As onetime blue-collar kids from high-crime neighborhoods, we are convinced that most police departments can do more to protect civilians in their neighborhoods from crime without increasing violent encounters between officers and residents. As empirical political scientists, we are even more convinced that the disastrous approaches championed by Black Lives Matter activists — notably, limited patrolling, fewer arrests, and partial defunding of police — aren’t our only options. But getting policing right requires overturning two widespread misconceptions. First, that police effectiveness in this regard cannot be accurately measured, and second, that bringing down homicide rates necessitates accepting a higher level of police violence.
Our fellow citizens of all races who live and work in high-crime neighborhoods care more about results than intentions. BLM activists often have the best of intentions, but their policies have ranged from ineffective to counterproductive to downright dangerous.
One reason for that: the topics that academic and corporate BLM researchers study.
As we point out in “
Which Police Departments Make Black Lives Matter, Which Don’t, and Why Don’t Most Social Scientists Care
?,” only one of the 25 most widely cited academic articles related to BLM tackles specific ways to reduce the taking of black lives by police or others. Instead, professors focus on highly abstract postmodern theory by analyzing such niche topics as “Challenging the dialogic promise: How Ben & Jerry’s support for Black Lives Matter fosters dissensus on social media.”
This is the kind of navel-gazing sure to get a professor tenure and promotion, and highly unlikely to save black lives. It also enables policies that are unmoored from reality and do more harm than good.
As one of us documents in “
Did the BLM Protests Against the Police Lead to the 2020 Spike in Homicides?
,” BLM has often succeeded in cutting back policing budgets and activity, in many cities setting up a cycle in which gangs take control of the streets, they
freely buy and sell drugs
and guns, and regular citizens become afraid to call 911.
All this de-policing had little impact on police shootings of civilians, which were already rare, but almost certainly did spike homicides, to the tune of 2,900 black deaths annually. Plain civilian-on-civilian murders take 20 times as many lives each year as do police shootings of civilians, so cutting cops ends up empowering killers.
We can do better. In the real world, some individual officers, precincts, and entire departments do a great job protecting black (and other) lives and property. Others do not. And some cops, such as ex-Minneapolis Officer Derek Chauvin, who had faced 18 citizen complaints and been involved in three shooting incidents before killing George Floyd, have no business serving on police forces, much less training rookie and young officers. Some police departments know this, and these are the ones we can learn from.
In “
Which Police Departments Make Black Lives Matter?
,” we ranked policing in America’s 50 largest cities based on their police departments’ performance in keeping homicides low while not shooting civilians. We did this after adjusting for poverty rates, since high-poverty neighborhoods usually have higher rates of crime, making policing more difficult.
We found that a good many police departments indeed do rock-solid work, including New York City, Boston, Raleigh, Mesa, five Texas cities including Austin and El Paso, and five California cities including San Diego and San Jose.
Per both our rankings and general reputation, the New York Police Department is not just New York’s finest, but America’s finest. Despite often facing danger in their high-poverty city, in a typical year, NYPD’s 35,000 officers kill fewer than 10 civilians, less than half the number of other leading police departments on a per capita basis. And compared to the rest of the 50 largest cities, New York has the sixth-fewest homicides per capita.
We know how part of this, the crime reduction, was accomplished. As recently as the early 1990s, New York was known as the crime capital of the United States, worse than Chicago. But then, in a remarkable 26-month period in the 1990s, NYPD Commissioner William Bratton began the turnaround, cutting homicide by 50%. The city has seen further declines since. New York became, as criminologist Franklin Zimring put it, “the city that became safe.” Police deterred rather than merely reacted to crime, and New York’s crime rates and the city’s incarcerated population fell substantially over the past 30 years.
Far less discussed is the fact that over the past 50 years, largely due to improved training of officers and issuing of nonlethal weapons such as Tasers, the NYPD’s killings of civilians fell 90%. We know, instinctively, to ask how crime was reduced, but it turns out the NYPD has more lessons for the country.
The two improvements, in fact, went hand in hand. The NYPD developed COMPSTAT, the computerized system for reporting when and where crimes occur in real time. And, unlike many other departments, the NYPD took the next logical step, deploying officers directly into action at identified crime hot spots. Precinct commanders who fail to do this get grilled by superiors, who encourage less successful leaders to copy their more effective peers, making the NYPD a learning organization.
Of course, real-world public servants do not always want to learn. NYPD precinct commanders learn and adapt because NYPD commissioners have unusual power over personnel, including the ability to bust precinct commanders back in rank, which, in turn, affects their pensions. Essentially, the police commissioner has the power to force into early retirement key managers and select their replacements. In the 1990s, Commissioner Bratton replaced about two-thirds of his precinct commanders in just two years, fundamentally changing NYPD culture. Nationally, few other police commissioners have this kind of power over personnel and fewer still focus that power on reforming the department.
The NYPD likewise has an unusually professional internal affairs unit to investigate and terminate unprofessional officers, or at least place them in posts in which they cannot carry firearms, such as in vehicle impoundment lots. Had the Minneapolis police chief had this sort of authority and the willingness to use it, George Floyd would almost certainly be alive today, as would roughly two dozen civilians killed in 2020’s BLM-inspired unrest.
While the NYPD shines, certain other police departments fail. At the very bottom of our 50-city rankings sit Las Vegas, Kansas City, and last-ranked Baltimore — no surprise there. Per capita, Baltimore’s police kill nearly 10 times as many civilians as their New York cousins. Even worse, Baltimore’s homicide rate is nearly 15 times that of the Big Apple.
Even after the police killing of Freddie Gray in 2015 and subsequent riots, Baltimore’s political leadership has not reformed city police to copy the Big Apple sitting just three hours north.
Journalists and academics can play an important role here. Studies such as ours should be done with wider data sets and with varying points of focus. And city officials should be made to answer for the level of accountability faced by officers. What powers of discipline and reform do the various departments around the country have, and what do they need in order to be able to hold officers accountable?
Few, if any, mayors in the cities whose police rank in the bottom 10 are pushing their police commissioners to copy leaders in the top 10 cities, by adopting basic techniques such as recruiting and training great officers, and holding them accountable. Unless a few mayors and city council members lose reelection, this probably will not change any time soon. That is a terrible pity, and a preventable one.
Robert Maranto is the 21st Century Chair in Leadership in the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas, and a Baltimore native.
Wilfred Reilly is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Kentucky State University, and the author of the books Hate Crime Hoax and Taboo.
Patrick J. Wolf is the 21st Century Endowed Chair in School Choice in the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas.
