Did Police Manpower Shortages Contribute to Virginia’s Crime Wave?

Data Source: 2020 and 2021 Crime in Virginia reports.

by James A. Bacon

Jim Sherlock, Dick Hall-Sizemore and I have been having an excellent debate in Bacon’s Rebellion over what caused the crescendo of homicides and violent crime in Virginia over the past two years. In response to previous posts by Jim and me critical of Northern Virginia’s woke, Soros-funded prosecutors, Dick argued yesterday that Fairfax, Loudoun and Arlington Counties haven’t seen much of a spike in crime. We can rest easy, he concludes. Their social-justice- driven criteria for prosecuting crimes have not turned NoVa into a crime-ridden hell hole.

Jim responded that the three NoVa counties are among the three most affluent localities in the country, and that a prosecutorial social-justice agenda would not have the same effect as it would in jurisdictions with large, low-income populations. Another key difference between the affluent NoVa counties and other localities, he suggested, is the staffing level of law enforcement.

I was in the process of tallying the law-enforcement staffing numbers when I read Jim’s comment this morning. As it turns out, law-enforcement staffing likely is a critical variable. The headcount of police and sheriffs departments is down overall across the state in 2021 compared to 2020, and markedly so in the four localities I highlighted in a previous post — Richmond, Norfolk, Portsmouth, and Hampton — that accounted for 70% of the increase in murders in Virginia last year. By contrast, staffing increased in Fairfax County last year, and declined only modestly in Loudoun and Arlington.

I pulled the numbers from the 2020 and 2021 Crime in Virginia reports. I did not include 2019 numbers, as I have for other crime data I’ve been highlighting in recent posts, because the Virginia State Police used a different methodology for compiling the headcounts.

Overall, Virginia law-enforcement agencies saw a 4.6% decline in headcount, which is consistent with media reports of manpower shortages in police and sheriffs departments around the state. The shortage was more acute in Virginia’s counties, suggesting that the problem is not just an urban problem. Overall, cities actually saw a slight increase in law-enforcement staffing.

However, statewide averages obscure what is happening at the local level. And some cities have significant manpower shortages in their police departments. As it happens, those cities also saw big increases in the number of homicides. In the City of Richmond, a leap in the number of homicides from 66 to 89 between 2020 and 2021 coincided with a plunge in law-enforcement headcount by more than 30%.

Staffing in Norfolk, which had 13 more murders, declined 11.2%. Likewise, staffing in Portsmouth and Hampton, which also witnessed more homicides, also declined more than the state average.

It doesn’t take a PhD in criminology to suggest that under-staffed police departments will have more difficulty clamping down on violent crime than fully-staffed departments. For example, the number of people arrested by Richmond police declined by 28% even though the number of incidents reported fell by only 9.2%.

The question that must be asked is why the ranks of law enforcement shrank so much more markedly in some cities than in others. I have repeatedly stressed the importance of local rhetoric. If local politicians, media, and advocacy groups continually vilify police, morale suffers, police retire early or move to other localities, and fewer recruits show up for training to replace them. Anti-police rhetoric in Richmond was appalling in 2020, the year of the massive George Floyd protests, as I assume it was in the other cities.

A related factor to consider is churn in the top ranks. Politics in some Virginia cities is totally dysfunctional — Portsmouth and Charlottesville come to mind. Police chiefs play musical chairs. Each new chief brings in a new style and new priorities, sowing confusion below.

The analysis I offer here is cursory. Ideally, one would have the time to look for patterns among all Virginia localities, and dig deeper into the numbers for each city and county. One quick example: Henrico County has seen the number of homicides increase from 7 in 2019 to 16 in 2020, and then to 23 last year — more than triple! Henrico is typically thought of as an affluent “suburban” county. But as the City of Richmond gentrifies, many low-income African-Americans are being displaced to neighboring Henrico.

The deeper you look, the more complicated the picture gets. There are many variables at play, and they interact in unpredictable ways.

I will concede that Dick is correct to say that NoVa’s “progressive” prosecutors have not turned the region into a crime-ridden hell hole. Yet. But, then, a city like Baltimore didn’t turn into a crime-ridden hell hole overnight. It took time. We’ll see what happens.

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