Writing in the New York Times, data analyst Jeff Asher notes that the rates that crimes have been solved by police forces across the United States have fallen considerably over the last four years.
When I started this newsletter, I ran a series of slightly oddball essays trying to think about the possible futures of policing and criminality in the U.S. Essentially, they were my attempt to say that I was not a “police abolitionist”, but that I believed that massive reform of policing was both necessary and possible. Some people who describe themselves as police abolitionists are really making the same argument, contending that the only way to communicate to the public the scale of changes that are needed is to use the shock of that term to start the conversation. Others are 100% serious that they believe in a society without policing not as a far-away utopian development but as something possible in a near-term future world. My own thinking was meant to say that I think the latter perspective is incorrect, that some of what individuals do to violate the commonweal of a free and just society will persist even if we removed some of the structural causes of crime and flawed systems of injustice and incarceration. Societies at all scales need some way to respond to harms that can’t be mediated or negotiated with, and I believe they will need that in even the best futures.
That’s all a very ethereal conversation. It gets us lost in abstractions, in hot arguments about human nature that are extremely hard to work out even when you have two individuals whose pragmatic sense of the real issues involved is quite similar.
What I would settle for instead is just getting Americans as a whole to understand the fundamental reality of the history of policing in the United States, and at the same time to understand that the representation of policing in American popular culture is roughly as fantastical as Star Wars or Lord of the Rings.
There are four empirical truths that Americans should understand.
Policing as they have known it for the last 75 years does not extend perpetually into the past. Most of the 19th Century and even the early 20th in the United States unfolded without police departments who could be routinely called upon to respond to major crimes, public disorder, or any of what we imagine police to be necessary for today. There was little federal policing as such for a long time, and some of what operated in that frame was essentially subcontracted to private organizations or to the military. Moreover, policing as well as incarceration from 1980 onward have been different substantially compared the forty years or so prior to that point. Contemporary Americans are captive to a mythological understanding of the relationship between order, justice and police.
The higher clearance rates in Asher’s data from 1960 to 1980 were significantly not a function either of having more cops employed or of superior investigative techniques, but instead often involved the nearly arbitrary naming of suspects who were conveniently available marginal or vulnerable people and the use of coercion, misdirection or outright fabrication to produce convictions following such arrests. Judicial and legislative reforms to criminal law in the 1960s and 1970s were frequently seen by right-wing critics as coddling or protecting criminals, but they were very basic responses to the overt disinterest of police forces in anything like the careful collection of evidence or investigative work.
As Asher’s data shows, American police forces have never been interested in property crime despite the fact that the public then and now has frequently expected or imagined that police would take such crime seriously. People who are frustrated today when the police won’t look into a series of bicycle thefts or house break-ins or a ring of identity thieves should understand that this is not a new development. This is despite the fact that property crimes often can be investigated in efficient ways. There are a lot of ways to explain this disinterest but as a basic fact about policing, it’s a steady reality. Cops generally don’t care if something’s been stolen from you, whether it’s your identity or your car or your purse, as long as nobody was physically hurt. It doesn’t matter if identifying a suspect beyond a reasonable doubt is easy to do, they don’t want to do it. One of the major oddities of the entirely stupid era of policing that developed from James Q. Wilson’s “broken windows” theory of crime is that police forces became more attentive to guys offering to clean car windows at intersections than they did to actual property theft.
Until very recently, most of what Americans weaned on shows like CSI think that police investigations consist of is just complete nonsense. I recently heard a terrific lecture by a colleague who is involved in the statistical analysis of forensic science used in police investigations, from which I learned about a major 2009 report on the state of forensic techniques that police and their supporters regarded as “scientific”. Most of the techniques familiar to Americans—fingerprinting, voice analysis, arson science, photo and content analysis, drug tests, etc., was deemed to be nearly valueless then in that report and most of it still isn’t worth much. About the only technique that has real rigor is genetic analysis—which is one reason it’s often been used to reveal how shoddy and inaccurate many past convictions have been. And even that work can be easily undercut by poorly run laboratories or just by basic difficulties in working with the samples provided. The important thing to understand also is how few police have any meaningful training in investigative techniques or rigorous analysis, including detectives, and how often phony experts whose credentials go unchallenged take the stand in criminal proceedings. The people on CSI do not exist, and neither does most of what they do on those shows.
In the wake of George Floyd’s murder, a lot of analyses pointed out that most of what people think of as the essential functions of police in terms of solving crimes are not what police primarily get called upon to do. Police get called to handle traffic and traffic accidents, to mediate between feuding neighbors, to reassure people who are frightened for no real reason, to handle public mental health crises, to provide public order at large gatherings, to handle noise complaints, to provide security to other municipal authorities carrying out their duties, and so on. At least some calls about crimes get logged and not investigated; others get investigated and not solved. Asher’s data shows that the last of those situations is worsening notably after a long period of slow decline.
We need help for many of the things we call police for, but the help we need is not the help that most police are prepared to give. Mediating or counseling people who are in conflict or crisis takes a different kind of training. Logging routine traffic accidents for insurance purposes could be done by the same people who give parking tickets—or even by cameras. Americans should want the vast majority of tasks handled by police to be invested in public employees better able to handle those challenges. But they should also understand that police have never been very good at solving certain crimes that the public expects them to solve, falsely believes that they solve with rigor and science, that’s because they’ve never been good at doing so in a way that matches popular culture. The answer to that is not “hire more police” and it’s definitely not “put more people in prison”, considering that the United States already has more of its population in jail than any other society on the planet. The answer is not even “fight back against police unions that are deliberately slowing down their clearance rates in order to mess with their adversaries”. The answer might be, “Actually, we want you to do this work right for the first time in your history—we want to relieve you of all that other work and of all the underqualified police you hire now who can neither investigate nor mediate. We want you to drop the junk science and the sleazy manipulation of evidence.”
The fact that Americans can’t even agree on that much—that it would be good to solve crimes, really solve them—is a function of how much policing is an ideological fixation that owes more to copaganda than data. Which is why so many critics of the police suspect that the strong support some people show for police is about something different than solving crimes or protecting the public.