime within five years following his
release from prison, he or she will be required to serve the remaining sentence suspended by the pardon in addition to
the sentence given for the new crime.
22 Fancesco Drago, Roberto Galbiati, and Pietro Vertova, “The Deterrent Effects of Prison: Evidence from a Natural
Experiment,” Journal of Political Economy, 117(2):257-280 2009.
23 John Schmitt, Kris Warner, and Sarika Gupta. “The High Budgetary Cost of Incarceration,” Center for Economic
and Policy Research, 2010.
24 Ibid.
25 Steve Aos, Marna Miller, and Elizabeth Drake, “Evidence-Based Public Policy Options to Reduce Future Prison
Construction, Criminal Justice Costs, and Crime Rates,” Olympia: Washington State Institute for Public Policy, 2006.
Broken windows theory
Academic theory
Written by: Adam J. McKee
broken windows theory, academic theory proposed by James Q. Wilson and George Kelling in 1982 that used broken windows as a metaphor for disorder within neighbourhoods. Their theory links disorder and incivility within a community to subsequent occurrences of serious crime .
Broken windows theory had an enormous impact on police policy throughout the 1990s and remained influential into the 21st century. Perhaps the most notable application of the theory was in New York City under the direction of Police Commissioner William Bratton. He and others were convinced that the aggressive order-maintenance practices of the New York City Police Department were responsible for the dramatic decrease in crime rates within the city during the 1990s. Bratton began translating the theory into practice as the chief of New York City’s transit police from 1990 to 1992. Squads of plainclothes officers were assigned to catch turnstile jumpers, and, as arrests for misdemeanours increased, subway crimes of all kinds decreased dramatically. In 1994, when he became New York City police commissioner, Bratton introduced his broken windows-based “quality of life initiative.” This initiative cracked down on panhandling, disorderly behaviour , public drinking , street prostitution , and unsolicited windshield washing or other such attempts to obtain cash from drivers stopped in traffic. When Bratton resigned in 1996, felonies were down almost 40 percent in New York, and the homicide rate had been halved.
The theory
Prior to the development and implementation of various incivility theories such as broken windows, law enforcement scholars and police tended to focus on serious crime; that is, the major concern was with crimes that were perceived to be the most serious and consequential for the victim, such as rape , robbery , and murder . Wilson and Kelling took a different view. They saw serious crime as the final result of a lengthier chain of events, theorizing that crime emanated from disorder and that if disorder were eliminated, then serious crimes would not occur.
Their theory further posits that the prevalence of disorder creates fear in the minds of citizens who are convinced that the area is unsafe. This withdrawal from the community weakens social controls that previously kept criminals in check. Once this process begins, it feeds itself. Disorder causes crime, and crime causes further disorder and crime.
Scholars generally define two different types of disorder. The first is physical disorder, typified by vacant buildings, broken windows, abandoned vehicles, and vacant lots filled with trash. The second type is social disorder, which is typified by aggressive panhandlers, noisy neighbours, and groups of youths congregating on street corners. The line between crime and disorder is often blurred, with some experts considering such acts as prostitution and drug dealing as disorder while many others classify them as crimes. While different, these two types of disorder are both thought to increase fear among citizens.
The obvious advantage of this theory over many of its criminological predecessors is that it enables initiatives within the realm of criminal justice policy to effect change, rather than relying on social policy. Earlier social disorganization theories and economic theories offered solutions that were costly and would take a long time to prove effective. Broken windows theory is seen by many as a way to effect change quickly and with minimal expense by merely altering the police crime-control strategy. It is far simpler to attack disorder than it is to attack such ominous social ills as poverty and inadequate education.
The theory in practice
Although popular in both academic and law-enforcement circles, broken windows theory is not without its critics. One line of criticism is that there is little empirical evidence that disorder, when left unchallenged, causes crime. To validate the theory in its entirety, it must be shown that disorder causes fear, that fear causes a breakdown of social controls (sometimes referred to as community cohesion), and that this breakdown of social controls in turn causes crime. Finally, crime must be shown to increase levels of disorder.
The strongest empirical support for the broken windows theory came from the work of political scientist Wesley Skogan, who found that certain types of social and physical disorder were related to certain kinds of serious crime. However, Skogan prudently recommended caution in the interpretation of his results as proof of the validity of the broken windows theory. Even this qualified support has been questioned by some researchers. In a reanalysis of Skogan’s data, political theorist Bernard Harcourt found that the link between neighbourhood disorder and purse snatching, assault, rape, and burglary vanished when poverty, neighbourhood stability, and race were statistically controlled. Only the link between disorder and robbery remained. Harcourt also criticized the broken windows theory for fostering “zero-tolerance” policies that are prejudicial against the disadvantaged segments of society .
In his attempt to link serious crime with disorder, criminal justice scholar Ralph Taylor found that no distinct pattern of relationships between crime and disorder emerged. Rather, some specific disorderly acts were linked to some specific crimes. He concluded that attention to disorder in general might be an error and that, while loosely connected, specific acts may not reflect a general state of disorder. He suggested that specific problems would require specific solutions. This seemed to provide more support for problem-oriented policing strategies than it did for the broken windows theory.
In short, the validity of the broken windows theory is not known. It is safe to conclude that the theory does not explain everything and that, even if the theory is valid, companion theories are necessary to fully explain crime. Alternatively, a more complex model is needed to consider many more cogent factors. Almost every study of the topic has, however, validated the link between disorder and fear. There is also strong support for the belief that fear increases a person’s desire to abandon disorderly communities and move to environments that are more hospitable. This option is available to the middle class, who can afford to move, but not to the poor, who have fewer choices. If the middle class moves out and the poor stay, the neighbourhood will inevitably become economically disadvantaged. This suggests that the next wave of theorization about neighbourhood dynamics and crime may take an economic bent.
COMMUNITY POLICING
Meanwhile, many police departments in the United States sought to increase their effectiveness by improving their relationships with the communities in which they worked. Community relations programs were established by many departments in the mid-20th century, and the “team policing” strategy was adopted in New York City and other areas in the 1970s. Later, in the 1980s and ’90s, an increasing number of departments employed an approach known as community policing, which many observers saw as a revival of the more socially conscious policing methods of Peel and the London Metropolitan Police.
Beginning in the 1940s, some police departments created communication and education programs aimed at ethnic minority communities. Those initiatives were based on the ideas of the American sociologist Joseph D. Lohman, who studied the interaction of police and minority groups, and the psychologist Gordon W. Allport, who studied the nature of prejudice. One goal of such programs was to enable police to understand and overcome their prejudice toward minorities and thereby improve their treatment of members of those groups. Although the programs drew support from the National Conference of Christians and Jews (now the National Conference for Community and Justice) and the National Institute on Police and Community Relations, most of them took the form of specialized community-relations units staffed by minority officers. However, those units received little support from rank-and-file police officers and eventually degenerated into public-relations efforts aimed at overcoming community dissatisfaction with police tactics. Their failure was made apparent by the violent confrontations between police and minority groups during the civil disturbances of the 1960s.
Team policing was introduced in the early 1970s in New York City. Patterned after earlier efforts in Britain, the approach emphasized the delivery of round-the-clock decentralized patrol services by a team of officers, usually under the direction of a sergeant or lieutenant, in a specific geographic area. Team commanders were responsible for conditions in the patrol area, regardless of whether they were on duty. Deployment decisions were made in consultation with local leaders and residents. The fixed territorial responsibility of the teams, it was hoped, would break down barriers between residents and police, enable police to provide services tailored to the needs of residents, and improve the job satisfaction of police officers. However, studies of the effectiveness of team policing in several cities in the United States failed to show an improvement over the crime-fighting model. Resistance by police administrators, resentment by officers on the street, and inadequate training eventually contributed to the demise of team policing by the mid-1970s.
During this period a new wisdom began to emerge, one that fully recognized the complexity of the tasks that police perform in society. Police administrators as well as researchers and other outside observers maintained that police deal with many behaviours that are not defined as criminal, that many of the functions of police concerning noncriminal behaviour are as important as their traditional tasks of enforcing public order, that there are many methods that police use to perform their duties, that police must be afforded discretion in carrying out their duties (particularly regarding whether to arrest a suspect), that a police force that is not in close contact with its community will have difficulty controlling crime and disorder, and that police must be accountable to elected officials and to the public.
The new wisdom led in the 1980s to the gradual displacement of the professional crime-fighting model by a set of strategies and programs collectively known as community policing. The basic premise of community policing is that the police should involve the community in their efforts to prevent and control crime and to solve communitywide problems. Community policing departs from the crime-fighting model by making the police officer a neighbourhood problem solver rather than an incident-driven crime fighter. Police officers assigned to community-policing duties are expected to maintain close contact with the community and to become familiar with its residents and its problems through foot patrols, community meetings, and service at police substations. The same familiarity with the community is also expected of police administrators.
Advocates of community policing believe that the approach mobilizes a variety of resources to solve problems that affect community safety and stability over the long term. They also contend that the more traditional crime-fighting model allows problems to fester by simply responding to incidents as they occur rather than addressing their underlying causes.
A considerable body of research also supported the move toward community policing. The American legal scholar Herman Goldstein argued in Problem-Oriented Policing (1990) that rapid-response, incident-based policing paid insufficient attention to the underlying community problems that create the majority of the incidents to which police departments must respond. In “Broken Windows: The Police and Neighborhood Safety,” a groundbreaking article published in 1982, the American political commentator James Q. Wilson and the American criminologist George L. Kelling maintained that the incidence as well as the fear of crime is strongly related to the existence of disorderly conditions in neighbourhoods. Using the metaphor of a broken window, they argued that a building in a constant state of disrepair conveys the impression that it has been abandoned and encourages criminals or delinquents to damage it further. As the building is eventually destroyed, nearby residents grow less concerned about their neighbourhood and community, which leads to an increase in incivility and disorderly behaviour. Such behaviour in turn creates public fear and encourages those with means to leave the neighbourhood, which eventually becomes crime-ridden and unlivable for those who remain. According to Wilson and Kelling, the crime-fighting model of policing ignores the law enforcement equivalent of broken windows.
Wilson and Kelling argued that police departments should institute patrol tactics designed to counteract disorder and to preserve the community in troubled neighbourhoods. The visibility of police in those areas deters potential criminals and generates goodwill among law-abiding citizens, who are encouraged to assert control over their public spaces. The problem of crime and community safety then become the responsibilities of both residents and police.
Community policing became part of a national strategy to combat crime in the United States in the 1990s. Legislation enacted in 1994 provided for the hiring of 100,000 new community police officers and the establishment of the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services, under the jurisdiction of the Department of Justice. By the early 21st century, some two-thirds of local police departments in the United States, employing some nine-tenths of the country’s police officers, had a community-policing plan of some type. (In many police departments, organized subunits, rather than the entire police force, carried out community policing.)
Despite its widespread adoption, community policing has faced obstacles. Some police administrators have been reluctant to support programs that require officers on the street to exercise considerable discretion and authority, especially in departments where such officers lack experience or are otherwise ill-prepared to identify and address complex community problems. Other administrators have continued to believe that the more traditional crime-fighting model, despite its deficiencies, is still an effective overall policing strategy.
America’s gun problem, explained
The public and research support gun control. Here’s how it could help — and why it doesn’t pass.
By German Lopez HYPERLINK "https://www.twitter.com/germanrlopez" @germanrlopez HYPERLINK "mailto:[email protected]" \o "" [email protected] Updated Aug 5, 2019, 1:14pm EDT
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Over the weekend, it happened again: more mass shootings in America. This time, gunmen in separate attacks in El Paso, Texas , and Dayton, Ohio , killed 31 people and injured dozens more.
Already, the shootings have led to demands for action. At a vigil for the Dayton shooting, attendees shouted down Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine with a simple demand: “Do something!” In New York City, protesters in Times Square called for Congress to act on the issue.
But if this plays out like the aftermath of past mass shootings, from Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012 to Las Vegas in 2017, the chances of Congress taking major action on guns is very low.
This has become an American routine: After every mass shooting, the debate over guns and gun violence starts up once again. Maybe some bills get introduced. Critics respond with concerns that the government is trying to take away their guns. The debate stalls. So even as America continues experiencing levels of gun violence unrivaled in the rest of the developed world, nothing happens — no laws are passed by Congress, nothing significant is done to try to prevent the next horror.
So why is it that for all the outrage and mourning with every mass shooting, nothing seems to change? To understand that, it’s important to grasp not just the stunning statistics about gun ownership and gun violence in the United States, but America’s unique relationship with guns — unlike that of any other developed country — and how it plays out in our politics to ensure, seemingly against all odds, that our culture and laws continue to drive the routine gun violence that marks American life.
1) America’s gun problem is completely unique
No other developed country in the world has anywhere near the same rate of gun violence as America. The US has nearly six times the gun homicide rate as Canada, more than seven times as Sweden, and nearly 16 times as Germany, according to UN data compiled by the Guardian. (These gun deaths are a big reason America has a much higher overall homicide rate , which includes non-gun deaths, than other developed nations.)
To understand why that is, there’s another important statistic: The US has by far the highest number of privately owned guns in the world. Estimated for 2017, the number of civilian-owned firearms in the US was 120.5 guns per 100 residents, meaning there were more firearms than people. The world’s second-ranked country was Yemen, a quasi-failed state torn by civil war, where there were 52.8 guns per 100 residents, according to an analysis from the Small Arms Survey .
Another way of looking at that: Americans make up less than 5 percent of the world’s population, yet they own roughly 45 percent of all the world’s privately held firearms.
That does not, however, mean that every American adult actually owns guns. In fact, gun ownership is concentrated among a minority of the US population — as surveys from the Pew Research Center and General Social Survey suggest.
These three basic facts demonstrate America’s unique gun culture. There is a very strong correlation between gun ownership and gun violence — a relationship that researchers argue is at least partly causal. And American gun ownership is beyond anything else in the world. At the same time, these guns are concentrated among a passionate minority, who are typically the loudest critics against any form of gun control and who scare legislators into voting against such measures.
2) More guns mean more gun deaths. Period.
The research on this is overwhelmingly clear: No matter how you look at the data, more guns mean more gun deaths.
This is apparent when you look at state-by-state data for gun ownership and gun deaths (including homicides and suicides) within the United States, as this chart from Mother Jones demonstrates:
And it’s clear when you look at the data for gun ownership and gun deaths (including homicides and suicides) across developed nations, as this chart, based on data from GunPolicy.org , shows:
Javier Zarracina/Vox
Opponents of gun control tend to point to other factors to explain America’s unusual levels of gun violence — particularly mental illness . But people with mental illnesses are more likely to be victims, not perpetrators, of violence. And Michael Stone, a psychiatrist at Columbia University who maintains a database of mass shooters, wrote in a 2015 analysis that only 52 out of the 235 killers in the database, or about 22 percent, were mentally ill. “The mentally ill should not bear the burden of being regarded as the ‘chief’ perpetrators of mass murder,” Stone concluded. Other research has backed this up .
Another argument you sometimes hear is that these shootings would happen less frequently if even more people had guns, enabling them to defend themselves from a shooting.
Yet high gun ownership rates do not reduce gun deaths, but rather tend to coincide with increases in gun deaths. While a few people in some cases may use a gun to successfully defend themselves or others, the proliferation of guns appears to cause far more violence than it prevents.
Multiple simulations have also demonstrated that most people, if placed in an active shooter situation while armed, will not be able to stop the situation, and may in fact do little more than get themselves killed in the process.
This video, from ABC News , shows one such simulation, in which people repeatedly fail to shoot an active shooter before they’re shot:
The relationship between gun ownership rates and gun violence rates, meanwhile, is well established. Reviews of the evidence compiled by the Harvard School of Public Health’s Injury Control Research Center backs this up: After controlling for variables such as socioeconomic factors and other crime, places with more guns have more gun deaths — not just homicides but also suicides , domestic violence , violence against police , and mass shootings .
For example, a 2013 study , led by a Boston University School of Public Health researcher, found that, after controlling for multiple variables, each percentage point increase in gun ownership correlated with a roughly 0.9 percent rise in the firearm homicide rate.
As a breakthrough analysis by UC Berkeley’s Franklin Zimring and Gordon Hawkins in the 1990s found, it’s not even that the US has more crime than other developed countries. This chart, based on data from Jeffrey Swanson at Duke University, shows that the US is not an outlier when it comes to overall crime:
Javier Zarracina/Vox
Instead, the US appears to have more lethal violence — and that’s driven in large part by the prevalence of guns.
“A series of specific comparisons of the death rates from property crime and assault in New York City and London show how enormous differences in death risk can be explained even while general patterns are similar,” Zimring and Hawkins wrote. “A preference for crimes of personal force and the willingness and ability to use guns in robbery make similar levels of property crime 54 times as deadly in New York City as in London.”
Javier Zarracina/Vox
Guns are not the only contributor to violence. (Other factors include, for example, poverty, urbanization, and alcohol consumption.) But when researchers control for other confounding variables, they have found time and time again that America’s high levels of gun ownership are a major reason the US is so much worse in terms of gun violence than its developed peers.
