A pretty sensible summary of our current situation and the research. In my view the article GREATLY underappreciates the double whammy created by covid 19 beginning in Martch 2020. In Chicago at least, this very very quickly led to a big decline in discretionary enforcement activity, routine patrolling, responses to (usually false) alarms, issuing minor traffic citations, and the like. The coppers did a better jog at sustaining gun seizures and other important matters, but the covid whammy was a hard blow. You will recall that the rest of us also were trying to stay 10 feet from everybody and we locked our doors when we were exposed or even just got the sniffles - that was real life in the Terrible Twenties.
I imagine the largest impact on policing/crime that is directly COVID related was the release of large portions of the jailed population and changes that prevented intake of newly arrested people. Any COVID effect has to deal with the above mentioned 1) not in the US and 2) not until after George Floyd issues. For 1), I am curious how other developed nations handled the jail/prison population issue. Perhaps they already used more probation, or had more space, or had buildings they felt they could quarantine better than US Jails. For 2), I can see a lag in releasing jail populations as offenders (I imagine) try to stay out of trouble for a bit, with the lack of intake being the bigger issue once the summer homicide and violence wave came.
If there IS a Ferguson effect, it would be additional evidence of the need for reforming policing. Leadership of police officers should not allow transient public pressure to disrupt protecting citizens from crime. [I reject the idea that any pull back is cynical on the part of policie leadership, to "punish" citizens for demanding better policing.] If the response to public pressure was to improve policing, homicide and other crimes ought to decrease, not increase!
This is not to claim that improving policing is easy and may not require more resources. [US cities are typically under-policed compared to European cities.] Technology and non-"police" personnel to deal with traffic and public order can free police to focus more on crime including criminal infrastructure that supplies "retail" criminals with guns and disposes of stolen items.
The pullback *is* cynical in the sense that it's self-interested. What you're referring to as "cynical" is really just spiteful and stupid. Yeah, it's not that.
At the moment of a Ferguson-style protest, everyone in the chain of command, from the mayor on down to the rookie officer, receives a message that being tough on crime is dangerous for their careers, so they go soft on crime until a message is received that their constituency is once again more concerned about the criminals than the cops.
I believe in the Ferguson effect and I think it's right not to view these things as long term trends. (In Baltimore, the effect of the Freddie Gray riots was instantaneous, and I don't think drawing a line between the long-lasting Portland riots and the uniquely bad Portland murder rate surge is too speculative) but we can certainly hope to go back to the gradually declining murder rates that preceded Ferguson instead of going back to ups and downs largely canceling each other out -- which admittedly is also plausible, so this isn't not much of a criticism.
We're not going to keep doing this every six years, not without a better reason than "a white cop did another bad shoot of a black guy." 2020 was about burning the gunpowder left over after 2014's incomplete detonation. 1968 to 2014 really was long enough for people to forget (with some help from activists trying to help them forget) how well riots for peace and perfect law enforcement works. The coordinated media blitz convinced a lot of normal people that we'd been doing it all wrong and great things were afoot. (And awful cops did and often still do get off too easy. The mistake was believing that awful cops were a big enough part of the problem that "don't be awful" was a message that cops in general had not received and that would havre a big statistical impact. And cop shooting rates were higher than most people realized, but people were encouraged to conflate "higher than realized" with "increasing.")
The recent drop is steep enough, it would take pretty hard braking not to end up below the 2014 low. We're still making enough obvious mistakes that the potential for further improvement is not hard to find.
With the possible exception of more deadlier guns, many of these mistakes are unpopular, so it's politically and technically possible they could be fixed, besides the mistakes that already have been fixed as part of the back end of that Ferguson bump you're talking about. I'm thinking in particular of long trial delays and screwed up bail policies partly justified by those delays, and the worst of the reforms that are still on the books or still being written in Chicago for example.
It seems like much of the reduced punishment for infrequent offenders could be kept so long as we undo the remaining revolving door policies for reoffenders that were often written on purpose so they can be unwritten on purpose too. I assume that better job prospects for lower income workers also helps, though without getting off track to explain why, I think the reasons for that are temporary. Plus the aging population... yeah I hope we can go lower than the 2014 murder rate before this decade ends, it's been long enough already.
You should look into how Memphis is defying the national trend. Tyre Nichols was killed in January 2023 and the homicide numbers were way up for that year (397 vs. 301 in 2022). So far in 2024, Memphis is on pace to have about another 400 homicides. There were protests, tons of news coverage, a Justice Dept. investigation, pending civil suits and criminal charges against the officers, plenty of activist rhetoric, and police reforms.
It wasn't as big of a national story because there were no actual riots and all of the officers involved were also black.
