More Police, Fewer Prisons, Less Crime
By Jay Donde
What do two identically-named social programs, the 9/11 terror attacks, and a placeholder mayor all have in common? Each contributed, entirely by accident, to our current understanding of why crime occurs and how we should respond to it. In fact, among public safety scholars, practitioners, and policymakers there is now a general consensus: more police means fewer prisons and less crime.
Our story begins in the 1990s when Boston was struggling with high rates of gun violence. A broad set of stakeholders including the police, district attorney, school district, and gang outreach workers came together with the Harvard Kennedy school to tackle the problem. The team discovered a pattern in Boston that was later found to be a consistent feature of crime in other major cities: small, tightly knit social networks comprising less than six percent of the population were typically responsible for upwards of 70 percent of a city’s violent crime.
In response, the team designed an approach called “Operation Ceasefire,” which involved interdisciplinary units of police, prosecutors, social workers, and community organizations collaborating to engage individuals at high risk of committing violent crime. The units made clear to targeted individuals that criminal activity would be met with the full force of the law. At the same time, they offered a portfolio of support services and community resources to help those individuals go straight.
This combined “carrots and sticks” approach worked. In Boston, youth homicides decreased by more than 60 percent in less than five years. Today, this approach to crime prevention, often referred to generically as “focused deterrence,” continues to produce results.
Notably, at the same time that Operation Ceasefire was being implemented in cities across the country, a “carrots only” approach – involving social services and community outreach but no police or prosecutors – was being tried elsewhere. This latter approach, with the nearly identical name of “Ceasefire,” did not meaningfully reduce violent crime.
A few years after Operation Ceasefire was implemented in Boston, the economists Jonathan Klick and Alex Tabarrok noticed that a natural experiment in police redeployment was occuring in Washington, DC. After 9/11, the Department of Homeland Security developed a color-coded rubric to classify the nation’s “terrorism threat level.” When levels were elevated, additional officers were deployed to high-risk areas near the Capitol. Klick and Tabarrok found that crime rates varied significantly across time within those areas, and that the rates were negatively correlated with threat level: at low levels like blue and green, crime followed historical trends; at high levels like red and orange, crime plummeted. The only difference on the ground, though, was the presence of more police officers.
Klick and Taborrok’s study was supported by robust bodies of literature in the fields of cognitive psychology and behavioral science showing that the single most effective way to deter crime is to ramp up the certainty of being caught. This is especially true for young men, the group that commits the vast majority of crimes. These offenders typically don’t think through the consequences of their actions or believe they’ll ever be arrested. Even those who are more seasoned stick to exploiting moments of vulnerability and targeting defenseless victims. When there’s a cop nearby, most won't roll the dice on a mugging, car theft, or drug sale.
Our story continues in the 2010s. After then-mayor Gavin Newsom won election as lieutenant governor of California, the Board of Supervisors chose Ed Lee as a compromise candidate to take over as mayor, erroneously believing the unassuming city administrator was no threat to run for re-election. Except Lee did run, and win, twice. One of his most significant achievements was cleaning up parts of the Tenderloin, something he succeeded in doing largely because he didn’t know you weren’t supposed to do it. As Randy Shaw, the longtime executive director of the Tenderloin Housing Clinic, tells it:
For many years the first block of Turk (between Mason and Taylor) was the leading drug dealer area… Lee ordered [then-Chief of Police Greg] Suhr to have two officers posted in the area 24/7. Suhr strongly disagreed with the mayor. He said he walked a beat in the Tenderloin in the 1980s and that was how the neighborhood was. Lee famously replied, “Well, it’s not going to be that way anymore”…
The south side of the first block of Turk was permanently vacated by dealers. Of the 50-75 dealers on lower Turk, a handful likely moved to existing drug operations on Turk and Leavenworth. But for anyone visiting the Tenderloin, Turk Street was a different world while Leavenworth looked the same.
Indeed, research shows that most crimes occur in a few neighborhoods, on a few streets, and at a few intersections – i.e. “hot spots.” Increased police presence in these areas reduces crime, and not just by displacing it elsewhere. But the most impactful implementations of hotspot policing don’t simply rely on the deterrent effect of more cops on the street. This must be followed up with, at least initially, an emphasis on enforcing quality of life laws. That’s because the key mechanism is not policing – that’s only the catalyst. The prohibition of overt criminal activity on the street means more pedestrian traffic and a more hospitable environment for businesses. More businesses in a community means more tax revenue, more political influence, and, importantly, more civic participation in the form of neighborhood groups and informal relationships. Each of these factors reinforces the other, yielding virtuous feedback loops that push neighborhoods past the tipping point from “dangerous” to “safe.”
A strategy like the one that cleaned up the Tenderloin works better when officers proactively address illegal behavior, and that typically means some form of “stop-question-frisk.” Often misunderstood and distorted as just “stop-and-frisk,” stop-question-frisk is a constitutionally permissible, highly effective strategy when implemented narrowly – for example, when the focus is exclusively on arresting and prosecuting individuals for carrying illegal firearms. Multiple studies have shown that “firearms first” policing dramatically reduces homicide rates and, more broadly, violent crime.
Collectively, these approaches – focused deterrence, hotspot policing, and firearms first/stop-question-frisk – work because they concentrate resources where they can be most effective. Most crimes are committed by a small number of individuals frequenting a few dangerous areas and engaging in a limited number of high-risk behaviors. These approaches have something else in common, too: They require that police departments be well staffed. When departments have plenty of officers, they can implement a diverse array of proven strategies to prevent crime, effect safe arrests, and build trust within communities. These strategies aren't available to departments that have only enough officers to rush from one emergency call to the next.
We ignore this lesson at our peril. The social and economic costs of crime are staggering. Crime makes life harder for businesses to operate, depriving struggling neighborhoods of basic services. Crime makes employees afraid to go to work. Crime creates a pandemic of fear, emptying out parks and churches and social clubs, trapping children indoors, and draining the lifeblood from neighborhoods and cities. Measured in economic terms – the cost of lives lost to violence and incarceration, victims’ pain and suffering, property loss, and reductions in civic participation – crime costs American society hundreds of billions or trillions annually.
If we’re serious about alleviating these harms, keeping people out of prison, and reviving our most troubled neighborhoods, we would do well to pay attention to the winning formula hit upon by many European cities, which field far more police officers per capita than cities in the US: more police, fewer prisons, less crime.
