The Case for More Police
Via Mark Kleiman, William Stuntz makes the case for increased federal assistance to local governments to hire police officers. He’s making the case in The Weekly Standard so it’s filled with a fair amount of somewhat annoying conservative rhetoric and framing, down to the use of the term “police surge” but he’s still right.
Among other things, staying strictly within the realm of things that count as “tough on crime” but increasing the number of prison beds and increasing the number of cops on the streets are effective at reducing crime. At boosting incarceration is considerably less humane and more socially destructive. Both police and prisoners are necessary, but we’ve gone from having twice as many police officers as prison inmates to having twice as many inmates as police officers. It’s not a beneficial switch.
42 Responses to “The Case for More Police”
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March 9th, 2009 at 12:09 pm
Among other things, staying strictly within the realm of things that count as “tough on crime” but increasing the number of prison beds and increasing the number of cops on the streets are effective at reducing crime. At boosting incarceration is considerably less humane and more socially destructive.
What?
March 9th, 2009 at 12:10 pm
Perhaps if the chattering classes didn’t spend so much time nattering on about how cops are uncivilized Fascist neanderthals, and then trying to sue their @$$es of when they do their jobs, more people would be willing to become cops.
Just a thought.
March 9th, 2009 at 12:11 pm
If we had the cojones to REALLY crack down on drugs within our borders, Malaysia style, then I guarantee a big part of the crime problem would go away.
March 9th, 2009 at 12:15 pm
The most troubling aspect of incarceration is it doesn’t do what it needs to do well. It doesn’t rehabilitate, nor does it discourage recidivism. It also serves as a training ground for an inmate expanding his “skills’ if you will. It dehumanizes and degrades. Once free you’re never really free, with all manner of institutional and legal stigmas attached to your person. Getting a job, housing, schooling and satisfying other needs are fraught with hurdles and onerous requirements, thus steering many right back to prison. Our penal system is a pathetic structure for dealing with crime.
March 9th, 2009 at 12:22 pm
There are far more applicants to my local large police departments (Minneapolis and Saint Paul) than positions available. Like most places we have large pool of young wanna be bad asses with below average inteligence.
March 9th, 2009 at 12:25 pm
Too bad much of any hypothetical money allocated will be spent on ridiculous, unnecessary armored toys.
March 9th, 2009 at 12:28 pm
Both police and prisoners are necessary, but we’ve gone from having twice as many police officers as prison inmates to having twice as many inmates as police officers. It’s not a beneficial switch.
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What is the problem with the ratioes of police officers/prisoners? Sounds if anything that it means the police are doing a better job, doesn’t it?
Aren’t your arguments better based on police per population ratioes?
March 9th, 2009 at 12:34 pm
Is it just me, or the prose here is egregiously bad, even by MY standards, esp. below the picture?
It gets so bad one can reach basically any conclusion.
Since we support all kinds of caps here, words per day for MY could be capped at, say, the monthly salary of the CEO of GM.
March 9th, 2009 at 12:34 pm
I also cannot understand this text.
March 9th, 2009 at 12:37 pm
Drew W.,
I love how you assume that cops are badass wannebes of below average intelligence. Luckily for you, those below-average badass wannabes are still willing to come rescue your daughter or wife when some drug dealing scum tries to assult her.
March 9th, 2009 at 12:46 pm
I’m not sure I can follow what he’s saying, since the typos have swamped grammar and sense to a high degree even by his standards. However, it seems to be arguing that because prison populations have grown so high, so should the number of cops on the street, to keep a past 2:1 ratio. What’s the logic in that? If we locked up 99 percent of the population, would we need an additional 198 percent of the population walking the beat?
March 9th, 2009 at 12:48 pm
those below-average badass wannabes are still willing to come rescue your daughter or wife when some drug dealing scum tries to assult her.
I only wish they were that zealous when some badge-having scumbag tries to assault a bartender half his size, or a team of police officers kills an old lady in Atlanta then tries to cover it up.
Also, I know the “rescue your wife or daughter” line appeals to people’s emotions better, but what is the ratio of “violent, drug-dealing scumbags arrested” to “meaningless, revenue-generating traffic citations issued”?
March 9th, 2009 at 1:00 pm
Right. Because if Bernie Madoff hadn’t been surrounded by broken windows, he would never have ripped off that $50 billion.
Not only is Matt having a little trouble understanding who the dangerous criminals are, but there’s a little something my dad said 40 years when Nixon was ranting and raving about lawn order- “The Federal government has no business policing American cities”.
