Options for fighting crime beyond the Biden plan
Political commentary follows a natural progression: A problem appears, politicians promise to fix it, columnists elaborate the reasons their proposal won’t work and frustrated readers retort, “Well, what’s your solution then?”
So I was not surprised when readers wanted to know my solution to the United States’ homicide spike, after I suggested that President Joe Biden’s proposed solution wasn’t actually much of one.
I wish I had a prepackaged 27-point plan guaranteed to fight crime, improve community relations and balance the federal budget.
Instead what I have are theses about fighting crime that won’t tell you exactly what works but will suggest what doesn’t.
Most fundamentally, I believe that controlling crime is an essential public good, without which healthy cities are impossible.
It most benefits the least advantaged, who cannot afford a doorman building, a safer neighborhood, a home in an affluent suburb.
I believe that the hundreds of millions of guns in this country do a lot of damage, including making our policing worse, because police officers are always worried about getting shot and are correspondingly more aggressive.
I also believe, however, that there is no practical, much less constitutional, way to get rid of all those guns, most of which are in the hands of law-abiding people who understandably resent being asked to give them up because criminals abuse theirs.
Given the fantastic oversupply of available weaponry, “reasonable gun control” is more likely to please the Democratic base than to meaningfully reduce crime.
I also believe that, with some targeted exceptions, such as community violence interventions or aggressive outreach on mental illness, social programs are not a cost-effective way to fight crime, because most people benefited by that sort of spending would not commit a crime in the first place.
As criminal justice policy expert Mark Kleiman pointed out in his 2009 book, “When Brute Force Fails,” transferring all government spending on criminal justice to education would increase education budgets by a fraction — perhaps a third.
Yet no one seriously thinks that a 33% increase in the education budget would eliminate crime, or even hold it to current
levels, without police on the street.
I believe that policing works, because high crime is a bad equilibrium. The more likely it is that crime will be detected and punished, the less likely it is to happen at all —even the most vicious rapist is unlikely to attack his next victim in front of a cop.
That means crime is susceptible to both vicious and virtuous cycles: As crime rises, the likelihood that any particular crime will be punished falls, and vice versa.
So it’s better to catch crime spikes early and crush their momentum. If we don’t catch things in time, however, we might be able to get to a better equilibrium using what Kleiman calls “dynamic concentration,” such as hot-spot policing: Pick one neighborhood or group of offenders and flood the zone, promising that any offense will be punished.
As crime falls, the virtuous cycle frees up enforcement resources that can then be redirected to the next problem.
By changing these incentives, I believe we can steer people out of a life of crime, helping them as well as society.
I believe that the welfare of criminals matters a lot, which is why prisons should be both nicer places and last resorts, used only for the minority of violent and incorrigible offenders who pose a severe threat to the rest of us.
I believe that our country gets this exactly backwards: Our justice system can catch and try only a minority of offenders, but the ones we do try risk draconian sentences in brutal conditions.
We should aim for much higher detection rates and
milder punishments.
Because of this, I believe that the United States is radically overprisoned but actually underpoliced, especially in our most vulnerable communities.
As a share of gross domestic product, total prison spending here is high, but police spending is low compared to many peer nations, even though our homicide rate is dramatically higher — more than twice that of Canada, and more than five times the rate of Germany or Britain.
We should have more police, train them longer and pay them better. This could help attract better candidates, for one thing.
Also, government generally keeps its wage bill down by compensating civil servants with off-the-books perks like shields against liability or being fired.
Pay money, instead, and demand accountability in exchange.
Finally, I believe that implementation matters immensely and that Biden’s ability to influence implementation is limited by the Constitution and by reality: The best policing is deeply embedded in a community, responding to local conditions.
Jurisdictions should learn best practices from each other, but ultimately their solutions have to be homegrown. Which means we should all spend less time demanding the impossible from “Uncle Joe” and more time asking our mayors what their plan is to get more and better cops on the streets while putting fewer people in prison.