To fight crime

Invest in quality policing

Government has no higher duty than to ensure public safety. And we’re falling short. Crime is up everywhere. Last year was Little Rock’s highest year on record for homicides.

In the long term, the best way to prevent crime is to address its root causes. Poverty, lack of education, lack of opportunity, lack of family support, lack of community support, and substance abuse are all correlated with higher crime. Connecting young Arkansans to a good education, mentorship, support, and fulfilling careers will go a long way toward preventing crime in the next generation.

But we need to improve public safety in the short term, too. In doing so, it’s critical that we pursue policies that have been proven to work. We shouldn’t ask Arkansas taxpayers to waste money on tough-sounding policies, like indiscriminately longer prison sentences, that simply aren’t effective in reducing crime. And it’s cruel to make worried Arkansas families wait for better outcomes that will never result from these dead-end policies, when there are approaches that we could be pursuing that would actually make us safer.

Here’s something that would actually reduce crime: Give law enforcement a raise.

Arkansas law enforcement officers are underpaid. As a result, we have a serious shortage of officers. The Governor’s 2020 Task Force to Advance the State of Law Enforcement in Arkansas reported that the average starting salary for an Arkansas law enforcement officer was $28,610, and the average salary was $40,750. That’s lower than the average Arkansas salary, and far too low for highly trained, armed, professional work that requires multiple skill sets and has a huge impact on public safety. Low pay is the single biggest reason that Arkansas doesn’t have enough officers. According to the task force, law enforcement administrators reported low pay as the No. 1 barrier to recruiting (89 percent) and retention (96 percent).

Last year, Arkansas gave law enforcement officers a one-time $5,000 bonus. It’s a start, but not nearly enough. We need to invest in a sustained, meaningful raise for every law enforcement officer in every city and county in the state.

Increasing officer pay would reduce crime in two important ways. First, it would allow cities and counties to hire more officers to fill their numerous vacant positions in places like Little Rock. Having enough officers to respond to calls, patrol neighborhoods, solve cases, and pursue partnership-based community policing would reduce crime. The improvement doesn’t exclusively happen through more arrests, either. Research shows that having more officers out on the streets prevents crimes from being committed in the first place.

Second, increasing pay would improve the quality of the law enforcement workforce. While there are plenty of capable and honorable people who are willing to protect and serve despite low pay, higher salaries would remove a barrier that prevents many good candidates from becoming officers. Quality officers, naturally, are skilled at preventing and addressing crime. They also tend to avoid the conduct issues that can hurt community trust and even cost innocent lives. Better compensation creates higher demand for positions. which encourages self-regulation and accountability for bad actors.

The governor was justifiably proud of adopting Arkansas Democrats’ proposal to set the minimum teacher salary at $50,000. Raising pay for teachers is a smart investment for the state. Same goes for law enforcement. We should establish a $50,000 minimum salary for certified law enforcement officers in every police and sheriff ’s department in Arkansas. And we should ensure sufficient ongoing funding to move the whole pay scale up, funding a potential raise of around $16,000 per officer, so that cities and counties can continue to bump officers’ salaries annually based on experience and qualifications and will not be forced to compress salaries into a narrow band. With state support, cities and counties could give officers a raise without having to increase local sales taxes or cut services.

It would be a significant investment. But reducing crime is worth it. It impacts personal safety, protection of property, quality of life, the economy, and just about everything else. And improving policing is an efficient expenditure. A 2018 MIT study showed that every dollar spent on extra policing generates about $1.63 in social benefits, primarily through fewer murders.

Not only is quality policing more effective than indiscriminately longer sentences and more prisons, it’s much less expensive.

It costs $56 a day to house a prison inmate. If our 23,000 parolees were instead behind bars, that would be $470 million a year. And building one or more new prisons to accommodate longer sentences could cost well over $500 million. Because the cost-benefit so clearly favors police spending over prison spending, every country in the world but one spends more on police than prisons. The United States is the only outlier. Arkansas should reject the failed approach of prioritizing prisons over quality policing.

There’s a lot we can do to address crime. Above all, we must do better in addressing the deep social and economic issues that give rise to crime. Certain reforms within the criminal justice system, like expanding specialty courts and improving re-entry services, have a good track record in restoring offenders to productive society. But to make an immediate, sustained impact on preventing crime, we should start by investing in quality policing.