This country is experiencing the problems of an oligarchy with a desperately impoverished underclass. Making it even more illegal to be poor ain’t going to solve that.
March 9th, 2009 at 1:03 pm
Re: a team of police officers kills an old lady in Atlanta then tries to cover it up.
It figures that Yglesian cosmopolitan liberals would compare an ACCIDENT during a routine drug raid, to a violent sexual assault. How predictable.
March 9th, 2009 at 1:09 pm
still, i think the idea of a “police surge” has a lot of merits.
to reproduce the success of the surge in iraq, it would have to involve massive cash payments to the worst of the criminals; carte-blanche for criminal cartels to engage in ethnic cleansing behind concrete walls that we would build; the forced transferal of entire ethnic populations from, say, detroit to camden (and ditto for every other city); and an end-state in which there were very few innocent bystanders killed because no one innocent would be left alive.
after that, the political situation would be entirely unchanged, but we could declare victory and keep our troops occupying north america for at least 100 years.
sounds great! no wonder the national review likes it!
March 9th, 2009 at 1:21 pm
As a general rule, most things Bill Stuntz writes about criminal justice are dead-on. For his take on the structural forces that brought us our atrociously unequal modern criminal justice system, check out his article “Unequal Justice” from last year.
March 9th, 2009 at 1:22 pm
Link fail. How embarrassing. Why is there no “Preview Comment” button? Anyway, it’s here, and at http://www.harvardlawreview.org/issues/121/june08/stuntz.shtml if I screwed up again.
March 9th, 2009 at 1:33 pm
kid bitzer says: still, i think the idea of a “police surge” has a lot of merits. To reproduce the success of the surge in iraq, it would have to involve massive cash payments to the worst of the criminals…
I think this is a great idea. I’m going to declare myself as the local headman and line up for some of that gubmint cash to “encourage local support”.
March 9th, 2009 at 1:39 pm
More “cops on the beat” may be a good thing. What I’m afraid of is continuing use of federal funds to overmilitarize local police departments, where no-knock raids with SWAT teams are becoming more and more common, even for arresting suspects of rather minor crimes.
March 9th, 2009 at 1:49 pm
Serial Catowner, your post makes no sense to me. Wall Street is full of criminals, so we shouldn’t put more cops on the streets? How is that not a complete non sequitur?
The person who mugs you or breaks into your home may well be less morally reprehensible and socially destructive than Bernie Madoff– but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t take whatever steps we can to keep people from mugging you or breaking into your home (or committing rape, and assault, and murder, and other similar non-Madoff ofenses).
It’s hardly an either-or situation. To me your comment makes as much sense as saying that we shouldn’t hire more cops because our education system is flawed, or because of the global warming crisis.
And how exactly does putting more police on the streets make it “more illegal to be poor”? Could you explain your reasoning there?
There’s certainly a case to be made that the police focus too much on victimless offenses (drug possession), and that their actions are often tainted by bias. But just saying “we don’t need more cops because the real criminals are on Wall Street” and “we don’t need to make it more illegal to be poor” makes zero sense. Maybe there’s some logic hidden in there somewhere, but to me it sounds like mindless anti-authoritarian rhetoric.
And maybe I’m wrong, but I strongly suspect two things:
1. That many if not most poor people would welcome an increase in police vigilance in their neighborhoods.
2. That you, like me, have little or no contact with serious poverty and violent crime.
March 9th, 2009 at 1:52 pm
The police have too much power already. The last thing this country needs is even more unaccountable cops out there shooting people in the backs, planting evidence, raping hookers, and harassing young people.
That seems to be just about the only things the police actually do anymore. We don’t really have a crime problem, so I can’t help but think that people of Matt’s class are getting anxious about the economic difficulty and think a few blue-shirts to beat the crap out of the natives is a great way to keep things from getting out of hand. All that will do is make things worse.
March 9th, 2009 at 1:55 pm
Blorp, most poor people would only actually welcome such a surge if it came from people located without their own neighborhoods. The last thing your average slum wants is a bunch of white cops from the suburbs getting bussed in ‘police’ their neighborhood.
If what you said was true, the police would have higher approval ratings. You certainly would see the elite of every city in the country begging poor people to keep an open mind about cops, and you certainly wouldn’t see the underclasses of those same cities boil over every time a suspect incident involving a cop happened.
To most poor people, reality if obvious: The police to not exist to protect them. The police exist to protect people like you and Matt FROM them.
March 9th, 2009 at 1:57 pm
It figures that Yglesian cosmopolitan liberals would compare an ACCIDENT during a routine drug raid, to a violent sexual assault. How predictable.