To deal with its problem, America will have to not only make guns less accessible, but likely reduce the number of guns in the US as well.
The research also speaks to this point: A 2016 review of 130 studies in 10 countries, published in Epidemiologic Reviews , found that new legal restrictions on owning and purchasing guns tended to be followed by a drop in gun violence — a strong indicator that restricting access to guns can save lives.
But even with the outrage over gun massacres, the sense that enough is enough, and the clear evidence that the problem is America’s high gun ownership rates, there hasn’t been significant legislation to help solve the problem.
3) Americans tend to support measures to restrict guns, but that doesn’t translate into laws
If you ask Americans how they feel about specific gun control measures, they will often say that they support them. According to Pew Research Center surveys , most people in the US support universal background checks, a federal database to track gun sales, bans on assault-style weapons, and bans on high-capacity magazines. Some surveys have also found strong support for requiring a license to buy and own a gun, another proposal with solid research behind it .
So why don’t these measures ever get turned into law? That’s in part because they run into another political issue: Americans, increasingly in recent years, tend to support the abstract idea of the right to own guns.
This is part of how gun control opponents are able to kill even legislation that would introduce the most popular measures, such as background checks that include private sales (which have upwards of 80 percent support, according to Pew): They’re able to portray the law as contrary to the right to own guns, and galvanize a backlash against it.
This kind of problem isn’t unique to guns. For example, although many Americans say they don’t like the Affordable Care Act (also known as Obamacare) , most of them do in fact like the specific policies in the health care law . The problem is these specific policies have been masked by rhetoric about a “government takeover of health care” and “death panels.” Since most Americans don’t have time to verify these claims, especially when they involve a massive bill with lots of moving parts, enough end up believing in the catchphrases and scary arguments to stop the legislation from moving forward.
Of course, it’s also the case that some Americans simply oppose any gun control laws. And while this group is generally outnumbered by those who support gun control, the opponents tend to be much more passionate about the issue than the supporters — and they’re backed by a very powerful political lobby.
4) The gun lobby as we know it is relatively recent but enormously powerful
The single most powerful political organization when it comes to guns is, undoubtedly, the National Rifle Association (NRA). The NRA has an enormous stranglehold over conservative politics in America, and that development is more recent than you might think.
The NRA was, for much of its early history, more of a sporting club than a serious political force against gun control, and even supported some gun restrictions . In 1934, NRA president Karl Frederick was quoted as saying , “I do not believe in the general promiscuous toting of guns. I think it should be sharply restricted and only under licenses.”
A 1977 revolt within the organization changed everything. As crime rose in the 1960s and ’70s, calls for more gun control grew as well. NRA members worried new restrictions on guns would keep coming after the historic 1968 law — eventually ending, they feared, with the government’s seizure of all firearms in America. So members mobilized, installing a hard-liner known as Harlon Carter in the leadership, forever changing the NRA into the gun lobby we know today.
This foundation story is crucial for understanding why the NRA is near-categorically opposed to the regulation of private firearms. It fears that popular and seemingly common-sense regulations, such as banning assault-style weapons or a federal database of gun purchases, are not really about saving lives but are in fact a potential first step toward ending all private gun ownership in America, which the NRA views — wrongly, in the minds of some legal experts — as a violation of the Second Amendment of the US Constitution.
So any time there’s an attempt to impose new forms of gun control, the NRA rallies gun owners and other opponents of gun control to kill these bills. These gun owners make up a minority of the population: anywhere from around 30 to around 40 percent of households, depending on which survey one uses. But that population is a large and active enough constituency, particularly within the Republican base, to make many legislators fear that a poor grade from the NRA will end their careers.
As a result, conservative media and politicians take the NRA’s support — especially the coveted A-to-F ratings the organization gives out — very seriously. Politicians will go to sometimes absurd length to show their support for gun rights. In 2015, for example, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) starred in a video, from IJ Review , in which he cooked bacon with — this is not a joke — a machine gun.
Although several campaigns have popped up over the years to try to counteract the NRA, none have come close to capturing the kind of influential hold that the organization has.
This might be changing. Between the March for Our Lives movement that came out of the Parkland, Florida, shooting and other groups like Everytown and Giffords , gun control groups are generally more organized, better funded, and bigger than similar organizations have been in the US. As a result, Democrats at the state and federal levels seem much more willing to discuss gun control.
But supporters of gun control face a huge obstacle: very passionate opponents. As Republican strategist Grover Norquist said in 2000, “The question is intensity versus preference. You can always get a certain percentage to say they are in favor of some gun controls. But are they going to vote on their ‘control’ position?” Probably not, Norquist suggested, “but for that 4-5 percent who care about guns, they will vote on this.”
What’s behind that passion? Kristin Goss, author of The Gun Debate: What Everyone Needs to Know , suggested that it’s a sense of tangible loss — gun owners feel like the government is going to take their guns and rights. In comparison, gun control advocates are motivated by more abstract notions of reducing gun violence — although, Goss noted, the victims of mass shootings and their families have begun putting a face on these policies by engaging more actively in advocacy work, which could make the gun control movement feel more relatable. (See: #NeverAgain .)
There is also an exception at the state level, where lawmakers and voters have passed laws imposing (and relaxing) restrictions on guns. In the past several years, for instance, Vermont , Washington state , and Oregon passed laws expanding background checks. “There’s a lot more going on than Congress,” Goss said. “In blue states, gun laws are getting stricter. And in red states, in some cases, the gun laws are getting looser.”
But state laws aren’t enough. Since people can cross state lines to purchase guns under laxer rules, the weaker federal standards make it easy for someone to simply travel to a state with looser gun laws to obtain a firearm and ship it to another state. This is such a common occurrence that the gun shipment route from the South, where gun laws are fairly loose, to New York, where gun laws are strict, has earned the name “the Iron Pipeline.” But it also happens all across the country, from New York to Chicago to California. Only a federal law could address this issue — by setting a floor on how loose gun laws can be in every state. And until such a federal law is passed, there will always be a massive loophole to any state gun control law.
Yet the NRA’s influence and its army of supporters push many of America’s legislators, particularly at the federal level and red states, away from gun control measures — even though some countries that passed these policies have seen a lot of success with them.
5) Other developed countries have had huge successes with gun control
In 1996, a 28-year-old man armed with a semiautomatic rifle went on a rampage in Port Arthur, Australia , killing 35 people and wounding 23 more. It was the worst mass shooting in Australia’s history.
Australian lawmakers responded with legislation that, among other provisions, banned certain types of firearms, such as automatic and semiautomatic rifles and shotguns. The Australian government confiscated 650,000 of these guns through a mandatory gun buyback program, in which it purchased the firearms from gun owners. It established a registry of all guns owned in the country and required a permit for all new firearm purchases. (This is much further than bills typically proposed in the US, which almost never make a serious attempt to immediatelyreduce the number of guns in the country.)
The result: Australia’s firearm homicide rate dropped by about 42 percent in the seven years after the law passed, and its firearm suicide rate fell by 57 percent, according to one review of the evidence by Harvard researchers.
It’s difficult to know for sure how much of the drop in homicides and suicides was caused specifically by the gun buyback program and other legal changes. Australia’s gun deaths, for one, were already declining before the law passed. But researchers David Hemenway and Mary Vriniotis argue that the gun buyback program very likely played a role: “First, the drop in firearm deaths was largest among the type of firearms most affected by the buyback. Second, firearm deaths in states with higher buyback rates per capita fell proportionately more than in states with lower buyback rates.”
One study of the program, by Australian researchers, found that buying back 3,500 guns per 100,000 people correlated with up to a 50 percent drop in firearm homicides, and a 74 percent drop in gun suicides. As Dylan Matthews noted for Vox, the drop in homicides wasn’t statistically significant because Australia has a pretty low number of murders already. But the drop in suicides most definitely was — and the results are striking:
Javier Zarracina/Vox
One other fact, noted by Hemenway and Vriniotis in 2011: “While 13 gun massacres (the killing of 4 or more people at one time) occurred in Australia in the 18 years before the [Australia gun control law], resulting in more than one hundred deaths, in the 14 following years (and up to the present), there were no gun massacres.”
6) Although they get a lot of focus, mass shootings are a small portion of all gun violence
Depending on which definition of a mass shooting one uses, there are anywhere from a dozen to hundreds of mass shootings in the US each year. These events are, it goes without saying, devastating tragedies for the nation and, primarily, the victims and their families.
Yet other, less-covered kinds of gun violence kill far more Americans than even these mass shootings. Under a broad definition of mass shooting, these incidents killed fewer than 500 people in the US in 2016. That represents less than 2 percent of the nearly 39,000 gun deaths that year — most of which were suicides, not homicides.
Preventing suicides isn’t something we typically include in discussions of gun control, but other countries’ experiences show it can save lives. In Israel, where military service is mandatory for much of the population, policymakers realized that an alarming number of soldiers killed themselves when they went home over the weekend. So Israeli officials, as part of their solution, decided to try forcing the soldiers to keep their guns at the base when they went home. It worked: A study from Israeli researchers found that suicides among Israeli soldiers dropped by 40 percent.
So while politicians often lean on mass shootings to call for gun control, the problem goes far beyond those incidents. Though it’s hard to fault them for trying; mass shootings, after all, force Americans to confront the toll of our gun laws and gun culture.
But it seems that we as a nation just aren’t willing to look, or else don’t sufficiently mind what we see, when these events occur. Even the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, in Newtown, Connecticut — in which a gunman killed 20 young children, six school personnel, and himself — catalyzed no significant change at the federal level and most states. Since then, there have been, by some estimates, thousands of mass shootings . And there is every reason to believe there will be more to come.
Recommended Readings:
Perspective
Preventing Gun Deaths in Children
Judith S. Palfrey, M.D., and Sean Palfrey, M.D.
N Engl J Med 2013; 368:401-403January 31, 2013DOI: 10.1056/NEJMp1215606
As practicing pediatricians who have lost patients to gun violence, we join our colleagues in mourning the 20 children and their teachers who were killed in Newtown, Connecticut, on December 14, 2012. Our sadness is deepened by our knowledge that the deaths, terror, and post-traumatic stress of the relatives and friends left behind could have been prevented.
Prevention is the core of pediatric work. We aim to protect children from all things that can harm them. Injuries are the biggest threat to U.S. children over 1 year of age. In 2010, gun-related injuries accounted for 6570 deaths of children and young people (1 to 24 years of age). That includes 7 deaths per day among people 1 to 19 years of age. Gun injuries cause twice as many deaths as cancer, 5 times as many as heart disease, and 15 times as many as infections (see graph Causes of Death among Persons 1 to 24 Years of Age in the United States, 2010.).1
How can we prevent gun injuries? We know the behaviors that place children and adolescents at high risk. Little children explore their worlds without understanding danger, and in one unsupervised moment, an encounter with a gun can end in fatality. School-age children often enter the worlds created by television shows, movies, and video games. Because of their developmental age, school-age children don't necessarily understand that people who are really shot may really die. A firearm in their hands can transform fantasy into tragedy. Even in our own lives, this risk has been manifest: to this day, one of us is haunted by the childhood memory of aiming a loaded rifle at a babysitter.
Teenagers get into fights over girlfriends or sneakers, get furious or scared. Alcohol and drugs may impair their judgment. A fistfight may cause transient injuries, but a gunfight can kill rivals, friends, or innocent bystanders. Depressed young people may attempt suicide. Less than 5% of such attempts involving drugs are lethal, but 90% of those involving guns are.2 Our niece might be alive today if she hadn't had easy access to a handgun at 18. Finally, permitting guns to reach the hands of severely deranged persons can have monstrous results. The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), recognizing all these vulnerabilities, declared in a policy statement on firearms in October 2012 that “the absence of guns from homes and communities is the most effective measure to prevent suicide, homicide, and unintentional injuries to children and adolescents.”2
In the early 1990s, there was a surge of violence and firearm-related deaths. The death rate was so high (nearly 28 of every 100,000 people 15 to 19 years of age)2 that pediatricians joined with other professionals (police officers, clergy, and educators) to find ways to combat the epidemic. Pediatricians began to address the protection of children from gun-related causes alongside the prevention of other types of injuries, poisonings, child abuse, lead toxicity, and infectious diseases.
Screening tools and basic interventions became routine practice through nationally accepted programs such as Connected Kids and Bright Futures. AAP guidelines recommend that when families report the presence of firearms in the house, pediatricians should counsel about gun removal and safety measures (gun locks and safe storage). One mother responded to routine screening questions asked by one of our colleagues, “Why, yes, I have a loaded gun in the drawer of my bedside table.” Until that moment, she had apparently never considered the risk to her child.
Although such screening and counseling are important in general, it is particularly important that children's health care providers have the opportunity (and time) to discuss the issue of guns with the families of children and young people who have developmental, behavioral, or mental health problems. In the United States, far too little attention is paid to the seriousness of our children's mental health problems. Families are often left unsupported as they try to protect their children who may be depressed, impulsive, or combative.
Since 1994, the AAP has conducted periodic member surveys to ascertain physicians' attitudes about gun safety and to see whether doctors are performing recommended screening and counseling. In both 2000 and 2008, approximately 70% of physicians reported that they “always or sometimes” asked whether there were guns in the home and recommended unloading and locking guns. In 2008, 50% of the doctors surveyed reported “always or sometimes recommending the removal of the guns from the house.”3 A recent AAP research analysis of these data show that doctors who live in states with high levels of gun ownership are just as likely as those in states with low levels to ask about guns in the home but are likely to counsel families about safe gun storage rather than removal.
In a randomized, controlled, cluster-design study by the Pediatric Research in Office Settings network, the intervention group that received specific gun-safety counseling from their doctors reported significantly higher rates of handgun removal or safe storage than did the control group. This study showed that families do follow through on pediatricians' recommendations about gun safety.4
Despite this evidence, in 2011, Florida passed legislation, the Firearms Owners' Privacy Act, making it illegal for a doctor to conduct preventive screening by asking families about guns in the home — essentially “gagging” health care providers. Under the aegis of the Second Amendment, the First Amendment rights and the Hippocratic responsibilities of physicians were challenged. In response, the AAP's Florida chapter brought suit, and in June 2012, Miami-based U.S. District Judge Marcia Cooke issued a permanent injunction banning the state from enforcing the law. Governor Rick Scott has appealed the ruling, and similar bills have been introduced in three additional states.
At the federal level, problematic language was introduced into the Affordable Care Act. Section 2717(c) sets restrictions on the collection and aggregation of data on guns in the home. Furthermore, Congress has restricted the research activities of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) by stipulating that no funds that are made available for injury prevention and control at the CDC “may be used to advocate or promote gun control.”5 Strictures like these often have a chilling effect on the gathering of important public health data.
The Newtown tragedy is galvanizing a national understanding of the pervasive threats that guns pose and the toll they take. The picture of wailing children leaving Sandy Hook Elementary School is seared into our collective consciousness like the image of the Kent State students or the smoking Twin Towers. The country's heart goes out to the families.
It is time to act for these families and for those who continue to lose children to gun violence. Newtown concentrated the horror in one place for one hour, but the same outrage occurs daily in U.S. cities, suburbs, and rural areas.
As a nation, we have it in our power to protect our children from gun injuries, as other countries have done. Doctors, teachers, city and state officials, gun owners, families, and young people must come together with a creative and meaningful commitment to improving our society.
We believe that, at a minimum, several specific measures should be taken. First, the ban on assault weapons should be reinstituted. Magazine and ammunition capacity and the tissue-destruction capability of ammunition should be limited. Rather than increasing the number of guns in public places, as was recently suggested by the National Rifle Association, we need to set a goal of reducing the number of guns in our homes and communities. This reduction can be accomplished through tighter consumer-safety regulations, as well as licensure and certification of gun owners. Federal restrictions on the collection of public health data about gun-related injuries should be reversed.5 Continued emphasis should be placed on limiting children's viewing of violent material on TV and through video games. Finally, we must dedicate more state and local funding to effective treatment of young people who are identified by parents, schools, and law-enforcement or mental health professionals as being at high risk for committing interpersonal violent acts.
If we take these steps, we will honor our children who have died needlessly. Our nation can prevent the loss of precious lives.
Harvard Injury Control Research Center
Means Matter Basics
Firearms are the most lethal and most common method of suicide in the U.S. More people who die by suicide use a gun than all other methods combined. Suicide attempts with a firearm are almost always fatal, while those with other methods are less likely to kill. Nine out of ten people who survive a suicide attempt do not go on to die by suicide later.
Every U.S. study that has examined the relationship has found that access to firearms is a risk factor for suicides. Firearm owners are not more suicidal than non-firearm owners; rather, their suicide attempts are more likely to be fatal. Many suicide attempts are made with little planning during a short-term crisis period. If highly lethal means are made less available to impulsive attempters and they substitute less lethal means, or temporarily postpone their attempt, the odds are increased that they will survive. Studies in a variety of countries have indicated that when access to a highly lethal and leading suicide method is reduced, the overall suicide rate drops driven by a drop in the restricted method.