A pretty sensible summary of our current situation and the research. In my view the article GREATLY underappreciates the double whammy created by covid 19 beginning in Martch 2020. In Chicago at least, this very very quickly led to a big decline in discretionary enforcement activity, routine patrolling, responses to (usually false) alarms, issuing minor traffic citations, and the like. The coppers did a better jog at sustaining gun seizures and other important matters, but the covid whammy was a hard blow. You will recall that the rest of us also were trying to stay 10 feet from everybody and we locked our doors when we were exposed or even just got the sniffles - that was real life in the Terrible Twenties.
Wesley G. Skogan
I imagine the largest impact on policing/crime that is directly COVID related was the release of large portions of the jailed population and changes that prevented intake of newly arrested people. Any COVID effect has to deal with the above mentioned 1) not in the US and 2) not until after George Floyd issues. For 1), I am curious how other developed nations handled the jail/prison population issue. Perhaps they already used more probation, or had more space, or had buildings they felt they could quarantine better than US Jails. For 2), I can see a lag in releasing jail populations as offenders (I imagine) try to stay out of trouble for a bit, with the lack of intake being the bigger issue once the summer homicide and violence wave came.
If there IS a Ferguson effect, it would be additional evidence of the need for reforming policing. Leadership of police officers should not allow transient public pressure to disrupt protecting citizens from crime. [I reject the idea that any pull back is cynical on the part of policie leadership, to "punish" citizens for demanding better policing.] If the response to public pressure was to improve policing, homicide and other crimes ought to decrease, not increase!
This is not to claim that improving policing is easy and may not require more resources. [US cities are typically under-policed compared to European cities.] Technology and non-"police" personnel to deal with traffic and public order can free police to focus more on crime including criminal infrastructure that supplies "retail" criminals with guns and disposes of stolen items.
The pullback *is* cynical in the sense that it's self-interested. What you're referring to as "cynical" is really just spiteful and stupid. Yeah, it's not that.
At the moment of a Ferguson-style protest, everyone in the chain of command, from the mayor on down to the rookie officer, receives a message that being tough on crime is dangerous for their careers, so they go soft on crime until a message is received that their constituency is once again more concerned about the criminals than the cops.
Lockdowns certainly helped set the stage for it, if only because they made people more restless and angry than before.
I believe in the Ferguson effect and I think it's right not to view these things as long term trends. (In Baltimore, the effect of the Freddie Gray riots was instantaneous, and I don't think drawing a line between the long-lasting Portland riots and the uniquely bad Portland murder rate surge is too speculative) but we can certainly hope to go back to the gradually declining murder rates that preceded Ferguson instead of going back to ups and downs largely canceling each other out -- which admittedly is also plausible, so this isn't not much of a criticism.
We're not going to keep doing this every six years, not without a better reason than "a white cop did another bad shoot of a black guy." 2020 was about burning the gunpowder left over after 2014's incomplete detonation. 1968 to 2014 really was long enough for people to forget (with some help from activists trying to help them forget) how well riots for peace and perfect law enforcement works. The coordinated media blitz convinced a lot of normal people that we'd been doing it all wrong and great things were afoot. (And awful cops did and often still do get off too easy. The mistake was believing that awful cops were a big enough part of the problem that "don't be awful" was a message that cops in general had not received and that would havre a big statistical impact. And cop shooting rates were higher than most people realized, but people were encouraged to conflate "higher than realized" with "increasing.")
The recent drop is steep enough, it would take pretty hard braking not to end up below the 2014 low. We're still making enough obvious mistakes that the potential for further improvement is not hard to find.
With the possible exception of more deadlier guns, many of these mistakes are unpopular, so it's politically and technically possible they could be fixed, besides the mistakes that already have been fixed as part of the back end of that Ferguson bump you're talking about. I'm thinking in particular of long trial delays and screwed up bail policies partly justified by those delays, and the worst of the reforms that are still on the books or still being written in Chicago for example.
It seems like much of the reduced punishment for infrequent offenders could be kept so long as we undo the remaining revolving door policies for reoffenders that were often written on purpose so they can be unwritten on purpose too. I assume that better job prospects for lower income workers also helps, though without getting off track to explain why, I think the reasons for that are temporary. Plus the aging population... yeah I hope we can go lower than the 2014 murder rate before this decade ends, it's been long enough already.
You should look into how Memphis is defying the national trend. Tyre Nichols was killed in January 2023 and the homicide numbers were way up for that year (397 vs. 301 in 2022). So far in 2024, Memphis is on pace to have about another 400 homicides. There were protests, tons of news coverage, a Justice Dept. investigation, pending civil suits and criminal charges against the officers, plenty of activist rhetoric, and police reforms.
It wasn't as big of a national story because there were no actual riots and all of the officers involved were also black.