In 1997, The Scrapbook saw a funny New York Times headline: “Crime Keeps on Falling, but Prisons Keep on Filling.” Astonishingly, we noted, “the possibility that longer sentences and less parole might be playing a large part in that falling crime rate” had failed to penetrate the furrowed brows at the Times.
We mocked them and were apparently ignored, because a year later they were back with more of the same, a story that captured the essence of modern liberal thought on crime. The headline: “Prison Population Growing Although Crime Rate Drops.” The lead: “The nation’s prison population grew by 5.2 percent in 1997, according to the Justice Department, even though crime has been declining for six straight years, suggesting that the imprisonment boom has developed a built-in growth dynamic independent of the crime rate, experts say.”
It was the same reporter, Fox Butterfield, displaying the same blind spot: a failure to entertain the possibility that crime had fallen precisely because criminals had been put in jail. James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal dubbed this blinkered liberalism “The Butterfield Effect.”
A January 7, 2018, headline doesn’t rival the earlier ones for sheer delight, but it’s in the same category: “Crime Is Falling, But Police Levels Remain Robust.” Crime is down in the 30 largest cities in the United States, the reporter, Jose Del Real, explains, “but fewer crimes have not resulted in fewer police officers on the streets.” To his credit, Del Real doesn’t pretend not to notice the obvious counter-argument—namely, that robust police numbers may have precipitated the drop in crime. But he dismisses the idea, noting that “the relationship between the number of officers and lawful behavior is not clear-cut.”
We’re not sure how a question with this many variables could ever be “clear-cut” (different cities with different problems, different policies at different police departments led by different people with different skills). But in one sense, at least, the relationship would seem as clear-cut as it’s possible to be: Police levels rose, crime fell.
Perhaps, though, we lack nuance. Or perhaps, as conservatives, we’re too ready to associate more cops with more order. Anyhow, the Times explains the problem with statistical conundrums like this:
The problem with this sort of analysis, it seems to us, is that it’s too narrowly focused on a single year, 2017. A more thorough interpretation would consider a much larger time span.
This reflection led us back to a terrific cover story in The Weekly Standard from February 23, 2009, by the late William Stuntz: “Law and Disorder: The case for a police surge.” Stuntz was a professor at Harvard Law School and the author of groundbreaking work on crime policy. In that essay he contended that just as a large surge of ground forces had quelled the insurgency in Iraq, so increases in police numbers tend over time to decrease violent crime.
We’re told by a former colleague of Stuntz (he died in 2011) that his 2009 essay “was extraordinarily controversial in law school circles. Defending anything about Iraq was almost unheard of. Bill took a lot of heat, and he turned out to be right.”