Um, what the hell? Assuming we’re talking about the same case — Kathryn Johnston in Atlanta — I’d like to know which part you consider an accident. They got the warrant based on the word of one completely unreliable informant — no accident there. The informant later said police pressured him to implicate Johnston. The cops knocked down the door and stormed in instead of trying a daytime warrant — that wasn’t an accident. Kathryn Johnston made a horrible (but understandable) mistake, assuming that the people breaking into her house in the middle of the night were criminals who meant to do her harm. So she shot at them. They shot back and killed her. That wasn’t exactly an “accident.” The cops then planted drugs at her home and lied to cover it up. That wasn’t an accident.
Three Atlanta police officers are now in federal prison, so if this was all some terrible accident, Hector ought to go tell the judge and save those poor innocent cops.
This article from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution gives a pretty summary of the facts.
March 9th, 2009 at 2:02 pm
a “pretty good” summary of the facts, of course.
This sentence from the wikipedia entry on Kathryn Johnston pretty much says it all:
March 9th, 2009 at 2:14 pm
“To most poor people, reality if obvious: The police to not exist to protect them.”
That is, unfortunately, very true. I’ve lived in both poor and rich neighborhoods. In the rich ones, police spend most of their time with property crimes. If your house is robbed, you call the police and they at least try to be helpful (such crimes are rarely solved). In the poor neighborhoods, police spend their time harassing people suspected of dealing drugs. This is despite the fact that drug use isn’t much higher in the poor neighborhoods. But if you are robbed in a poor neighborhood, you’re on you own. The last time I lived in a poor neighborhood, I was one of only three white people. I’d walk through a wealthy neighborhood to get to my home, and the cops would wave to me and say hello. When I reached my neighborhood, the cops would detain and question me because they thought I was there to buy drugs. After about a year of that crap, the cops finally realized that I actually lived there. It’s hard to have a positive attitude towards the police when they cuff on a regular basis for walking in your own neighborhood. Now I live in a rich neighborhood, and my attitude has improved.
March 9th, 2009 at 2:42 pm
@18: If accidentally killing old ladies is part of your routine, maybe you need a new routine?
@25: I definitely agree that we need more people policing the policemen (pun very much intended; what, did you think it was *just* about superheroes?), but that doesn’t mean that police themselves can’t also serve a useful function. More police on the beat does not necessarily mean more unaccountability and immunity to legal standards – indeed, having more police might be one of the things that would free you up to fire and blacklist the bad ones.
We should definitely start by examining the concerns in comments 2 and 5, though.
March 9th, 2009 at 3:20 pm
Screw more cops, we need CCTV! Cameras are cheaper, they don’t have ego issues, and a camera on every corner would be a lot more benign than a cop on every corner.
Imagine if potential criminals had to deal with the prospect of a camera catching them entering/leaving a targeted store, and then getting in their car or walking to or through the nearest metro stop. Didn’t the folks in the UK use CCTV to round up the July 7 bombers? And hasn’t CCTV done wonders for traffic control there? It’s only a matter of time before CCTV catches on here in our cities – consider traffic light cameras an early test run. I’m surprised MY doesn’t advocate for CCTV given his “urbanist” outlook.
March 9th, 2009 at 3:30 pm
And one more thing, before folks start saying that CCTV is Orwellian. The war on drugs is ridiculous, everyone realizes this. But catching someone who either has or is under the influence of an illicit substance typically represents a “target of opportunity” for the arresting officer because it’s much easier to stop and find drugs on a perp than it is to track down a true criminal or prevent a true criminal from committing a crime (the exception being targeted raids, which until prohibition is lifted will be a fact of life, and not a horrible one – I’m not talking about raids against state sanctioned mj dispensaries, but rather raids on meth labs and crack houses).
Cameras/CCTV would allow the police to spend their resources a bit more wisely – they could go after folks that commit real crimes, and not have to worry so much about “patrolling” which more often than not results in the ad hoc detention of small bait, non-violent offenders.
March 9th, 2009 at 4:05 pm
DuBois,
I said that the Yglesian hipsters of the world were lucky that the cops they abuse would protect their daughters from sexual assaults. Some bright boy piped in to say that the cops killed Ms. Johnston, so it was all a wash. That seems to me to be clearly saying that the bad that the cops do (Kathryn Johnston) outweighs the good (preventing violent sexual assaults.) If there’s anyone making s**t up here, it isn’t me.