To explore the research on each of these concepts in greater depth, click here:
· Many suicide attempts occur with little planning during a short-term crisis.
· Intent isn’t all that determines whether an attempter lives or dies; means also matter.
· 90% of attempters who survive do NOT go on to die by suicide later.
· Access to firearms is a risk factor for suicide.
· Firearms used in youth suicide usually belong to a parent
· Reducing access to lethal means saves lives.
Harvard Injury Control Research Center
Homicide
1. Where there are more guns there is more homicide (literature review).
Our review of the academic literature found that a broad array of evidence indicates that gun availability is a risk factor for homicide, both in the United States and across high-income countries. Case-control studies, ecological time-series and cross-sectional studies indicate that in homes, cities, states and regions in the US, where there are more guns, both men and women are at higher risk for homicide, particularly firearm homicide.
Hepburn, Lisa; Hemenway, David. Firearm availability and homicide: A review of the literature. Aggression and Violent Behavior: A Review Journal. 2004; 9:417-40.
2. Across high-income nations, more guns = more homicide.
We analyzed the relationship between homicide and gun availability using data from 26 developed countries from the early 1990s. We found that across developed countries, where guns are more available, there are more homicides. These results often hold even when the United States is excluded.
Hemenway, David; Miller, Matthew. Firearm availability and homicide rates across 26 high income countries. Journal of Trauma. 2000; 49:985-88.
3. Across states, more guns = more homicide
Using a validated proxy for firearm ownership, we analyzed the relationship between firearm availability and homicide across 50 states over a ten year period (1988-1997).
After controlling for poverty and urbanization, for every age group, people in states with many guns have elevated rates of homicide, particularly firearm homicide.
Miller, Matthew; Azrael, Deborah; Hemenway, David. Household firearm ownership levels and homicide rates across U.S. regions and states, 1988-1997. American Journal of Public Health. 2002: 92:1988-1993.
4. Across states, more guns = more homicide (2)
Using survey data on rates of household gun ownership, we examined the association between gun availability and homicide across states, 2001-2003. We found that states with higher levels of household gun ownership had higher rates of firearm homicide and overall homicide. This relationship held for both genders and all age groups, after accounting for rates of aggravated assault, robbery, unemployment, urbanization, alcohol consumption, and resource deprivation (e.g., poverty). There was no association between gun prevalence and non-firearm homicide.
Miller, Matthew; Azrael, Deborah; Hemenway, David. State-level homicide victimization rates in the U.S. in relation to survey measures of household firearm ownership, 2001-2003. Social Science and Medicine. 2007; 64:656-64.
At the center of the Baltimore protests: racial disparities in the criminal justice system
The protests over Freddie Gray's death in Baltimore were part of the "Black Lives Matter" movement that has become prominent since the police shooting of Michael Brown , an unarmed black 18-year-old, in Ferguson, Missouri. Since Brown's death, the rallying call of Black Lives Matter has been pushed in protests over several other police killings — of Eric Garner in New York City, Tamir Rice in Cleveland, and Walter Scott in North Charleston, South Carolina. These deaths and others have fed into the idea in black communities that their own — even their own sons — could be the next victims of police brutality.
An analysis of the available FBI data by Vox's Dara Lind found that US police kill black people at disproportionate rates: black people accounted for 31 percent of police shooting victims in 2012, even though they made up just 13 percent of the US population. Although the data is incomplete because it's based on voluntary reports from police agencies around the country, it highlights the vast disparities in how police use force.
Joe Posner/Vox
Black teens were 21 times as likely as white teens to be shot and killed by police between 2010 and 2012, according to a ProPublica analysis of the FBI data. ProPublica's Ryan Gabrielson, Ryann Grochowski Jones, and Eric Sagara reported: "One way of appreciating that stark disparity, ProPublica's analysis shows, is to calculate how many more whites over those three years would have had to have been killed for them to have been at equal risk. The number is jarring — 185, more than one per week."
Some researchers have suggested that subconscious racial biases are behind the disparities. Studies show officers are quicker to shoot black suspects in video game simulations . Josh Correll, a University of Colorado Boulder psychology professor, who conducted the research, said it's possible the bias could lead to more skewed outcomes in the field. "In the very situation in which [officers] most need their training," he said, "we have some reason to believe that their training will be most likely to fail them."
The racial disparities in the criminal justice system go beyond police use of force. Black people are much more likely to be arrested for drugs , even though they're not more likely to use drugs or sell them . And black inmates make up a disproportionate amount of the prison population.
Joe Posner/Vox
The disparities have driven many in minority communities to distrust and fear law enforcement — out of concern that they or their sons could be the next victims. For them, the only way to speak out against these perceived injustices is protest — and, for those who feel truly desperate, violence.
Was this card help
DEC. 4, 2015
Continue reading the main story
Gun homicides in Canada are about as common as deaths from alcohol poisoning in the United States.
5.6 deaths per million people
Two young campers were sleeping in Yosemite Valley this August when a tree branch snapped and fell on their tent, killing them both. “We don’t know what caused the limb to fall,” said the park’s spokeswoman, Jodi Bailey. “It seems like just a freak accident.”
Ms. Bailey was right: Being killed by a falling object is extremely rare. On average, about 680 Americans each year die this way, or about two people per million. The accident was seen as so unusual that it became national news , covered by CNN , T HYPERLINK "http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-children-killed-yosemite-20150814-story.html" he Los Angeles Times , MSN and The Daily Beast .
Yet in other developed countries, there is another cause of death that is just as rare: homicide by gun.
In Germany, for example, about two out of every million people are fatally shot by another person each year — making such events as uncommon there as the campers’ deaths in Yosemite. Gun homicides are just as rare in several other European countries, including the Netherlands and Austria. In the United States, two per million is roughly the death rate for hypothermia or plane crashes.
In Poland and England, only about one out of every million people die in gun homicides each year — about as often as an American dies in an agricultural accident or falling from a ladder. In Japan, where gun homicides are even rarer, the likelihood of dying this way is about the same as an American’s chance of being killed by lightning — roughly one in 10 million.
In the United States, the death rate from gun homicides is about 31 per million people, which is similar to the rate at which Americans die in car accidents (not including van, truck, bus or motorcycle accidents). The homicides include losses from mass shootings, like th HYPERLINK "http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/03/us/san-bernardino-shooting.html" ose Wednesday in San Bernardino, Calif. , and the week before HYPERLINK "http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/28/us/colorado-planned-parenthood-shooting.html" in Colorado Springs . And of course, they also include the country’s vastly more common single-victim killings.
These comparisons help highlight how exceptional the United States is. Here, where the right to bear arms is cherished by much of the population, gun homicides are a significant public health concern. For men 15 to 29, they are the third leading cause of death, after accidents and suicides. In other high-income countries, gun homicides are unusual events. The recent Paris attacks killed 130 people , which is nearly as many as die from gun homicides in all of France in a typical year. But even if France had a mass shooting as deadly as the Paris attacks every month, its annual rate of gun homicide death would be lower than that in the United States.
The accompanying table shows the mortality rates for gun homicides in a variety of countries, along with a correspondingly likely cause of death in the United States.
Continue reading the main story
|
Being killed with a gun here: |
Is about as likely as Dying of ________ in the U.S. |
Deaths per mil. |
|
El Salvador |
Heart attack |
446.3 |
|
Mexico |
Pancreatic cancer |
121.7 |
|
United States |
Car accident* |
31.2 |
|
Chile |
Motorcycle accident |
14.3 |
|
Israel |
Building fire |
7.5 |
|
Canada |
Alcohol poisoning |
5.6 |
|
Ireland |
Drowning in a lake, river or ocean |
4.8 |
|
Netherlands |
Accidental gas poisoning |
2.3 |
|
Germany |
Contact with a thrown or falling object |
2.1 |
|
France |
Hypothermia |
2.0 |
|
Austria |
Drowning in a swimming pool |
1.9 |
|
Australia |
Falling from a building or structure |
1.7 |
|
China |
Plane crash |
1.6 |
|
Spain |
Exposure to excessive natural heat |
1.6 |
|
New Zealand |
Falling from a ladder |
1.5 |
|
Poland |
Bicycle-car crash |
1.1 |
|
England |
Contact with agricultural machinery |
0.9 |
|
Norway |
Accidental hanging or strangulation |
0.9 |
|
Iceland |
Electrocution |
0.6 |
|
Scotland |
Cataclysmic storms |
0.5 |
|
South Korea |
Being crushed or pinched between objects |
0.4 |
|
Japan |
Lightning strike |
0.1 |
Note: Rates are 2007-12 averages; car accidents includes car occupants only; not van, truck, motorcycle or bus accidents
Our gun homicide numbers come from the Small Arms Survey , a Swiss nonprofit affiliated with the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, and represent the average gun homicide death rates in those countries between 2007 and 2012. Our United States death rates come from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention over those same years. We focused on the rates of gun homicides; the overall rate of gun deaths is substantially higher, because suicides make up a majority of gun deaths in the United States and are also higher than in other developed countries.
The table is not meant to make light of rare causes of death. Instead, we show them as a way to help think meaningfully about the differences among gun death rates.
The rate of gun violence in the United States is not the highest in the world. In parts of Central America, Africa and the Middle East, the gun death rates are even higher — close to those from heart attacks and lung cancer in the United States. In neighboring Mexico, where a drug war rages, 122 people per million die in a gun homicide, a rate slightly higher than Americans’ death rate from pancreatic cancer . But the countries with those levels of gun violence are not like the United States in many other ways, including G.D.P. , life expectancy and education. Among developed democracies, the United States is an outlier.
How violence shapes children for life
Poor kids who grow up in more violent places are less likely to escape poverty later in life.
WAPO By Emily Badger and Christopher Ingraham April 20
There's something about Atlanta, Chicago and Detroit that traps children in poverty. Poor kids who grow up there are less likely to reach the middle class as adults than poor kids who grow up in, say, Salt Lake City, according to a now-famous study released three years ago that found wide geographic variation in economic mobility across the country.
Precisely what that something is, though, the authors couldn't say.
Patrick Sharkey, a sociologist at New York University, suspected part of the answer: These places have pockets of deep violence and high crime rates, and the fraying neighborhoods that come with them. In Chicago, Sharkey had found that black children performed worse on vocabulary and reading assessments when a homicide occurred in their neighborhood in the previous week. If violence impairs how children learn and navigate life, he figured, it could be a key to economic mobility. "All of the evidence generated to this point," Sharkey says, "suggests that it should be."
In new research with Ph.D. student Gerard Torrats-Espinosa, Sharkey is now making the bold argument that higher levels of violent crime lower children's prospects for upward mobility, explaining a significant part of the geographic variation in that landmark 2013 study. Their work is among the first to claim what's causing differences across the country in mobility, filling in some of the mystery created by the original research.
Violence itself has harmful effects. But Sharkey and Torrats-Espinosa are saying that violent places do, too, and that the environments created by recurring homicides and assaults — whether or not children are the direct victims of it — hinder their lives in ways that become apparent in their economic standing as adults.
Using data shared from the original 2013 study, led by economists Raj Chetty and Nathaniel Hendren, Sharkey and Torrats-Espinosa found that poor children across the country have worse outcomes in more violent places, like Chicago and Detroit. They have higher economic mobility in safer places like Fairfax County, Va.:
But they also discovered, within individual counties, that children who reached their crucial teen years at more violent times fared worse than children growing up in the very same places during periods of greater peace.
Their research exploits the fact that the children in the study came of age at the beginning of a sweeping national decline in crime. And they further test their theory by tracking changes in economic mobility as crime spiked during local crack epidemics, and as it waned following federal grants for more local policing. Poor children whose teenage years coincided with the peak of the crack epidemic in Chicago, for instance, lived through an intensely violent period in the city's history. These children achieved less mobility later in life than children who grew up in Chicago just a few years later.
In all the ways Sharkey and Torrats-Espinosa sliced their data, the analyses pointed to the same pattern: More violence meant poor kids were less likely to advance up the economic ladder, measured by their own incomes at age 26. It's hard to imagine that something else explains the consistent link they observed. That's why they argue that changes in violence aren't just associated with differences in mobility rather, they cause these differences in mobility.
Hendren, one of the authors of the original economic mobility study, says he was impressed by the findings. The most convincing piece, he says, is the discovery that adding more police — through federal grants given out by the Community Oriented Policing office created in 1994 — resulted in greater upward mobility. Of course, all policing strategies aren't equally beneficial (and some may be harmful), but this point begins to hint at how we could wield specific policies to improve odds for poor kids.
All of these findings notably apply to poor kids but not wealthy ones. Changes in violent crime don't appear to affect the economic outcomes of kids who start life closer to the top. This makes sense given previous research by Sharkey and others showing that the biggest drops in crime since the 1990s have occurred in the poorest, most segregated neighborhoods.
This economic mobility data is divided by county, not by neighborhood. But there's reason to believe that the kids living in the poorest neighborhoods within these counties were affected by these changes in violence the most. The original data, based on tax records, also isn't broken down by race. But other research also suggests that changes in violence disproportionately affect black children.
"Everything that I’ve done, everything that I’ve seen leads me to conclude that the strongest benefits — even though we can’t see it in this dataset — have occurred for African-American kids," Sharkey says.
[
But why exactly would less violence mean more upward mobility for them? Sharkey and Torrats-Espinosa offer two arguments. The first is that exposure to violence has direct effects on children: It heightens their stress levels, distracts them in class, disrupts their learning and impairs their cognitive development.
The children in this data who were exposed to less crime weren't more likely to attend college. But they were less likely to drop out of high school, suggesting in some ways they may have done better in school as a result (the income gains from having a high-school diploma as opposed to none at all could also explain improvements in economic mobility for kids who started off near the bottom).
The second explanation is that violence breaks down entire communities, stripping them of the things that poor kids need to get ahead, like good schools and job networks.
"Violence undermines community life as a whole," Sharkey says. Violence makes it less likely that business will open, providing jobs; that good teachers will choose these schools; that public spaces will be safe; that families will invest in the neighborhoods around them.
The children in the earliest cohort in this study, born in 1980, experienced American cities at such a low point.
]
"Urban communities around the country fell apart during this period," Sharkey says. "In the late '80s, when we’re looking at these kids growing up, kids were living in war zones. They were living in places that looked like they were bombed out, where people had retreated from the streets, where businesses wouldn't dream of investing and opening up a store, where institutions were dilapidated."
Children born even a few years later reaped the gains of the decline in crime. This suggests that disparities in economic mobility would be even more stark today if Chicago, Detroit and Atlanta remained as violent as they once were. Although Atlanta is still one of the most violent places in the country, the homicide rate there has fallen by more than 50 percent from its peak in the early 1990s. In Chicago and Detroit, homicides have dropped more than 25 percent.
As Sharkey and Torrats-Espinosa resolve some of the mystery around why differences in economic mobility appear, their work will inevitably point back to another riddle: There is no definitive explanation for why violent crime has declined so dramatically across the country since the 1990s. The best answer is a set of theories , and many of them are contested. But Sharkey argues that we can still pursue individual ideas that we know work — like summer jobs programs or Obama's favorite Becoming a Man intervention — without holding the answer to that larger question.
Last year’s crime trends are still a puzzle, even with new data
WAPO By Max Ehrenfreund April 22
Hundreds more people were killed in major U.S. cities last year than the year before, the first substantial increase in homicides in more than two decades. Meanwhile, though, total violent crime increased just slightly, while there was no change in overall urban crime rates, posing a puzzle for criminologists and law enforcement.
An analysis from the Brennan Center for Justice in New York published this week concludes that the number of homicides in the country's 30 largest cities increased 14.5 percent last year compared to 2014. The results broadly confirm previous research by The Washington Post based on the 50 largest cities, which concluded that the number had increased by close to 17 percent.
Yet the Brennan Center also found that overall crime in those major cities was essentially unchanged after declining 0.1 percent. Violent crime had increased 3.1 percent. These figures corroborate an earlier analysis from the FBI, which issued a preliminary report based on data from the first six months of last year and also found little change. The bureau recorded a nationwide increase in violent crime of 1.7 percent during that period, along with a decrease in property crime of 4.2 percent.
The data on broad categories of crime complicate a popular theory among commentators and public figures: that the increase in the number of homicides could be the result of increased public scrutiny of law enforcement. Following the deaths of several young black men in altercations with the police, according to this theory, the risk of prosecution or negative attention from the press has made cops reluctant to do their jobs.
If police in major cities were avoiding talking with civilians, hesitating to engage with suspicious people as well as potential witnesses and informers because of the risk of something going wrong, criminologists might expect that petty crimes and street violence would increase.
Several cities -- notably Baltimore and Cleveland -- recorded alarming increases in the numbers of homicides following major controversies over police conduct, The Post found.
