(Fighting) crime doesn't pay

Freddie's thoughts on crime are worth reading:

Briefly-- this post reminded me of an important fact about the debate over crime. Discussions of crime and crime prevention tend to be deeply political and often quite harsh, with differing camps making various accusations of each other. Liberals' concern for rights of the accused is often represented by conservatives as a failure to be tough on crime. Conservatives' tendency to push for harsh punishment and aggressive enforcement is often represented by liberals as a slouch towards totalitarianism.

But the actual small-scale policy prescriptions that work best to reduce crime tend to be rather apolitical, or so it seems to me. Much has been made of the aggression of the Giuliani-era police force in New York city, and the enormous reduction in crime during that period. (I find the NYPD's record on racial equity and the number of violent acts against black men during that time very disturbing.) But the people who know the best all seem to think that the gains weren't from racial profiling or more aggressive police actions, but from the increase in the number of police officers and the large increase in information-sharing within the department. Boots on the ground and intra-agency interoperability and communication seem to be the most important facet of reducing crime in our nation's cities. And those are both things that I find people of most political stripes are amenable to.

Though I think this has a lot of merit, I don't think it's quite that simple.  Certainly, there's broad agreement on some policies that everyone should be for:  put more cops on the street, get them out of their cars and talking to the community, and hold precinct commanders responsible for reducing crime in their districts.  (I was recently shocked to be told that DC still hasn't implemented the computer-based analyses, modeled on the Compstat system pioneered in New York by Bill Bratton, that are now standard in most major cities. No wonder crime is still so high).

But the fact is, the more cops you put on the street, the more interactions they will have with citizens.  And in a big city, where many of those citizens will be strangers, this means more potential for things to go dramatically wrong.

Now, you can mitigate this by forcing beat cops to stay on their beat until they really know the place, so they spend less time hassling "good kids".  And certainly, the quasi-military tactics that have become popular all over the country (with voters as well as police departments) are often counterproductive bits of political theater.  But the fact remains that if you put more police on the street, you are probably going to end up with more complaints--not least because criminals don't enjoy being hassled any more than anyone else.