March 9th, 2009 at 4:50 pm
I refuse to accept the idea that cops can’t protect people from sexual assault without killing innocent little old ladies. I don’t see the connection at all. There is a connection between hiring more cops and innocent people getting killed, though. If you want to expand the ranks of cops you’ll probably have to lower the hiring standards, and right now the standards are so low that innocent people very frequently have their homes invaded, their property seized, their pets killed, etc, and once in a while they get killed.
March 9th, 2009 at 4:53 pm
I am on occasion given a painful reminder of just what thin gruel the standard liberal and progressive critique of the criminal justice system amounts to. This is one such occasion.
Almost without exception the most thoughtful critics of the altogether too routine injustices which are sadly part and parcel of our law enforcement, our courts, and our penal system are to be found on the far left and among libertarians.
March 9th, 2009 at 4:54 pm
Hey, at least Hector admitted up there that obtaining an illegal no-knock warrant under false pretenses and then planting drugs when you don’t find them constitutes a “routine drug raid.”
March 9th, 2009 at 5:01 pm
too many steves,
I refuse to accept the idea that cops can’t protect people from sexual assault without killing innocent little old ladies.
Yes!
There is a connection between hiring more cops and innocent people getting killed, though.
I think you are oversimplifying here. I don’t believe the abuses you, quite rightly, decry are a consequence of the number of police officers or even the individual competence of those officers, but rather of the specific laws they enforce and the array policies which have encouraged the para-militarization of our peace officers.
March 9th, 2009 at 5:20 pm
Blorp @ 24- Wall Street is full of crooks, so we should put more cops on the beat? How is that not a complete non sequiter?
Should we start with the fact that a cop on the beat can’t even arrest a Wall Street crook? Or maybe you think that stealing billions of dollars is a victimless crime?
The money came from somewhere. It basically came from the money that would have paid for enough education, healthcare, housing, and job creation to make every American a law-abiding person. Most of the poor schmucks that get arrested are just screw-ups, people who got dealt a bad hand and then made it worse by some decision like drinking an entire bottle of cheap wine. Putting enough police on the street to make these people stay inside just means they will get their head stuck in the toilet or something.
I’ve lived with people who don’t have much money most of my life, but almost none of them could commit the cruel and grasping crimes I’ve seen lawyers, professional “Guardians”, and some government workers commit against impoverished disabled people. If a lawyer and a “Guardian” exploit a disabled person, keeping them confined to a nursing home bed until they die at age 50 from complications of immobility instead of living to be 70 as they should, is that a “violent crime”?
Uniformed cops run a dragnet on the poor. That’s all they’re allowed to do. Meanwhile, about a trillion dollars has been stolen from the good ol’ USA over the past decade, and all the white collar classes can say is “Tsk tsk, it oughta be a crime”.
That’s just pathetic.
March 9th, 2009 at 5:40 pm
The other thing everyone missed in the serial takedown of Hector was that he called for executions for drug possession (Malaysia style).
Whether we have too many or too few police, I don’t know. But it is without question that we have too many prisoners. fosert’s take on this at 29 should be widely linked-to and discussed.
March 9th, 2009 at 6:23 pm
Re: The other thing everyone missed in the serial takedown of Hector was that he called for executions for drug possession (Malaysia style).
Drug DEALING, Rob Mac, drug DEALING. And perhaps ‘Malaysia style’ was an exaggeration, but we need harsh penalties for drug dealers.
March 9th, 2009 at 7:51 pm
I’d like to see better pay for the police and more incentive to solve problems without violence. I don’t envy them their jobs. Abuse of power, is always a problem and cracking down on crime should include an equal effort to crack down on police abuses (which are criminal).
March 9th, 2009 at 10:04 pm
Why is Justin Raimondo in the pokey? Did he try to defend Chas Freeman?
March 9th, 2009 at 11:16 pm
I’ve read (no link – sorry) that a police office is five times more likely to go to prison – as in inmate – than the average American citizen.
I worry much more about the dangers of America becoming a police state than I do the dangers from criminals (who, after all, are demonized by most Americans). I fear that too many power-hungry people are attracted to police work. Also, I read of too many examples (and have experienced at least one personally) where police officers refuse to testify against another police officer accused of a crime.
There are a lot of good police officers in this country, but I fear that they are getting outnumbered by the other kind, and I suspect that the good ones find it hard to rise to higher ranks.
March 10th, 2009 at 12:24 am
Hector: They accidentally tried to cover it up? I guess all the cops who’ve planted evidence, coerced confessions, perjured themselves, etc., did that accidentally as well.
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