Denise Lu / The Washington Post
At the same time, the number of homicides increased only slightly in New York -- where relations between law enforcement and civilian leaders had been severely strained for several years even before the death of Eric Garner in a highly publicized case in 2014. Overall, lethal violence in New York has declined 35 percent over the past five years.
The data so far suggest there is no easy answer to the question of why more people were killed in American cities last year, making the problem that much more urgent for experts on law enforcement and crime.
Untold Damage: America’s
The Deadly Mix of Guns and Domestic Violence
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD JULY 1, 2016
CreditLisk Feng
It’s a good thing Congress passed a law in 1996 barring people convicted of domestic violence from buying or owning guns. Today, despite horrifyingly frequent mass shootings and yearly gun deaths topping 30,000, lawmakers, nearly all of them Republican, stand in lock-step formation against even modest gun-control efforts — like preventing people suspected of terrorist ties from easily buying firearms.
Twenty years ago, in a somewhat less warped political universe, Congress saw clearly that domestic violence and guns were a deadly mix, and passed, with overwhelming bipartisan support, the Lautenberg Amendment, which barred people convicted of misdemeanor domestic abuse from buying or owning a gun or ammunition. (Those convicted of felony domestic abuse were already subject to a gun ban under federal law.) As one senator said during debate over the bill, all too often “the only difference between a battered woman and a dead woman is the presence of a gun.”
On Monday, the Supreme Court ruled, 6-to-2 , that the law applies to domestic abusers even if they were found to have committed their offense recklessly, and not intentionally.
The case, Voisine v. United States , was brought by two Maine men who had been stripped of their right to own guns following convictions for domestic violence. One of the men, Stephen Voisine, had pleaded guilty to assaulting his girlfriend. Officials didn’t realize he was violating the gun law until several years later — after he used his gun to shoot a protected bald eagle.
Mr. Voisine argued that his Second Amendment right was violated because Maine’s law — versions of which exist in 34 states and the District of Columbia — permitted a conviction if someone “recklessly” committed a domestic assault. He contended that a recklessness standard failed to satisfied the federal requirement that a person actually use physical force.
But Congress knew that state laws like Maine’s existed when it passed the ban. As Justice Elena Kagan wrote in the majority opinion, the federal firearms restriction was clearly intended to cover both reckless and intentional crimes of domestic violence under state assault laws.
Any other interpretation would substantially undermine the gun ban’s ability to prevent bloodshed. Domestic abusers pose a much higher risk to their partners when there is a gun in the house. According to a 2014 report by the group Everytown for Gun Safety, more than half of all women murdered with guns in America are killed by partners or family members. And people with a history of domestic violence are five times more likely to murder their partner if a gun is in the house.
69COMMENTS
In dissent, Justice Clarence Thomas complained that the majority was treating the Second Amendment right to own a gun “cavalierly.” He warned that the “reckless” standard was so easy to meet that even accidental conduct could lead to a lifetime ban on gun rights. But prosecutors are not going after accidents.
The Lautenberg Amendment is not a perfect solution . Many people convicted of domestic violence buy guns illegally, and in all but nine states, those who already own a gun are not required to turn it over to the authorities. It has, however, been a step toward protecting women from gun violence — and in that regard it is far beyond anything Congress has shown itself capable of doing today.
Surprising New Evidence Shows Bias in Police Use of Force but Not in Shootings
NYT UPSHOT By QUOCTRUNG BUI and AMANDA COX JULY 11, 2016
Police officers are more likely to ...
|
|
with blacks |
than with whites in similar situations |
|
|
use hands |
2,165for every 10,000 stops in New York City |
1,845for every 10,000 stops in New York City |
17% more likely |
|
push into wall |
623 |
529 |
18% |
|
use handcuffs* |
310 |
266 |
16% |
|
draw weapons |
155 |
129 |
19% |
|
push to ground |
136 |
114 |
18% |
|
point weapon |
54 |
43 |
24% |
|
use pepper spray or baton |
5 |
4 |
25% |
* Handcuffs exclude arrests. Counts represent at least that level of force, based on stop-and-frisk data from 2003 to 2013. Similar situations account for gender, age, police precinct, the reason for the stop, whether the stop was indoors or outdoors, the time of day, whether the stop took place in a high-crime area or during a high-crime time, whether the officer was in uniform, the type of identification provided, and whether others were stopped at the same time.
A new study confirms that black men and women are treated differently in the hands of law enforcement. They are more likely to be touched, handcuffed, pushed to the ground or pepper-sprayed by a police officer, even after accounting for how, where and when they encounter the police.
But when it comes to the most lethal form of force — police shootings — the study finds no racial bias.
“It is the most surprising result of my career,” said Roland G. Fryer Jr. , the author of the study and a professor of economics at Harvard. The study examined more than a thousand shootings in 10 major police departments, in Texas, Florida and California.
The result contradicts the mental image of police shootings that many Americans hold in the wake of the killings (some captured on video) of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo.; Laquan McDonald in Chicago; Tamir Rice in Cleveland; Walter Scott in South Carolina; Samuel DuBose in Cincinnati; Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, La.; and Philando Castile in Minnesota.
The study did not say whether the most egregious examples — the kind of killings at the heart of the nation’s debate on police shootings — are free of racial bias. Instead, it examined a much larger pool of shootings, including nonfatal ones.
Official statistics on police shootings are poor. James Comey, the F.B.I. director, has called the lack of data “ embarrassing and ridiculous .” Even when data exists, the conditions under which officers decide to fire their weapons are deeply nuanced and complex.
Mr. Fryer is the youngest African-American to receive tenure at Harvard and the first one to receive a John Bates Clark medal , a prize given to the most promising American economist under 40. He is not afraid of controversial questions. In previous work, he has paid students to read books; considered the possibility of genetic differences in intelligence ; and shown that high-achieving black and Hispanic students have fewer friends .
Mr. Fryer said his anger after the deaths of Michael Brown and Freddie Gray and others drove him to study the issue. “You know, protesting is not my thing,” he said. “But data is my thing. So I decided that I was going to collect a bunch of data and try to understand what really is going on when it comes to racial differences in police use of force.”
He and a group of student researchers spent about 3,000 hours assembling detailed data from police reports in Houston; Austin, Tex.; Dallas; Los Angeles; Orlando, Fla.; Jacksonville, Fla.; and four other counties in Florida.
They examined 1,332 shootings between 2000 and 2015, systematically coding police narratives to answer questions such as: How old was the suspect? How many police officers were at the scene? Were they mostly white? Was the officer at the scene for a robbery, violent activity, a traffic stop or something else? Was it nighttime? Did the officer shoot after being attacked or before a possible attack? One goal was to figure out whether police officers were quicker to fire at black suspects.
How Officer Reports Were Coded
Excerpt from a typical Houston Police Department summary
Suspect Race: Black Suspect Sex: Male Suspect Age: 32 Suspect Injury: Wounded Suspect Weapon Used: Firearm HPD Firearm Injury: No Injury Capital Murder (Attempted): On duty HPD officers responded to a robbery. One susp. was arrested and handcuffed. Susp produced a weapon firedat HPD SGT. who returned fire; susp fled the building firing at a second officer who returned fire. Susp fled and was found later with gunshot wounds.
In officer-involved shootings in these cities, officers were more likely to fire their weapons without having first been attacked when the suspects were white. Black and white civilians involved in police shootings were equally likely to have been carrying a weapon. Both of these results undercut the idea that the police wield lethal force with racial bias.
But this line of analysis included only encounters in which a shooting took place. A more fundamental question still remained: In the tense moments when a shooting may occur, are police officers more likely to fire if the suspect is black?
To answer this question, Mr. Fryer focused on one city, Houston. The Police Department there allowed the researchers to look at reports not only for shootings but also for arrests when lethal force might have been justified. Mr. Fryer defined this group to include suspects the police charged with serious offenses like attempting to murder an officer, or evading or resisting arrest. He also considered suspects shocked with Tasers.
And in the arena of “shoot” or “don’t shoot,” Mr. Fryer found that, in tense situations, officers in Houston were about 20 percent less likely to shoot a suspect if the suspect was black. This estimate was not very precise, and firmer conclusions would require more data. But, in a variety of models that controlled for different factors and used different definitions of tense situations, Mr. Fryer found that blacks were either less likely to be shot or there was no difference between blacks and whites.
The study, a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, relied on reports filled out by police officers, and a set of police departments willing to share those reports. Recent videos of police shootings have led many to question HYPERLINK "http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/09/us/video-of-fatal-shooting-of-walter-scott-reignites-debate-on-police-use-of-force.html" the reliability of such accounts . But the results were largely the same whether or not Mr. Fryer used information from narratives provided by officers.
And intriguingly, he found that the rise of mobile video did not substantially change the results in Houston. Racial gaps were about the same in years when iPhones and Facebook were prevalent and in years when they weren’t.
Such results may not be true in every city. The cities Mr. Fryer used to examine officer-involved shootings make up only about 4 percent of the population of the United States, and serve more black citizens than average.
Moreover, the results do not mean that the general public’s perception of racism in policing is misguided. Lethal uses of force are exceedingly rare. There were 1.6 million arrests in Houston in the years Mr. Fryer studied. Officers fired their weapons 507 times. What is far more common are nonlethal uses of force.
And in less extreme uses of force, Mr. Fryer found ample racial differences, which is in accord with the public’s perception and other studies .
In New York City, blacks stopped by the police were about 17 percent more likely to experience use of force, according to stop-and-frisk records kept between 2003 and 2013. (In the later year, a judge ruled that the tactic as employed then was unconstitutional .)
That gap, adjusted for suspect behavior and other factors, was surprisingly consistent across many different levels of force. Black suspects were 18 percent more likely to be pushed up against a wall, 16 percent more likely to be handcuffed without being arrested and 18 percent more likely to be pushed to the ground.
Even when the police said that civilians were compliant, blacks experienced more force.
Mr. Fryer also explored racial differences in force from the viewpoint of civilians, using data from a nationally representative survey conducted by the federal government. Here, he found racial gaps in force that were larger than those he found in the data reported from the officers’ perspective. But these gaps were also consistent across many different types of force. They were as strong for civilians making more than $50,000 a year as they were for those making less.
This discovery is not new to the black community. It’s at root of the “ talk ” that many black parents give to their sons and daughters about how to approach interactions with the police.
As an economist, Mr. Fryer wonders if the difference between lethal force — where he did not find racial disparities — and nonlethal force — where he did — might be related to costs. Officers face great costs, legal and psychological, when they unnecessarily fire their weapons. But excessive use of lesser force is rarely tracked or punished. “No officer has ever told me that putting their hands on inner-city youth is a life-changing event,” he said, contrasting the consequences of shootings and lesser uses of force.
For Mr. Fryer, who has spent much of his career studying ways society can close the racial achievement gap, the failure to punish excessive everyday force is an important contributor to young black disillusionment.
“Who the hell wants to have a police officer put their hand on them or yell and scream at them? It’s an awful experience,” he said. “ I HYPERLINK "http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/20/magazine/toward-a-unified-theory-of-black-america.html" ’ve had HYPERLINK "http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/20/magazine/toward-a-unified-theory-of-black-america.html" it multiple, multiple times . Every black man I know has had this experience. Every one of them. It is hard to believe that the world is your oyster if the police can rough you up without punishment. And when I talked to minority youth, almost every single one of them mentions lower level uses of force as the reason why they believe the world is corrupt.”
In Baltimore Report, Justice Dept. Revives Doubts About Zero-Tolerance Policing
NYT By TIMOTHY WILLIAMS and JOSEPH GOLDSTEIN AUG. 10, 2016
The Justice Department has criticized a string of police departments nationwide for unfairly targeting blacks, but in its report on the Baltimore police, issued Wednesday , it used its most scathing language to date to denounce the zero-tolerance policing approach that has spread from New York to many departments big and small.
The broken-windows style of policing that New York evangelized with particular fervor during William J. Bratton ’s first term as police commissioner is increasingly viewed more as a source of tensions with minority communities than as a successful crime-fighting strategy.
Taking up too much space on a park bench in New York. Spitting in public in Minneapolis. Moving household goods at night in Atlanta. Focusing on small violations to prevent bigger crimes has grown into a cornerstone of policing over recent decades.
But the Justice Department found that critical elements of that approach led to a breakdown in police-community relations in Baltimore and prompted a frenzy of unconstitutional policing aimed at African-Americans that was more about racking up statistics than reducing violent crime.
Baltimore’s “pattern of making unconstitutional stops, searches and arrests arises from its longstanding reliance on ‘zero tolerance’ street enforcement, which encourages officers to make large numbers of stops, searches and arrests for minor, highly discretionary offenses,” the report said. “These practices led to repeated violations of the constitutional and statutory rights, further eroding the community’s trust in the police.”
In an interview, Mr. Bratton said that the excesses of the Baltimore police should not discredit an approach to policing that he argued, far from being outdated or in disrepute, remained “the fundamental principle on which police operate.”
He distinguished between his policing approach, which requires officers to confront disorderly behavior but not necessarily to make arrests, and a zero-tolerance approach that measures success by arrest figures.
Mr. Bratton said the key was to adjust the level of police enforcement based on the security of the city. He noted that in recent years, as public safety improved, the number of arrests and police stops in New York dropped.
“We don’t do zero-tolerance policing,” he said, adding that he took “umbrage” at the Justice Department’s suggestion that zero-tolerance policing had migrated from New York to Baltimore and elsewhere. “Since we didn’t apply it,” Mr. Bratton said, “how did it migrate out of New York?”
Departments across the country, including those in Minneapolis; Atlanta; New York; and Tampa , Fla., have rolled back no-holds-barred enforcement of laws that criminalize minor offenses like spitting, riding bicycles on sidewalks, panhandling and public drinking.
The approach grew out of the war on drugs in the 1990s and record levels of murders, criminologists say, as departments sought to use renewed vigor by patrol officers to prevent major crimes.
In practice, however, data from police departments around the country shows that officers using the zero-tolerance strategy focused their arrests on African-American men in poor neighborhoods, while ignoring the same offenses in wealthier white neighborhoods.
One study, for example, showed that from 2008 to 2011, New York police officers issued eight citations for riding bicycles on sidewalks in Park Slope, a predominantly white Brooklyn neighborhood, but 2,050 in nearby Bedford-Stuyvesant, which is primarily African-American and Latino.
“A whole generation of police officers has come up under this approach: ‘Arrest. Arrest. Arrest,’” said David A. Harris, a professor and expert in police accountability at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law. He said the federal government’s denunciation “might signify a kind of turning point in law enforcement.”
Others pointed out, however, that the practice is standard in hundreds of police forces across the nation and that officers often win awards and promotions based on the number of arrests they make, including for minor offenses.
On Wednesday, Vanita Gupta, the head of the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department, said the Baltimore police had pursued “a quest to produce large numbers of enforcement actions, pedestrian stops in particular,” which created “caustic damage to community relationships.”
Ms. Gupta added that even as the idea was discredited, “many in the B.P.D. continue to follow this strategy.”
While some police officials have credited broken-windows policing with the large drops in crime nationally since the 1990s, a number of academic studies have questioned HYPERLINK "http://chronicle.uchicago.edu/060330/brokenwindow.shtml" \o "University of Chicago Chronicle news release." its effectiveness , and some officers have blamed the practice for the lack of public cooperation they receive in trying to solve violent crimes.
“We’ve been spending the past two decades trying to prove something, but there’s zero evidence for its efficacy,” said Michael A. Wood Jr., a former Baltimore police sergeant who now advocates police reform.
The frequency with which police officers — from Seattle to Oakland, Calif.; from Ferguson, Mo., to Philadelphia; and now in Baltimore — have been found to have infringed on the constitutional rights of citizens has led some police leaders to reject the practice in favor of community-based policing.
“The dilemma for police chiefs is how do you impact crime in high-crime neighborhoods without the overreach of violating the rights of people who have done nothing wrong,” said Chuck Wexler, the executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, an organization that provides technical assistance to law enforcement agencies.
Ronal Serpas, who has been a police chief in New Orleans, Nashville and Washington State, said that zero-tolerance policing had been losing adherents among chiefs for years, even before the 2014 riots in Ferguson, which were prompted by the fatal police shooting of Michael Brown .
Mr. Serpas said that police chiefs during the 1990s had imitated New York City’s broken-windows strategy under Mr. Bratton by intensifying efforts on low-level crime enforcement.
“Those policing strategies became a beast that fed itself,” Mr. Serpas said, noting that the rise in stop-and-frisks, arrests and tickets had become increasingly burdensome and intrusive. “In the years, we found out that we lost these people whose kids started getting caught up in these dragnets.”
In New York, the Police Department’s crime-fighting strategy had grown increasingly reliant on a particular component of broken-windows policing: the investigative stop, often called “stop, question and frisk.”
But police data showed that officers rarely found any evidence of criminality. In one precinct, only 4 percent of the stops resulted in an arrest or summons. In Brownsville, a predominantly African-American neighborhood of Brooklyn, young black men were stopped so often on their way home after school that members of a high school football team began carrying their helmets home with them so the police would view them with less suspicion.
