Decarceration and Violent Crime | City Journal
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Last Wednesday, August 10, marked the launch of a new, bipartisan criminal-justice reform initiative: the Coalition for Public Safety, headed by former adviser to President Trump Ja’Ron Smith. Drawing a welcome distinction between his group and some of the more radical elements of the criminal-justice reform movement, Smith tweeted that the Coalition would seek “to reduce violent crime” and work “to adequately fund police.”
With serious violent crime—homicides and shootings, in particular—spiking in many parts of the country (and in some cases, even surpassing 1990s peaks), it is refreshing to see reform-oriented organizations like the Coalition prioritize our public-safety problem. Its efforts are particularly welcome given the last few years of criminal-justice policymaking, which have been marked by misguided efforts to defund police, restrict officer pursuits, elect prosecutors who seek unilaterally to abrogate duly enacted legislation, and pursue decarceration through bail and other sentencing reforms predicated on the belief that the United States suffers from “mass incarceration.”
However, as recent reform efforts have shown, good intentions do not invariably make for wise policy. Making sure that police are properly funded is a necessary condition for public safety, but it is not sufficient. A truly comprehensive safety strategy also requires recognition of the role played by order maintenance and, backing up police efforts, a criminal-justice system dedicated to the incapacitation of dangerous offenders.
A review of the Coalition’s literature suggests a fundamental discomfort with approaches to law enforcement that a full recovery from resurgent crime may ultimately require. For example, a recent Fox News piece covering the Coalition’s launch announcement highlighted this passage from the group’s statement of principles: “Every minute [the police] spend on revenue-generating activities is a minute they are not spending on solving or preventing serious crime.” The piece went on to note that the statement “argues that police officers are too often bogged down with non-criminal calls, traffic-related incidents, and mental health-related incidents,” which prevent them “from focusing their time and resources on combating violent crime.”
This idea has several problems. Let’s start with traffic enforcement. The suggestion that such efforts are mere “revenue-generating activities” is deeply misguided. It ignores the substantial evidence linking reductions in police-led traffic enforcement with increases in vehicle collisions and traffic-related fatalities. The implicit call to deemphasize traffic enforcement in order to maximize efforts to combat violent crime also ignores how contacts initiated as a result of traffic violations often lead to the discovery of contraband and warrants, which serves public safety. In New York City, for example, more than 42 percent of all 2020 gun arrests were made during vehicle stops.
As for mental-health-related incidents, shifting the responsibility for response completely, or even substantially, away from police is simply unrealistic, as my Manhattan Institute colleague Charles Fain Lehman recently noted in a thorough review of the evidence.
On the issue of bail and pretrial detention, the Coalition’s webpage states that it wants to “[p]romote the use of transparent, validated and non-discriminatory risk-based solutions to replace pure money bail systems that discriminate against the poor and fail to provide adequate public safety return.” Yet its New York landing page makes no mention of the fact that New York is the only state that legally prohibits judges from considering a defendant’s public safety risk in any aspect of any decision relating to pretrial release. That page does, however, include criticisms of “the bail industry,” a defense of The Bail Project (which has secured the release of violent reoffenders), as well as a defense of the state’s bail reform, the enactment of which was followed by a 25 percent increase in the share of violent felony arrests constituted by people with open cases.
The Coalition has a webpage for each of the states in which it currently works. At the top of each one is a count of the prison, jail, and correctional supervision populations, as well as each state’s correctional rate and share of the budget spent on corrections. No other data are included—not the number of police, not the number of homicides, and not the number of other violent victimizations. This and other content on the website suggest that the Coalition will measure success primarily by the degree to which these jurisdictions decarcerate as opposed to whether the public safety picture improves.
There’s no problem with pursuing reforms of an imperfect system. There are indeed subsets of America’s jail and prison populations for whom incarceration serves no legitimate penological end. But there are also people who should be behind bars but aren’t, which is a problem that an outfit dedicated to public safety must be willing to confront. Among the questions I hope the Coalition’s leadership will answer is how it squares its emphasis on decarceration with its dedication to improving public safety—especially given that so much serious violence is already driven by those who have received multiple “second chances,” to use a phrase from the Coalition’s list of policy priorities. And I would remind readers that recent Bureau of Justice Statistics reports show that, on average, those released from state prison had racked up about ten prior arrests and five prior convictions before their most recent incarceration. Those numbers suggest that the vast majority of those incarcerated today constitute higher-risk offenders than those who—according to a mixed body of evidence—can be safely diverted from correctional settings.
Public safety is any neighborhood’s most important asset, and its provision is the government’s first and foremost duty. That asset has been eroding now for years—a development that has coincided with sharp reductions in the nation’s jail and prison populations. Reclaiming public safety must begin with an openness to the possibility that these trends are related.
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