By the time Shira A. Scheindlin, a federal judge, concluded in 2013 that the department’s policies had led to widespread constitutional violations, the police commissioner at the time, Raymond W. Kelly, had already begun abandoning the strategy.
And since Mr. Bratton’s return as commissioner under Mayor Bill de Blasio, he has signaled to officers that a warning for a minor infraction is sometimes preferable to handcuffs. Mr. Bratton has announced that he will resign in September to take a job in the private sector.
The New York City Council considered decriminalizing numerous petty offenses, including public urination and public drinking. But, facing stiff opposition from the Police Department, it softened the legislation this spring, and the law now leaves it up to officers to decide whether to treat petty offenses as criminal or civil matters.
In Atlanta, Kwanza Hall, a City Council member, introduced legislation this year that would decriminalize a series of low-level crimes — including spitting, panhandling, moving household goods at night and loitering around railroad tracks — that he said had been used to target African-Americans.
And in June 2015, the Minneapolis City Council repealed laws against lurking — an offense similar to loitering — and spitting in public after an A.C.L.U. report showed that African-Americans and Native Americans were nearly nine times more likely than whites to be arrested on minor offenses.
While officers are given wide discretion in whether to make arrests, issue tickets or ignore minor crimes, they are often ordered by sergeants and lieutenants to confront every violation they see, a practice that the Justice Department said was called “clearing streets” in Baltimore.
This often meant, according to the federal report, that the police confronted people hanging outside of shops, searching them and checking for open warrants, even though the officers lacked the legal authority to do so.
“Zero-tolerance policing was not keeping us safer,” said Sherrilyn Ifill, the president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, and a Baltimore resident. “It’s not rocket science. We knew that this was devastating.”
Killings of police officers on duty are near record lows
VOX
There's no sign that it's more dangerous to be a cop today than it was decades or even years ago.
For much of 2015, Fox News and the New York Post decried a "war on cops," specifically blaming the Black Lives Matter movement — and its criticisms of excessive use of force by cops — for enabling a wave of violence against police officers in the US.
But it looks like 2015 was one of the safest years to be a police officer in America. Since 1960, only 2013 had fewer on-duty police officer deaths than 2015.
The Officer Down Memorial Page , which tracks police officer deaths, estimated 129 police officers died in the line of duty in 2015, down 3 percent from 2014. This continued the long-term trend downward, based on the organization's statistics going back decades.
The single biggest cause of death in 2015 was gunfire. Out of 129 deaths, 39 were gun homicides, and two were accidental shootings. But deadly shootings were down from 2014, when 49 cops died to gunfire.
The drop in police deaths coincides with a dramatic drop in crime in recent decades: Violent crime rates in the US dropped by roughly 49 percent between 1994 and 2014, according to FBI HYPERLINK "https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2014/crime-in-the-u.s.-2014/tables/table-1" \t "_blank" data .
Still, police organizations claim to feel increasingly threatened following the growing criticisms and protests against law enforcement over racial disparities in use of force, particularly after the police killings of Eric Garner in New York City, Freddie Gray in Baltimore, and Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. Tensions in police departments were especially high after the killings of New York City police officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos and the riots in Baltimore over the death of Freddie Gray while in police custody.
In response, police have sometimes leveled their own criticisms and protests. In comments to media, Chuck Canterbury, national president of the Fraternal Order of Police, the country's largest police union, suggested cops should be shielded from attacks in hate crime legislation.In New York City and Baltimore , police officers engaged in a "slowdown" in which they carried out fewer arrests — a tactic that police have historically used to protect themselves, avoid public scrutiny, purposely decrease public revenue raised through citations, and show critics what life may be like without law enforcement.
Some defenders of police referenced the "Ferguson effect" : the idea that more scrutiny of police since the Ferguson, Missouri, protests has demoralized cops and emboldened criminals, leading to more crime. A report by the Brennan Center for Justice , a criminal justice group, found that murder rates significantly increased in some cities in 2015, but overall crime dropped.
The protests by police also sometimes backfired, leading to further criticisms that law enforcement are too sensitive and trying to escape public accountability. In a January 2015 Quinnipiac University survey , 57 percent of nearly 1,200 respondents in New York City said cops should be disciplined if they deliberately made fewer arrests or wrote fewer tickets.
Still, many defenders of police continue claiming that cops are under serious threat — potentially in an attempt to shift the conversation from heightened levels of police brutality.
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There are huge racial disparities in how US police use force
Black people are much more likely to be shot by police than their white peers.
An analysis of the available FBI data by Vox's Dara Lind found that US police kill black people at disproportionate rates: Black people accounted for 31 percent of police killing victims in 2012, even though they made up just 13 percent of the US population. Although the data is incomplete because it's based on voluntary reports from police agencies around the country, it highlights the vast disparities in how police use force.
Black teens were 21 times as likely as white teens to be shot and killed by police between 2010 and 2012, according to a ProPublica analysis of the FBI data. ProPublica's Ryan Gabrielson, Ryann Grochowski Jones, and Eric Sagara reported: "One way of appreciating that stark disparity, ProPublica's analysis shows, is to calculate how many more whites over those three years would have had to have been killed for them to have been at equal risk. The number is jarring — 185, more than one per week."
The disparities appear to be even starker for unarmed suspects, according to an analysis of 2015 police killings by the Guardian . Racial minorities made up about 37.4 percent of the general population in the US and 46.6 percent of armed and unarmed victims, but they made up 62.7 percent of unarmed people killed by police.
These disparities in police use of force reflect more widespread racial inequities across the entire American criminal justice system. Black people are much more likely to be arrested for drugs, even though they're not more likely to use or sell them. And black inmates make up a disproportionate amount of the prison population.
Joe Posner/Vox
Some of these disparities are explained by socioeconomic factors — such as poverty, unemployment, segregation, and neglect by the police when it comes to serious crimes — that make black Americans much more likely to commit crime than their white counterparts. As a result, police tend to be more present in black neighborhoods — and therefore may be more likely to take policing actions, from traffic stops to arrests to shootings, in these areas.
But a review of the research by the Sentencing Project concluded that throughout various time periods in the past few decades, the higher crime rates in black communities only explained about 61 to 80 percent of black overrepresentation in prisons. This means that up to 39 percent of the racially disparate rate of imprisonment is attributable to other factors, including, potentially, racial bias or past criminal records influencing a prison sentence.
Another study , from 2015, by researcher Cody Ross found, "There is no relationship between county-level racial bias in police shootings and crime rates (even race-specific crime rates), meaning that the racial bias observed in police shootings in this data set is not explainable as a response to local-level crime rates." That suggests that, again, other factors are involved in the disparities seen for these shootings.
One of those potential factors: subconscious racial biases . Studies show, for example, that officers are quicker to shoot black suspects in video game simulations . Josh Correll, a University of Colorado Boulder psychology professor who conducted the research, said it's possible the bias could lead to more skewed outcomes in the field. "In the very situation in which [officers] most need their training," he said, "we have some reason to believe that their training will be most likely to fail them."
The racial disparities have fueled criticisms of law enforcement over the past few years, culminating in the Black Lives Matter movement that has risen to national prominence due to the controversial police killings of Brown in Ferguson, Eric Garner in New York City, Tamir Rice in Cleveland, and Freddie Gray in Baltimore, among others. For critics, the disparities and high-profile killings have fostered concerns that black lives matter less to police, and that the next victim of a police shooting could be just about any black American.
American police shoot and kill far more people than their peers in other countries
Police officers in the US shoot and kill hundreds of people each year, according to the FBI's very limited data — far more than other developed countries like the UK, Japan, and Germany, where police officers might go an entire year without killing more than a dozen people or even anyone at all.
The Economist charted the differences in annual police shooting deaths in the US, UK, Japan, and Germany:
One explanation for this disparity is that violent crime is much more common in the US, putting police in more situations in which the use of force is necessary. As data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development shows, the US homicide rate throughout the 2000s was more than three times the rate of Canada, four times that of the UK, and more than 10 times that of Germany.
But why does the US have a much higher violent crime rate than other countries? One explanation: Americans are much more likely to own guns than their peers around the world. This means that conflicts — not just between police and civilians but between civilians — are much more likely to escalate into deadly, violent encounters. The research bears this out: More guns lead to more gun violence . And for police in particular, one study found that every 10 percent increase in firearm ownership correlated with 10 additional officers killed at the state level over a 15-year period.
According to survey data compiled by Simon Rogers for the Guardian , the US had 88.8 guns per 100 people in 2007 — compared with 54.8 in the second-closest country, Yemen. Reddit user Phillybdizzle mapped this data, showing just how much the US stands out in gun ownership compared with the rest of the world:
This is a result of cultural and policy decisions made by the US that have made firearms far more available in America than most of the world. For American police officers, this means they not only will encounter more guns, but they expect to encounter more guns, making them more likely to anticipate and perceive a threat and use deadly force as a result.
But deadly police encounters have drawn increased criticism over the past few years as cops have shot and killed unarmed or otherwise innocent black men and boys, highlighting the troubling racial disparities in how police use force. For critics of law enforcement, the disparities indicate that it's not just greater rates of gun ownership and violent crime that explain the higher number of police shootings in the US. Perhaps it's the lax legal standards that allow cops to justify deadly force against suspects who pose no danger, and sometimes are only perceived to pose a threat to officers because cops hold racial biases that are endemic in the criminal justice system.
Domestic Violence Statistics
ABA WEBSITE
Survey of Recent Statistics
This survey is provided as a service for legal practitioners and advocates who may find it useful to include current statistical data in their arguments to the court. It is not intended to be a comprehensive listing of research in the area of domestic violence.
All citations conform to the format for court documents described in The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation (18th Ed.).
The ABA Commission on Domestic & Sexual Violence does not engage in research, and cannot vouch for the quality or accuracy of any of the data excerpted here. Users are advised to independently confirm data with source documents cited.
Prevalence of Domestic Violence | Stalking | Stalking on Campus | Sexual Assault | Trafficking | Immigrants | Teens | Elders | Same-Sex | Welfare | Workplace | Offender Recidivism | Children Physical Injury and Medical Treatment | Law Enforcement | Effect of Protection Orders FMI National Violence Against Women Survey
Prevalence of Domestic Violence
· In a 1995-1996 study conducted in the 50 States and the District of Columbia, nearly 25% of women and 7.6% of men were raped and/or physically assaulted by a current or former spouse, cohabiting partner, or dating partner/acquaintance at some time in their lifetime (based on survey of 16,000 participants, equally male and female).
Patricia Tjaden & Nancy Thoennes, U.S. Dep't of Just., NCJ 181867, Extent, Nature, and Consequences of Intimate Partner Violence, at iii (2000), available at http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/nij/pubs-sum/181867.htm
· Approximately 1.3 million women and 835,000 men are physically assaulted by an intimate partner annually in the United States.
Patricia Tjaden & Nancy Thoennes, U.S. Dep't of Just., NCJ 183781, Full Report of the Prevalence, Incidence, and Consequences of Intimate Partner Violence Against Women: Findings from the National Violence Against Women Survey, at iv(2000), available at http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/nij/pubs-sum/183781.htm
· Intimate partner violence made up 20% of all nonfatal violent crime experienced by women in 2001.
Callie Marie Rennison, U.S. Dep't of Just., NCJ 197838, Bureau of Justice Statistics Crime Data Brief: Intimate Partner Violence, 1993-2001, at 1 (2003), available at http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/pub/pdf/ipv01.pdf
· Intimate partners committed 3% of the nonfatal violence against men.
Callie Marie Rennison, U.S. Dep't of Just., NCJ 197838, Bureau of Justice Statistics Crime Data Brief: Intimate Partner Violence, 1993-2001, at 1(2003), available at http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/pub/pdf/ipv01.pdf
· In 2000, 1,247 women and 440 men were killed by an intimate partner. In recent years, an intimate partner killed approximately 33% of female murder victims and 4% of male murder victims.
Callie Marie Rennison, U.S. Dep't of Just., NCJ 197838, Bureau of Justice Statistics Crime Data Brief: Intimate Partner Violence, 1993-2001, at 1(2003), available at http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/pub/pdf/ipv01.pdf
· Access to firearms yields a more than five-fold increase in risk of intimate partner homicide when considering other factors of abuse, according to a recent study, suggesting that abusers who possess guns tend to inflict the most severe abuse on their partners.
Jacquelyn C. Campbell et al., Risk Factors For Femicide in Abusive Relationships: Results From A Multi-Site Case Control Study, 93 Am. J. of Public Health 1089, 1092 (2003), abstract available at http://www.ajph.org/cgi/content/abstract/93/7/1089
· Of females killed with a firearm, almost two-thirds were killed by their intimate partners. The number of females shot and killed by their husband or intimate partner was more than three times higher than the total number murdered by male strangers using all weapons combined in single victim/single offender incidents in 2002.
The Violence Pol'y Ctr., When Men Murder Women: An Analysis of 2002 Homicide Data: Females Murdered by Males in Single Victim/Single Offender Incidents, at 7 (2004), available at http://www.vpc.org/studies/wmmw2004.pdf
According to the U.S. Department of Justice, between 1998 and 2002:
· Of the almost 3.5 million violent crimes committed against family members, 49% of these were crimes against spouses.
· 84% of spouse abuse victims were females, and 86% of victims of dating partner abuse at were female.
· Males were 83% of spouse murderers and 75% of dating partner murderers
· 50% of offenders in state prison for spousal abuse had killed their victims. Wives were more likely than husbands to be killed by their spouses: wives were about half of all spouses in the population in 2002, but 81% of all persons killed by their spouse.
Matthew R. Durose et al., U.S. Dep't of Just., NCJ 207846, Bureau of Justice Statistics, Family Violence Statistics: Including Statistics on Strangers and Acquaintances, at 31-32
Murder Rates Rose in a Quarter of the Nation’s 100 Largest Cities
NEW YORK TIMES By HAEYOUN PARK and JOSH KATZ SEPT. 9, 2016
Murder rates rose significantly in 25 of the nation’s 100 largest cities last year, according to an analysis by The New York Times of new data compiled from individual police departments.
The findings confirm a trend that was tracked recently in a study published by the National Institute of Justice . “The homicide increase in the nation’s large cities was real and nearly unprecedented,” wrote the study’s author, Richard Rosenfeld, a criminology professor at the University of Missouri-St. Louis who explored homicide data in 56 large American cities.
In the Times analysis, half of the increase came from just seven cities — Baltimore, Chicago, Cleveland, Houston, Milwaukee, Nashville and Washington.
Chicago had the most homicides — 488 in 2015 — far more than the 352 in New York City, which has three times as many people. Baltimore had the largest increase — 133 more than 2014 — and the second-highest rate in 2015, after St. Louis, which had 59 homicides per 100,000 residents.
The number of cities where rates rose significantly was the largest since the height of violent crime in the early 1990s.
Donald J. Trump, the Republican presidential candidate, has said that crime is “ out of control ” and that decades of progress are now being reversed . But the Times analysis shows that the rise in homicides is much more nuanced; while violence is up in a number of cities, it’s not soaring across the nation.
Nationally, homicide rates are still much lower than they were in the 1990s, even among the seven cities that drove last year’s increase.
For the Times analysis, we collected 30 years of homicide data from the F.B.I. through 2014, then gathered 2015 data from local police departments in the 100 cities. (The F.B.I. will not release the full 2015 data until later this month.)
Since crime rates fluctuate from year to year, we used a statistical technique to determine places where we can definitely say rates were rising.
The Cities That Drove the Increase
Nationwide, nearly 6,700 homicides were reported in the 100 largest cities in 2015, about 950 more than the year before. About half of the rise — 480 of the 950 — occurred in seven cities. The poverty rate in these cities is higher than the national average.
At least three of these cities have also been embroiled in protests after police-involved HYPERLINK "http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/07/12/us/looking-for-accountability-in-police-involved-deaths-of-blacks.html" deaths of black males, like Freddie Gray in Baltimore, Laquan McDonald in Chicago and Tamir Rice in Cleveland.
In his study, Dr. Rosenfeld said that rising crime might be linked to less aggressive policing that resulted from protests of high-profile police killings of African-Americans. But he said this hypothesis, a version of the so-called Ferguson effect , which has spurred heated debate among lawmakers and criminologists, must be further evaluated.
There is no consensus on what caused the recent spike, and each city appears to have unique circumstances contributing to the uptick.
“Cities are obviously heterogeneous,” said Robert Sampson, a Harvard professor who is an expert on crime trends. “There is tremendous variation across the largest cities in basic features such as demographic composition, the concentration of poverty, and segregation that relate to city-level differences in rates of violence.”
Many crime experts warn against reading too much into recent statistics. In fact, murder rates remained largely unchanged in 70 cities, and decreased significantly in five.
“Even if the uptick continues in some cities, I doubt the pattern will become universal,” Dr. Sampson said.
No End in Sight for Chicago’s Violence
In Chicago, homicides were concentrated in highly segregated pockets that are predominantly black. A fifth of Chicago’s killings took place in just two police districts on the city’s West and South Sides, which are also among the city’s poorest.
“Flare-ups and spikes in violence are occurring in predictable places,” Dr. Sampson said. “The cynicism and mistrust of legal institutions in poor black communities is longstanding, although recent conflicts with the police have exacerbated underlying tensions.”
Alarming levels of violence have become the norm in some of these neighborhoods. While murder rates have continued to decline in the nation’s two largest cities — New York and Los Angeles — Chicago’s has stalled in the last decade. At its peak in the 1990s, New York’s homicide rate was more than seven times as high as it is now.
In Chicago, however, the landscape appears to be worsening, with killings up more than 45 percent so far this year. In August, Chicago had its deadliest month in about 20 years with at least 90 murders — more than New York and Los Angeles have had for the whole year so far.
Areas with “long-standing conditions of alienation, hopelessness, poverty and lack of opportunities” also have the greatest distrust of the police and the greatest complaints of police abuse, said Craig Futterman, a University of Chicago law professor who directs a civil rights and police accountability project at the law school.
That means homicides go unsolved, perpetuating a dangerous cycle because people committing the crimes are still out there. In some neighborhoods, the city’s clearance rate, the percentage of homicides in which the police arrest or identify a suspect, is less than 20 percent, he said.
Dr. Futterman said the city’s problems were intensified in recent years by the closing of more than 50 public schools in 2013, the dismantling of public housing throughout the 2000s, and the federal government’s successful prosecution of big gang leaders, which destabilized gang hierarchies, territories and illegal drug markets.
While there was violence before, ironically, crime was more contained and easier to police than it is now, he said.
What’s Behind the Surge of Killings in Baltimore?
In 2015, Baltimore’s murder rate not only increased the most among the 100 top cities, it also reached a historic high of 55 homicides per 100,000 residents. Its previous record high was in 1993, when the rate was 48.
Some experts attribute the sudden spike in violence largely to a flood of black-market opiates looted from pharmacies during riots in April 2015. The death of Freddie Gray, a young black man who sustained a fatal spinal cord injury in police custody, had set off the city’s worst riots since the death of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
During the riots , nearly 315,000 doses of drugs were stolen from 27 pharmacies and two methadone clinics, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration, a number much higher than the 175,000 doses the agency initially estimated.
Most of the homicides in Baltimore were connected to the drug trade, and what happened in 2015 was a result of more people “getting into the game of selling drugs,” said Jeffrey Ian Ross, a criminologist at the University of Baltimore.
Police commanders have said that an oversupply of inventory from looting resulted in a violent battle for customers among drug gangs.
“This would have caused a disruption in drug markets, with more people trying to maintain or increase their market share,” Dr. Ross said. “You have new entrants coming into the field, altering the supply and demand of illegal drugs in those neighborhoods,” often leading to increased violence.
If the drug theory holds true, the killings in Baltimore should subside this year. A midyear violent crime survey by the Major Cities Chiefs Police Association showed that while killings were up among 60 large cities, they were slightly down in Baltimore.
“I’m not going to say they’re going to return to historic lows, but we hit a peak last year and things are settling themselves out,” Dr. Ross said.
Note: Data included for the analysis are consistent with the F.B.I.’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program’s definition for homicides. The number of homicides were reported by local and federal officials as of Sept. 8. Departments sometimes revise the numbers as new information emerges.
Sources: Police departments (homicide data for 2015); F.B.I. Uniform Crime Reporting (homicide data from 1985 to 2014); socialexplorer.com; Richard Rosenfeld, University of Missouri-St. Louis; Robert J. Sampson, Harvard University; Craig Futterman, University of Chicago; Jeffrey Ian Ross, University of Baltimore; Brennan Center for Justice, New York University School of Law
There are huge racial disparities in how US police use force
VOX
Black people are much more likely to be shot by police than their white peers.
An analysis of the available FBI data by Vox's Dara Lind found that US police kill black people at disproportionate rates: Black people accounted for 31 percent of police killing victims in 2012, even though they made up just 13 percent of the US population. Although the data is incomplete because it's based on voluntary reports from police agencies around the country, it highlights the vast disparities in how police use force.
Black teens were 21 times as likely as white teens to be shot and killed by police between 2010 and 2012, according to a ProPublica analysis of the FBI data. ProPublica's Ryan Gabrielson, Ryann Grochowski Jones, and Eric Sagara reported: "One way of appreciating that stark disparity, ProPublica's analysis shows, is to calculate how many more whites over those three years would have had to have been killed for them to have been at equal risk. The number is jarring — 185, more than one per week."
The disparities appear to be even starker for unarmed suspects, according to an analysis of 2015 police killings by the Guardian . Racial minorities made up about 37.4 percent of the general population in the US and 46.6 percent of armed and unarmed victims, but they made up 62.7 percent of unarmed people killed by police.
These disparities in police use of force reflect more widespread racial inequities across the entire American criminal justice system. Black people are much more likely to be arrested for drugs, even though they're not more likely to use or sell them. And black inmates make up a disproportionate amount of the prison population.
Joe Posner/Vox
Some of these disparities are explained by socioeconomic factors — such as poverty, unemployment, segregation, and neglect by the police when it comes to serious crimes — that make black Americans much more likely to commit crime than their white counterparts. As a result, police tend to be more present in black neighborhoods — and therefore may be more likely to take policing actions, from traffic stops to arrests to shootings, in these areas.
But a review of the research by the Sentencing Project concluded that throughout various time periods in the past few decades, the higher crime rates in black communities only explained about 61 to 80 percent of black overrepresentation in prisons. This means that up to 39 percent of the racially disparate rate of imprisonment is attributable to other factors, including, potentially, racial bias or past criminal records influencing a prison sentence.
Another study , from 2015, by researcher Cody Ross found, "There is no relationship between county-level racial bias in police shootings and crime rates (even race-specific crime rates), meaning that the racial bias observed in police shootings in this data set is not explainable as a response to local-level crime rates." That suggests that, again, other factors are involved in the disparities seen for these shootings.
One of those potential factors: subconscious racial biases . Studies show, for example, that officers are quicker to shoot black suspects in video game simulations . Josh Correll, a University of Colorado Boulder psychology professor who conducted the research, said it's possible the bias could lead to more skewed outcomes in the field. "In the very situation in which [officers] most need their training," he said, "we have some reason to believe that their training will be most likely to fail them."
The racial disparities have fueled criticisms of law enforcement over the past few years, culminating in the Black Lives Matter movement that has risen to national prominence due to the controversial police killings of Brown in Ferguson, Eric Garner in New York City, Tamir Rice in Cleveland, and Freddie Gray in Baltimore, among others. For critics, the disparities and high-profile killings have fostered concerns that black lives matter less to police, and that the next victim of a police shooting could be just about any black American.
American policing is broken. Here’s how to fix it.
Step one: Police must admit there's a problem.
Updated by German Lopez HYPERLINK "http://www.twitter.com/germanrlopez" @germanrlopez HYPERLINK "mailto:[email protected]" \o "" [email protected] May 2, 2017, 9:24am EDT
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When a Baltimore police shift commander created an arrest form for loitering on public housing, he didn’t even try to hide his racist expectations. In the template, there was no space to fill in gender or race. Instead, that information was automatically filled out: “black male.”
This attitude was not exclusive to one cop in Baltimore. A Justice Department investigation conducted in 2015 and 2016 found black people in Baltimore were much more likely to be stopped than their white counterparts even after controlling for population. One black man in his mid-50s was stopped 30 times in less than four years — nearly one stop a month — despite never receiving a citation or criminal charge.
And these were just some of the many alarming findings of racial bias in the Baltimore Police Department that were unearthed by the Justice Department’s investigation . By the end of it all, the Justice Department found Baltimore police consistently violated at least three amendments in the US Constitution — the First, Fourth, and 14th — and engaged repeatedly and persistently in a pattern of racial bias.
The tyranny of a traffic ticket: How small crimes turn fatal for poor, minority Americans
“Racially disparate impact is present at every stage of BPD’s enforcement actions, from the initial decision to stop individuals on Baltimore streets to searches, arrests, and uses of force,” the report concluded. “These racial disparities, along with evidence suggesting intentional discrimination, erode the community trust that is critical to effective policing.”
It would be one thing if this were just a particularly bad police department in the US. But when you zoom out to look at all the investigations the Justice Department has done over the past several years, typically after protests ignite due to a police shooting perceived as unjust, a pattern emerges: Whether it’s Baltimore; Cleveland; New Orleans; Ferguson, Missouri; or, most recently, Chicago , the Justice Department has found horrific constitutional violations in how police use force, how they target minority residents, how they stop and ticket people, and virtually every other aspect of policing. These issues come up time and time again, no matter the city that federal investigators look at.
One is left with just one possible conclusion: Policing in America is broken.
Many Americans seem well aware of this: The statistics show that many simply don’t trust the very people who are supposed to protect them. But there are essentially two worlds — black and white — for police trust.
A 2016 Pew Research Center survey found, for instance, that black people are less than half as likely to trust the police as their white counterparts. When asked whether police treat racial and ethnic groups equally, 75 percent of white people said cops do an excellent or good job in this area, while just 35 percent of black people said the same. And 75 percent of white people said police do a good or excellent job using the right amount of force for each situation, while just 33 percent of black people did.
Meanwhile, statistics show police are arguably failing to protect residents in black communities: While black people made up about 13 percent of the population in 2015, they made up more than half of reported murder victims.
Thomas Abt, a criminologist at Harvard University, put it in stark terms: “In addition to all of these burdens that we’re placing on African-American communities in terms of aggressive policing, we’re fundamentally failing them at keeping them safe.”
So I set out to find out how, exactly, policing in America can be fixed. I spoke to nine veteran policing and criminal justice experts across the country, with a focus on the big question: How should police and lawmakers address complaints of racial bias while making sure communities are effectively policed for crime?
Based on what I heard from experts, I nailed down eight big policy ideas. These ideas could be done even under a Trump administration that fashions itself as “tough on crime”; almost all policing is done at the local and state, not federal, level — out of the nearly 18,000 law enforcement agencies in America, only a dozen or so are federal. And the ideas are not in any specific order, but experts consistently said that nothing else will work if the first step on this list isn’t fully embraced by law enforcement across the US.
1) Police need to apologize for centuries of abuse
Karl Merton Ferron/Baltimore Sun/TNS via Getty Images
Time and time again, I heard the same thing from several experts: Until police own up to how minority communities view them, they won’t be able to effectively police their communities.
Some police officers might feel many of the criticisms are unfair. Some might hear about the history of police being used on slave patrols, and feel that they are wrongly blamed for things they weren’t even alive for. Some might feel that they are good cops, and it’s only a few officers who are bad.
But that doesn’t matter. The reality is minority communities distrust police. That sentiment is based on a long history of flat-out racist policing in America, even if it doesn’t apply to every single officer or department today. Until police acknowledge that, they will be perceived by many people as trying to cover up a long history of oppression.
David Kennedy, a criminologist at John Jay College, argued that there will always be distrust between police and black communities until cops own up to historical abuses, mimicking what a police chief might say to a community: “We recognize these facts — whether we were there or not, whether we were around during slavery, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, attacks on the civil rights movement, or whether it’s more recent things that we have done that you have found disrespectful and untoward, like zero-tolerance policing and high levels of stop and frisk.”
“IN ORDER TO OVERCOME LACK OF TRUST AND CONFIDENCE, THE POLICE HAVE TO MAKE CONTACT”
So how can police repair this? For one, experts said police need to undertake a big effort — through community meetings, going door to door, their daily patrols, and TV appearances — to get their communities aligned with how policing should be done.
“In order to overcome lack of trust and confidence, the police have to make contact — door-to-door, face-to-face contact — with members of their community,” said Richard Rosenfeld, a criminologist at the University of Missouri in St. Louis. “The police will be rebuffed on occasion, but that’s the only way I see to, in the long run, rebuild trust or, really, build it for the first time in the police in members of these communities.”
Walter Katz, a California attorney who specializes in oversight of law enforcement agencies, likened the potential process to South Africa’s post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Throughout those hearings, investigators spoke candidly with the victims and enforcers of apartheid about what happened. Much of the hearings were televised. In doing this, people not only got to air their grievances and see their concerns heard, but plans were also set in place — including reparations — to help undo the damage that had been done.
Above all, the point is to let communities know that police hear them, are taking what they say seriously, and are planning further steps to address their complaints.
2) Cops should be trained to address their racial biases
Elijah Nouvelage/Getty Images
Out of all the complaints leveled against the police, the biggest one in recent years — echoed by the Black Lives Matter movement — is that police are racially biased.
Sometimes the cause is explicit racism — such as in North Miami Beach, Florida, where police officers used mug shots of black people as target practice. But other times, such biases may occur at the implicit level , where people’s subconscious biases guide their choices even when they’re not fully aware of it.
Josh Correll, a University of Colorado Boulder psychology professor, tested police for racial biases through a shooting simulation . His initial findings showed officers generally did a good job of avoiding shooting unarmed targets of all races. But when shooting was warranted, officers pulled the trigger more quickly against black suspects than white ones. This suggests that officers exhibit some racial bias in shooting.
In the real world, this could lead police to shoot black people at disproportionate rates. Real policing situations, after all, are often much more complicated: Factors — such as a real threat to the officer’s life and the chance that a bullet will miss and accidentally hit a passerby — can make the situation much more confusing to officers.
“In the very situation in which [officers] most need their training,” Correll previously told me , “we have some reason to believe that their training will be most likely to fail them.”
That’s one of the reasons there are racial disparities in police use of force: An analysis of the available FBI data from 2012 by Vox’s Dara Lind found black people accounted for 31 percent of police killing victims, even though they made up just 13 percent of the US population.
It’s not just individual biases driving the disparities, but structural problems as well. As a result of years and years of racial segregation, economic and educational inequality among people of different races, concentrated poverty in minority communities, and the criminal justice system’s neglect of crimes against minorities, there tends to be much more crime in black neighborhoods. So police are deployed more often in these areas, where they’re then more likely to shoot and kill someone.
But higher crime in minority communities doesn’t fully explain the disparities. A 2015 study by researcher Cody Ross found “there is no relationship between county-level racial bias in police shootings and crime rates (even race-specific crime rates).” That suggests something else — such as, potentially, racial bias — is at work.
Phillip Goff, a criminal justice and racial bias expert at John Jay College, told me, this isn’t about whether officers are all evil racists. Instead, this is a bias that has been found time and time again in just about everyone. If you are a human being, chances are you have some level of bias — based on race, gender, religion, and so on. But American media and culture, with their constant depictions of black people as criminals, have shaped Americans’ biases into consistently associating black people with criminality.
“The issue of police bias starts with the thing law enforcement is hiring, which is that they hire humans,” Goff said. “They end up being at least as biased as the rest of the population. And in some instances, I suspect, it may be even slightly more in terms of racial bias.”
For police, the bias can be particularly bad: They are constantly put in situations where they have to think quickly. And that makes it much more likely that their biases will take over. As Goff told me, “If I could put you in the right situation, I could get that particular association to lend itself to certain kinds of behaviors.”
Officers can be trained to help combat their biases. Lorie Fridell, a University of South Florida criminologist who works with cops to help them resist their biases, previously explained that cops can be taught to force themselves to focus on factors that aren’t skin color — such as body language and what a person is holding.
Unfortunately, that training is rarely emphasized by police departments.
A 2006 report from the Justice Department found that police officers typically receive about 111 hours on firearms skill and self-defense — but just 11 on cultural diversity and human relations, eight on community policing strategies, and eight on mediation and conflict management.
This doesn’t speak just to how little police are trained to handle racial biases, but also all sorts of other situations they take part in — mental health crises, interactions with the LGBTQ community, and domestic and sexual abuse cases, as a few examples. Cops just aren’t well-trained to handle a wide variety of sensitive, difficult areas.
If police want to renew community trust, this needs to change. It likely wouldn’t solve all problems — racial bias, for one, is likely to be present to some degree no matter how well cops are trained. But it would help.
3) Police should avoid situations that lead them to use force
Allison Joyce/Getty Images
Often, the error that leads to an unnecessary shooting — and perhaps bias as a driving factor of the excessive force — comes long before an officer pulls out his or her gun. It can happen when an officer decides to approach a scene in a certain way.
Think of the final moments of before a Cleveland police officer shot and killed 12-year-old Tamir Rice in 2014. In that tragedy, officers suspected that Rice, who was black, had an actual firearm, when he was in fact playing with a toy gun. And officers drove right into the park where Rice was playing, shooting the boy within two seconds of getting out of their squad car.
What if officers had, instead of driving into the scene, parked further away, surveyed the area, and walked into the park more slowly, while giving warnings to Rice? It’s of course impossible to say what the outcome would be — but it certainly seems much more likely that Rice would be alive today.
“We talk about the split-second decisions that have to be made when deadly force is used, and it’s a red herring,” Goff said. “Most of the time, [police] are not ambushed in a corner and then they have to figure out what to do. Most of the time, what happens is there are a number of tactical decisions you’ve made up until that point that have compromised your safety.”
“WE HAVE TO BE ABLE TO ACKNOWLEDGE AND IDENTIFY THE SET OF SITUATIONS THAT ARE MOST LIKELY TO FACILITATE BIASED BEHAVIOR”
So if officers have racial biases, and you put them in an intense situation in which they have little to call on but their own biases, those biases are going to guide their actions. “We have to be able to acknowledge and identify the set of situations that are most likely to facilitate biased behavior,” Goff said. “And we want to be able to disarm or interrupt them.”
Goff gave an example from research work he did in Las Vegas . There, police established a foot pursuit policy that said the officer who was giving chase should not be the first person to put their hands on the suspect, with coordinated backup instead arriving on the scene and taking on that role. The idea is that foot pursuits often ended in excessive use of force — after all, they are high-adrenaline chases in which the officer and the suspect can get really angry, really fast. So by limiting, when possible, chasing officers from putting their hands on the suspect, Goff figured you could limit use of force.
The change appeared to work. There was a 23 percent reduction in total use of force and 11 percent reduction in officer injury over several years, on top of reducing racial disparities, according to Goff. “Safer for the officer, safer for the suspects,” he said.
“I didn’t have to talk about race to reduce a disparity that has racial components to it,” he added. “I had to change the fundamental situation where police are chronically engaging with suspects. And that’s the kind of example that I’m talking about how you interrupt the biases of life.”
This is just one example. More broadly, police need to stop being deployed in a way that is particularly aggressive against minority communities — such as when cops in New York City effectively targeted people of color and their whole communities through “stop and frisk.” As Jonathan Blanks, a research associate focused on policing issues at the Cato Institute, told me, “So long as you have [racially disparate policing strategies], you can have all these ideas about how we’re going to measure how many black people we stop and reduce bias there, but I don’t think it’s really going to work.”
4) Officers must be held accountable in a very transparent way
With the above steps, police can avoid more unnecessary uses of force. But there’s another problem: When police do use excessive force or engage in other types of misconduct, there needs to be more transparency and accountability in the aftermath.
The most well-known policy for this is the adoption of body cameras. Over the past couple of years, advocates have pushed police departments to equip all their cops with cameras that will record nearly every move.
The cameras are crucial because video can help eliminate some of the doubt — for the police and civilians — as to what happened in, for example, a shooting.
Take the 2015 police shooting of Walter Scott in North Charleston, South Carolina. An officer, Michael Slager, claimed that Scott had tried to take his stun gun and use it on him before fleeing. Video footage from a civilian at the scene, however, revealed that Scott had not tried to grab Slager’s stun gun, and Slager had shot at Scott’s back as the 50-year-old black man very slowly attempted to flee. And after the shooting, Slager then planted the stun gun near Scott’s dead body — presumably to give his story credibility.
If the cellphone video from the passerby didn’t exist, would Slager have been charged with murder and civil rights violations? Would he have been fired? Would he have gotten away with a totally unjustified shooting? After all, without video, witness testimony may have been limited to Slager’s own account.
Beyond changing the gear that officers wear, some experts argued that police leaders need to embrace a fundamental shift in accountability and transparency. As it stands, police departments are mired in secrecy — making it nearly impossible in some cases to find out if an officer has, for example, been disciplined in the past.
In a 2015 investigation , Robert Lewis, Noah Veltman, and Xander Landen of the New York public radio station WNYC talked to attorneys and experts in all 50 states and Washington, DC, and reviewed laws and court cases to find out which states restrict police disciplinary records. They found that 23 states and DC make the records confidential. And 15 other states limit access to records by, for example, only letting the public see examples of severe discipline, such as suspension or termination. The remaining 12 states generally open police disciplinary records to the public.
Much of this secrecy is ingrained in police culture. The “blue wall of silence” tells cops to stay quiet about other officers’ misconduct. This code is enforced both formally and informally. In Baltimore, for example, the Justice Department found a black sergeant was told to “stay in your lane” when he tried to flag misconduct within the police:
In 2014, a BPD lieutenant placed several signs next to the desk of an African-American sergeant with a reputation for speaking out about alleged misconduct in the Department. Among the signs were warnings to "stay in your lane," "worry about yourself," "mind your own business!!" and "don’t spread rumors!!!" After the sergeant filed a complaint about the signs, the lieutenant admitted to creating them and placing them next to the sergeant’s desk. Yet BPD took no meaningful corrective action. Though the complaint was sustained, the lieutenant received no suspension, fine, or loss of benefits.
To fix this, then, some experts argue that a fundamental shift in leadership is needed.
“The work that needs to be done certainly involves progressive leadership,” said Thomas Nolan, a Boston police veteran and criminologist at Merrimack College of Massachusetts. “We’ve seen, unfortunately, too little of that. We seem to see the same types of people — and there are exceptions — being put in chief executive positions in police departments across the country.”
Policing in America, particularly at the leadership level, tends to be quite insular. For example, William Bratton served as the police commissioner in Boston in the early 1990s, commissioner in New York City in the mid-1990s, chief in Los Angeles in the 2000s, and finally as commissioner again in New York City from 2014 to 2016. Anthony Batts similarly served as police chief in Oakland and Long Beach, California, before moving to the Baltimore Police Department from 2012 to 2015. There are many more similar examples in big and medium-size cities’ police departments.
Nolan’s argument is simple: If the same people tend to be in charge of police agencies, how can we expect them to change to be more transparent?
5) On-the-job incentives for police officers need to change
Robert Nickelserg/Getty Images
As part of changing the culture of transparency and accountability, several experts also argued that the incentives many police departments across the country impose on their officers need to change.
The most commonly cited example comes from Ferguson, Missouri — where Michael Brown’s death by police in 2014 effectively launched the modern Black Lives Matter protests.
The Justice Department investigated the Ferguson Police Department as a result of the protests. It found that police were encouraged to ticket as many people as possible with the explicit goal of raising as much revenue as possible from fines and fees. But to do this, police targeted the most vulnerable — mainly, black residents — with frivolous charges.
The Justice Department cited one example:
Officers frequently arrest individuals under Section 29-16(1) on facts that do not meet the provision’s elements. Section 29-16(1) makes it unlawful to "[f]ail to comply with the lawful order or request of a police officer in the discharge of the officer’s official duties where such failure interfered with, obstructed or hindered the officer in the performance of such duties." Many cases initiated under this provision begin with an officer ordering an individual to stop despite lacking objective indicia that the individual is engaged in wrongdoing. The order to stop is not a "lawful order" under those circumstances because the officer lacks reasonable suspicion that criminal activity is afoot. … Nonetheless, when individuals do not stop in those situations, FPD officers treat that conduct as a failure to comply with a lawful order, and make arrests.
This is not exclusive to Ferguson. In New York City, a group of police officers tried to sue the city and police department over a “quota” to stop and arrest as many people as possible. Some officers acknowledged that officers met this incentive by targeting low-income black neighborhoods with little political power.
“When you put any type of numbers on a police officer to perform, we are going to go to the most vulnerable,” Adhyl Polanco, one of the New York City police officers, told WNBC . “We’re going to [the] LGBT community, we’re going to the black community, we’re going to go to those people that have no boat, that have no power.”
Experts say that police can still be incentivized for productivity, but that can be done without focusing so much on specific numbers of arrests or traffic tickets. It can be done in a more subjective manner through direct supervision. It can also be coupled with other types of data, such as the number of complaints leveled at an officer and how many times a particular cop used force.
But the bottom line is police need to be aware of how strict quotas and incentives can lead officers astray — and take steps to correct any of those unwanted side effects.
6) We need higher standards for police — and better pay for cops
Andrew Burton/Getty Images
Who becomes a police officer likely needs to change, as well — by setting a higher bar for who can qualify for the job.
There are no federal standards for police officers. Federal lawmakers could establish such guidelines, allowing states to treat them as the bare minimum or even expand on them.
States could also individually up their licensing requirements for police. For example, in Florida, barbers are required under state law to have more training than police: Barbers need to log 1,200 hours, while cops need 770. It’s just one state, but it exemplifies how poor the standards can be for police licensing across the US.
Then there are other considerations, such as whether cities and states should require a college degree for cops — something that isn’t required in much of the country right now.
But generally, experts say there should be strong requirements in place that can check for the skills and characteristics we expect of police before they’re put in a live situation.
“WE NEED TO THINK SERIOUSLY ABOUT PAYING THESE GUYS BETTER”
“We want to recruit people who have the capacity for emotional regulation — so they don’t get angry, they don’t see authority challenges as personal challenges, they don’t fall on use of force as the first response to a challenge to their authority,” said Jeffrey Fagan, a criminologist at Columbia University. “We want people who are good at planning and thinking ahead. We want people who have a capacity to reflect on their own work and update their own work — in other words, learn from their mistakes.”
But, Fagan added, “In order to do that, we need to think seriously about paying these guys better.”
This is the rub: Higher standards will almost certainly lead to a need to pay cops more. Otherwise, why would someone with, say, a college degree take a job as a police officer when he or she can get far more pay at a private security firm?
John Roman, a criminal justice expert at the University of Chicago, agreed: “I think we should have higher standards. And if you’re going to have higher standards, you’re going to have to pay them better to attract better-quality people. That’s just the way the free market works.”
7) Police need to focus on the few people in communities causing chaos and violence
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Along with all these changes, police can also take steps that explicitly go after crime while limiting who’s impacted by policing actions.
The vast majority of crime in communities is perpetrated by just a few people in a few specific parts of the city. As Abt, the Harvard criminologist, recently wrote for Vox , “In most HYPERLINK "http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1745-9125.2004.tb00521.x/abstract" cities across the nation, 3 to 5 percent of city blocks account for 50 to 75 percent of all shootings and killings, with 1 percent of a city’s population responsible for 50 to 60 percent of all homicides.”
If police focus on just these few blocks — through policing strategies known as “hot-spot policing” and “focused deterrence” — they can stop and deter a lot of crimes in their cities.
Focused deterrence in particular has been hugely successful: Study after study backs it up, and the method got much of the credit for the “Boston miracle” that saw the city’s violent crime rate drop by 79 percent in the 1990s.
Rosenfeld of the University of Missouri in St. Louis explained the two prongs of focused deterrence: “We clearly know who you are, where you live, and we’re going to do everything we can to stop the violence in this community — and if that means that we arrest and charge you with a serious violent crime, we’re going to do that. If you want out of this life, then, secondly, here are services and support that you might find useful to set a different direction of your life.”
“IN MOST CITIES ACROSS THE NATION, 3 TO 5 PERCENT OF CITY BLOCKS ACCOUNT FOR 50 TO 75 PERCENT OF ALL SHOOTINGS AND KILLINGS”
The social services can be costly, but they’re needed for the strategy to work. For one, they offer a way out to someone caught in a bad place in life — people often get trapped in violent situations due to desperate economic situations. And when cops offer these services, they also signal that they’re not just there to enforce the law, but also to try to help people out of dire circumstances.
“That lends a certain legitimacy to the police,” Rosenfeld said. “They’re not there to just serve warrants or warn people about what’s going to happen to them if they commit another crime, but also conveys a certain degree of concern for those individuals and their lives.”
So these strategies can limit who’s directly impacted by policing — by targeting a few people in a few areas, instead of sweeping whole neighborhoods with aggressive stops. They can also signal to the community that the police get it: Most people in these communities are innocent, and police are going to focus only on those who aren’t.
As Abt told me , “If you get very specific, you are better at fighting crime and reducing violence. But you also improve legitimacy by showing the community that you're not occupying them like a military, but that you're serving them by trying to help them address a small number of people in places that really are hurting the community.”
One big hurdle to these strategies is they can involve a big initial investment — and police departments, used to fighting crime in a certain way, may be resistant to new ideas, especially if they cost more money upfront. But if these strategies work to save and improve lives, there’s a moral imperative for all levels of government to take them more seriously.
8) We need better data to evaluate police and crime
Todd Maisel/NY Daily News Archive via Getty Images
If the federal government does get more involved in funding policing, it could also stand to make another change: massively improve the data we collect on crime and policing in America.
As it stands, the federal government does a terrible job collecting data on crime and police actions. Nationwide crime reports tend to come out with a nearly one-year lag period. And virtually every expert agrees that this data very likely undercounts crime, since it misses crimes that aren’t reported to the police.
“We know virtually nothing about crime in America other than murder, kidnapping, and arson,” Roman of the University of Chicago said. “Rape, robbery, assault, motor vehicle theft, gangs, drugs — we don’t report data back to the federal government that allows the federal government to tell law enforcement how to behave more efficiently or helps researchers understand how crime is created and evolves.”
“WE KNOW VIRTUALLY NOTHING ABOUT CRIME IN AMERICA OTHER THAN MURDER, KIDNAPPING, AND ARSON”
But more comprehensive, current data could be very useful for fighting crime, several experts argued.
“You need that comparative information so you can determine whether that problem you’re experiencing in your own community is relatively distinctive or specific to local community conditions or it’s a common problem in many, many other communities,” Rosenfeld said. “If it’s the latter, you want to consult with those other communities to see how they’re addressing it. If it’s the former, then you know you have to devise strategies that respond to the specifics of the problems in your own community.”
It’s not just crime. Goff pointed out that there’s little to no data on what police do — stops, arrests, use of force, and so on. A 2015 study found that the federal agencies’ police killing data misses as many as half of all people killed by police in America. And the federal government doesn’t try to track more typical police actions, from stops to arrests. (The Justice Department is now moving on a couple of initiatives to change this, but they are still in very early stages, and it’s unclear if the Trump administration will continue these efforts.)
As long as the US fails to collect this data, it’s going to be impossible to evaluate what works to address virtually any of the issues people have with police, from racial bias to crime fighting. It may cost more money to collect this data properly, but every expert I talked to brought it up as a major issue that needs to be addressed.
There’s an underlying point in all these strategies: More effective and transparent policing really can solve the two big problems — racial bias and high crime — pegged to police in America today.
Whenever another police shooting of a black man hits the news, opponents of Black Lives Matter tend to fall back on a question: “But what about black-on-black crime?” The suggestion is that far more black people are murdered by black civilians, so that’s really what someone worried about black lives should worry about.
What these critics miss is that distrust in the police — the key driver behind Black Lives Matter — is also a key driver of crime in minority neighborhoods. “When communities don’t trust the police and are afraid of the police, then they will not and cannot work with police and within the law around issues in their own community,” Kennedy of John Jay College said. “Then those issues within the community become issues the community needs to deal with on their own — and that leads to violence.”
A recent study was particularly illuminating to this end. The study , from sociologists Matthew Desmond of Harvard, Andrew Papachristos of Yale, and David Kirk of Oxford, looked at the effects of 911 calls in Milwaukee after incidents of police violence hit the news.
They found that after the 2004 police beating of Frank Jude , 17 percent (22,200) fewer 911 calls were made in the following year compared with the number of calls that would have been made had the Jude beating never happened. More than half of the effect came from fewer calls in black neighborhoods. And the effect persisted for more than a year, even after the officers involved in the beating were punished. Researchers found similar impacts on local 911 calls after other high-profile incidents of police violence.
“WHEN COMMUNITIES DON’T TRUST THE POLICE AND ARE AFRAID OF THE POLICE, THEN THEY WILL NOT AND CANNOT WORK WITH POLICE AND WITHIN THE LAW AROUND ISSUES IN THEIR OWN COMMUNITY”
But crime was still happening in these neighborhoods. Indeed, as 911 calls dropped, researchers also found a rise in homicides. They note that “the spring and summer that followed Jude’s story were the deadliest in the seven years observed in our study.”
That suggests that people were simply dealing with crime themselves. And although the researchers couldn’t definitively prove it, that might mean civilians took to their own — sometimes violent — means to protect themselves when they couldn’t trust police to stop crime and violence.
“An important implication of this finding is that publicized cases of police violence not only threaten the legitimacy and reputation of law enforcement,” the researchers write, “they also — by driving down 911 calls — thwart the suppression of law breaking, obstruct the application of justice, and ultimately make cities as a whole, and the black community in particular, less safe.”
Better policing can’t stop all crime. There are many other issues, from jobs to housing, that also have an impact. But police, if they are trusted by the community, can have a sizable effect.
To some degree, this should be common sense. Journalist Jill Leovy captured it well in her brilliant book Ghettoside : Noting that homicides are much less likely to be solved in black neighborhoods , she argues that some people in black communities have concluded that police don’t value black lives — and so they need to settle interpersonal conflicts on their own.
Leovy writes, “Take a bunch of teenage boys from the whitest, safest suburb in America and plunk them down in a place where their friends are murdered and they are constantly attacked and threatened. Signal that no one cares, and fail to solve murders. Limit their options for escape. Then see what happens.”
That’s why transparency, accountability, and community cooperation, described as part of the “procedural justice” model of policing , are all so important: They signal that the justice system does care. And if the police do it right — by stopping overly aggressive practices and preventing crime and violence in black neighborhoods — they can signal that black lives really do matter to them.
Why you can’t blame mass incarceration on the war on drugs
The standard liberal narrative about mass incarceration gets a lot wrong. A new book breaks through the myths.
VOX Updated by German Lopez HYPERLINK "http://www.twitter.com/germanrlopez" @germanrlopez HYPERLINK "mailto:[email protected]" \o "" [email protected] May 30, 2017, 9:00am
There’s a “Standard Story” that many Americans, particularly on the left, believe about mass incarceration: During the 1970s and ’80s, the federal government dramatically escalated its war on drugs. This alone led to millions of people getting locked up for fairly low-level drug offenses, causing the US prison population to spike. This new prison population is predominantly black, leading to massive racial disparities in the criminal justice system. And all of this happened, not coincidentally, right after the civil rights movement — showing the rise in incarceration was a ploy to oppress black Americans just after they made huge gains.
But in a new book, Locked In: The True Causes of Mass Incarceration and How to Achieve Real Reform , Fordham University criminal justice expert John Pfaff offers a trove of evidence that this narrative is by and large wrong or, at the very least, misses much of the real story.
The “Standard Story” of mass incarceration, as Pfaff calls it, was largely popularized by a 2010 book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander. Pfaff goes through many facts and statistics to show that this Standard Story gets a lot wrong about the causes and realities of mass incarceration, from the types of crime that people are locked up for (in reality, largely violent offenses) to the areas in which reform is truly needed (with a focus on state and local, not federal, reform).
“The core failing of the Standard Story is that it consistently puts the spotlight on statistics and events that are shocking but, in the grand scheme of things, not truly important for solving the problems we face,” he writes. “As a result, it gives too little attention to the more mundane-sounding yet far more influential causes of prison growth.”
The story that Pfaff carefully describes is different from the standard narrative: It’s not drug offenses that are driving mass incarceration, but violent ones. It’s not the federal government that’s behind mass incarceration, but a whole host of prison systems down to the local and state level. It’s not solely police and lawmakers leading to more incarceration and lengthy prison sentences, but prosecutors who are by and large out of the political spotlight.
The book dampens much of the excitement around the progress we’ve seen in the past few years. Starting in 2010, the incarceration rate began to fall in the US for the first time in decades. But the drop has been slight, driven mostly by changes to sentencing laws for low-level drug and property crimes.
And based on Pfaff’s work, this drop won’t continue — at least in a dramatic fashion — as long as reformers and the public remain focused on a Standard Story that’s almost entirely about the federal war on drugs.
“Simply stopping the rise in incarceration has been a huge accomplishment,” Pfaff notes. “If the goal is real decarceration, however, it is time to shift focus to the much broader, much more confounding issues that keep us locked in to our current predicament.”
To this end, Pfaff agrees that, for example, we should strive to get low-level drug offenders out of prison. He just says it’s not enough — that the real issue is much bigger.
It’s an uncomfortable read, not least because it suggests America will have to make some very tough choices if it wants to seriously cut the incarceration rate: Are we really okay with locking up fewer violent offenders? Does the country really have the ability to sustain a focus on local and state politics to ensure that the real sources of mass incarceration come down? If America does stumble upon a new crime wave or drug crisis, will all the work that’s already been done be pulled back as politicians resurrect “tough on crime” rhetoric (like President Donald Trump has )?
All of this is a reason for reformers to be pessimistic about their ability to undo mass incarceration. The bright spot, if there is one, is that work like Pfaff’s can help expose the real problems in the system, leading to more sustainable solutions.
Drug offenders make up a small portion of the US prison population
No misconception wraps the Standard Story more than the belief that mass incarceration was caused by the war on drugs. This was widely popularized by Alexander’s The New Jim Crow. That book argues that, facing the success of the civil rights movement, racist lawmakers shifted to another regime to try to control black Americans: the criminal justice system. So the federal government launched the war on drugs, locking up black people for low-level drug offenses and driving incarceration rates in the US to astronomical highs.
“The impact of the drug war has been astounding. In less than thirty years, the U.S. penal population exploded from around 300,000 to more than 2 million, with drug convictions accounting for the majority of the increase,” Alexander writes. She later claims that “the uncomfortable reality is that arrests and convictions for drug offenses — not violent crime — have propelled mass incarceration.”
Pfaff demonstrates that this central claim of the Standard Story is wrong. “In reality, only about 16 percent of state prisoners are serving time on drug charges — and very few of them, perhaps only around 5 or 6 percent of that group, are both low level and nonviolent,” he writes. “At the same time, more than half of all people in state prisons have been convicted of a violent crime.”
By the numbers, Pfaff is correct: The latest data by the US Bureau of Justice Statistics shows that in state prisons, where about 87 percent of US inmates are held, nearly 53 percent are in for violent offenses (such as murder, manslaughter, robbery, assault, and rape), while only about 16 percent, as Pfaff said, are in for drug offenses.
These figures are at best a minimum for the number of violent offenders in prison. It’s not rare for violent offenders to plea down their charges to nonviolent crimes; this lets offenders get a lower sentence, and it lets prosecutors and judges skip a costly trial. So at least some of the supposedly nonviolent offenders have likely committed violent crimes.
This context is crucial to understanding why mass incarceration happened: It really was a reaction to a massive violent crime wave. From the 1970s to ’90s, violent crime rose dramatically across the US — and lawmakers responded, in what Pfaff characterizes as an overreaction, with mass incarceration.
That doesn’t rule out the role of racism. One reason that policymakers overreacted to the crime wave, Pfaff acknowledges, is likely prejudice, given that “our durable history of racism may make rising crime seem more frightening to white voters than it is to Europeans [who didn’t react to their own crime waves with similar bouts of incarceration], or at least it may ensure greater rewards (or fewer risks) for politicians who crack down on poor minority communities.”
But the statistics indicate that violent crime played a huge role in mass incarceration. It wasn’t just — or even mostly — the war on drugs. “Until we accept that meaningful prison reform means changing how we punish violent crimes, true reform will not be possible,” Pfaff writes.
Yet the opposite has happened. Over the past few years, local and state lawmakers have enacted criminal justice reforms. But these efforts almost always focus on low-level drug and property offenses. In some cases, lawmakers and reformers will argue that low-level offenders need to be kept out of prison so more violent offenders can be locked up — a framework that could lead to more incarceration, not less. (Consider the common line that we need to “focus expensive prison beds on those who deserve them the most.”)
Pfaff cites Georgia, often celebrated as a success story in criminal justice reform, as one example: “Georgia’s lauded 2011 reforms have cut prison populations, but hidden in that decline is a rise in the absolute number of people serving time for violent crimes — people whose sentences tend to be longer, and whose rising imprisonment may, in the long run, undo the short-run declines.”
This won’t work, Pfaff argues: “Freeing every single person who is in a state prison on a drug charge would only cut state prison populations back to where they were in 1996-1997, well into the ‘mass incarceration’ period. That’s not to say we shouldn’t think about releasing a lot of those who are in prison for these sorts of crimes, but we need to be realistic about what doing so would accomplish more broadly.”
The big criminal justice story is local, not federal
A fundamental problem with how the Standard Story approaches mass incarceration is the narrative poses the greater rates of imprisonment as the work of one system, working to perpetuate mass incarceration as a singular response to civil rights gains. As Alexander writes in The New Jim Crow, “We have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.”
The reality is that there are many systems at play — more than 3,100, representing every county and county equivalent in America. As Pfaff writes, “[T]he term ‘criminal justice system’ is a misnomer; criminal justice is, at best, a set of systems, and at worst it is a swirling mess of somewhat antagonistic agencies.”
Despite the perennial focus on the federal criminal justice system in the media, most incarceration and law enforcement take place at the local level. “About 87 percent of all prisoners are held in state systems,” Pfaff writes. “The federal government runs the single largest prison system, but several states have systems that are fairly close to the federal one in size, and if we look at total populations under some sort of correctional observation (not just prison, but also jail, parole, and probation), the federal government quickly falls out of first place.”
The focus on the federal prison system may explain why many in the media and other experts think that drug offenses are such a huge driver of incarceration. In the federal system, about half of prisoners are in for drug crimes — more than three times the rate of the state systems.
But given that the state systems contain a much larger bulk of the prison population, Pfaff argues the fight to end mass incarceration should focus at the local and state level — and that means focusing on crimes that go far beyond drugs.
Emphasis on local. “Take New York, a state that has experienced one of the longest sustained decarcerations in recent history, with prison populations falling by about 25 percent since 1999,” Pfaff writes. “This looks like a state success story, but the entire decline between 2000 and 2011 took place in just twelve of the state’s sixty-two counties, with the other fifty counties adding inmates to state prisons during that time.”
The federal government does have some sway over local and state prison systems. But Pfaff argues that this influence is perhaps not as strong as people think.
To demonstrate this, he looks at the federal government’s main tool for driving criminal justice policies at the local and state levels: grant money. These funds are supposed to encourage local and state government to adopt certain policies, but they’re just not sizable enough to make a big impact.
“Between 1993 and 2012, eight major grant-making arms of the US Department of Justice awarded about $38 billion to state and local governments,” Pfaff writes. “As a percentage of annual criminal justice spending, these grants consistently hovered (in total) around 2 percent for the states and under 1 percent for local governments.”
In short, the federal government’s war on drugs never played much of a role in incarceration because the federal government just doesn’t play much of a role in incarceration overall.
Prosecutors are enormously powerful, yet rarely discussed in reform efforts
Typically, discussions of the criminal justice system focus on lawmakers, prisons, the police, and maybe judges. Rarely, however, is the most powerful actor in this system mentioned: the prosecutor.
Local and state prosecutors are enormously powerful in the US criminal justice system, in large part because they are given so much discretion to prosecute however they see fit. For example, former Brooklyn District Attorney Kenneth Thompson in 2014 announced that he would no longer enforce low-level marijuana arrests. Think about how this works: Pot is still very much illegal in New York state, but Brooklyn’s district attorney flat-out said that he would ignore an aspect of the law — and it’s completely within his discretion to do so.
Prosecutors make these types of decisions all the time: Should they bring the type of charge that will trigger a lengthy mandatory minimum sentence? Should they bring a charge that’s only a misdemeanor? Should they strike a deal for a lower sentence, but one that can be imposed without a costly trial?
Courts and juries do, in theory, act as checks on prosecutors. But in practice, they don’t: More than 90 percent of criminal convictions are resolved through a plea agreement, so by and large prosecutors and defendants — not judges and juries — have almost all the say in the great majority of cases that result in incarceration or some other punishment.
Many prosecutors are also elected. This, too, is supposed to keep prosecutors in check. But in practice, prosecutors try to appease the electorate by looking “tough on crime” — and that means imposing harsh prison sentences, as well as locking up as many “bad guys” as possible. (This may go against voters’ wishes, but another problem is voters don’t actually do much to hold prosecutors accountable: When Ronald Wright of Wake Forest University School of Law looked at data from 1996 to 2006, he found that about 95 percent of incumbent prosecutors won reelection, and 85 percent ran unopposed in general elections.)
Pfaff has even found evidence that prosecutors have been the key drivers of mass incarceration in the past couple of decades. Analyzing data from state judiciaries, he compared the number of crimes, arrests, and prosecutions from 1994 to 2008. He found that reported violent and property crime fell, and arrests for almost all crimes also fell. But one thing went up: the number of felony cases filed in court.
Prosecutors were filing more charges even as crime and arrests dropped, throwing more people into the prison system. Prosecutors were driving mass incarceration.
Pfaff provides a real-world example of this kind of dynamic: “Take South Dakota, which in 2013 passed a reform bill that aimed to reduce prison populations. The law did lead to prison declines in 2014 and 2015, yet at the same time prosecutors responded by charging more people with generally low-level felonies, and over these two years total felony convictions rose by 25 percent.” In the long term, this could lead to even larger prison populations.
To combat this, Pfaff argues that states could enact, for example, prosecutorial guidelines that limit the amount of discretion these officials have.
“Almost all stages of the criminal justice system now operate under some sort of guideline or actuarial regime,” he writes. “The lone exception is the prosecutor. Although prosecutors need room to exercise discretion, their job is not so uniquely different from the other parts of the criminal justice system that they alone cannot do it if they are subjected to some sort of guidance.”
Yet, he explains, “No major piece of state-level reform legislation has directly challenged prosecutorial power (although some reforms do in fact impede it), and other than a few, generally local exceptions, their power is rarely a topic in the national debate over criminal justice reform.”
The bottom line: mass incarceration is about way more than the federal war on drugs
Piece by piece, Pfaff paints a more nuanced picture of the criminal justice systems in America than that of the Standard Story. In the end, it’s not that the war on drugs or the federal system doesn’t matter; it’s that they both play a much smaller role than they are typically given credit for. Pfaff goes through similar data on private prisons , the length of certain prison sentences, and other Standard Story tropes — showing that they all tend to get outsize attention given their actual impact on incarceration.
It all points to one conclusion: To truly eliminate mass incarceration, reformers will have to at some point shift more attention to dealing with the mass incarceration of violent offenders, not just low-level drug offenders, and do so with a focus on the state and local levels, particularly prosecutors in these areas.
This puts reformers and lawmakers who want to end mass incarceration in a much more difficult situation. For one, it’s going to be way more challenging to advocate for lower sentences and fewer admissions for violent offenders.
A poll conducted by Morning Consult for Vox last year, for example, found that nearly eight in 10 US voters support reducing prison sentences for people who committed a nonviolent crime and have a low risk of reoffending. But fewer than three in 10 backed shorter prison sentences for people who committed a violent crime and have a low risk of reoffending.
Pfaff tries his hand at some of the messaging that will be needed here: He argues that incarceration is simply an ineffective way to combat crime, while it imposes all sorts of costs on individuals and society that likely outweigh its benefits.
“It’s true that crime is costly — but so, too, is punishment, especially prison,” he writes. “The real costs are much higher than the $80 billion we spend each year on prisons and jails: they include a host of financial, physical, emotional, and social costs to inmates, their families, and communities. Maybe reducing these costs justifies some rise in crime.”
It’s hard to imagine Americans buying Pfaff’s suggestion that we should accept more crime. But he’s certainly right that prison is an ineffective way of dealing with crime, based on much of the research in this area.
A 2015 review of the research by the Brennan Center for Justice estimated that more incarceration — and its abilities to incapacitate or deter criminals — explained about 0 to 7 percent of the crime drop since the 1990s. Other researchers estimate it drove 10 to 25 percent of the crime drop since the ’90s.
More incarceration can lead even to more crime. As the National Institute of Justice concluded in 2016, “Research has found evidence that prison can exacerbate, not reduce, recidivism. Prisons themselves may be schools for learning to commit crimes.”
Meanwhile, criminal justice experts have come up with all sorts of other solutions to combating crime. There are new police strategies — such as “hot-spot policing” and “focused deterrence” — that have measurable impacts on crime, including violence. There are other ideas focused more on socioeconomic issues, such as stricter alcohol policies, raising the age for dropping out of school, and some behavioral intervention programs.
“Besides prison, crime is shaped by the number of police, the unemployment rate, wage levels, the number of crime-aged young men in the population, immigration levels, cultural attitudes toward violence, technological improvements, and so much more,” Pfaff writes.
This creates a lot more room to enact policies that are less brutal and much more efficient at dealing with crime than prisons are. “Hiring a police officer is probably about as expensive as hiring a prison guard, for example, but investing in police has a much bigger deterrent effect and avoids all the capital expenditures of prisons,” Pfaff argues. “Steven Levitt has estimated that $1 spent on policing is at least 20 percent more effective than $1 spent on prisons.”
In an ideal world, maybe America would spend infinite money on these programs and stop all crime forever. But resources are limited. So the US and the different criminal justice systems within it could see better results if they put the money they do have toward anti-crime policies other than prison.
Adopting this sort of perspective on criminal justice issues, Pfaff argues, is crucial to undoing mass incarceration. The important thing here isn’t just to pass laws that cut prison sentences or make it harder to lock someone up, but to fundamentally alter the way that Americans and their leaders think of crime in America. Only then can the US adopt the kind of mentality that will push against “tough on crime” attitudes even as the crime rate goes up.
After all, even if the US did enact a bunch of reforms now, there’s always the fear of a future crime wave, Pfaff explains: “If crime starts to really rise again, which almost certainly will happen at some point, there’s nothing to prevent legislators from rolling back the current reforms and overreacting once more.” He later added, “It is a change in attitude, more than anything else, that will prevent legislatures from bringing back tough laws they earlier repealed.”
That’s why work like Pfaff’s is so important: Only by understanding the real causes of mass incarceration can the public and policymakers be prepared to undo and resist it now and in the future.
