Can Criminal Justice Reform Survive a Wave of Violent Crime?

[WhiskeyGrinder]

https://newrepublic.com/article/162634/criminal-justice-reform-violent-crime

The comparisons with the past are striking, but they are also quite ambiguous, and the way they are framed inescapably shapes the political conclusions people will draw. Crime, especially violent crime, rose from the mid-1960s until the early 1990s, when it began a steady and still poorly understood decline. In absolute terms, the estimated 21,000 homicides in 2020 will be close to 1991’s all-time high of 25,000. Framed like this, the current spike resembles the peak of a crime boom. But the U.S. population has grown by around 75 million people since 1991. So when you look at number of homicides per capita—a more accurate measure, it should perhaps go without saying—the appropriate historical parallel reveals itself to be 1998, or the soft landing of a major crime decline. (In 1998, there were 6.3 murders per 100,000 people; 2020’s rate will likely be around 6.5 murders per 100,000. The rate likely peaked in 1980 at 10.2 and 1991 at 9.8.)

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Moreover, the changes that progressive prosecutors have adopted toward violent crime are not the sort to lead to more homicides. In Philadelphia, for example, Larry Krasner has started to charge more homicides as third-degree murder rather than first- or second-, moving the expected sentence from life without parole to a standard minimum of 10 years. While that may seem like a major shift, a 20-year sentence does not meaningfully deter people more than a 10-year sentence, while imposing substantial financial and humanitarian costs. One of the most consistent findings in criminology is that the certainty of a sentence, not its severity, is what deters: detection, not punishment. (So it is worth pointing out that the Philadelphia Police Department, whose union has routinely attacked Krasner, struggles to solve murders; it made arrests in fewer than half those committed in that city in 2020.) The claims that Krasner has been soft on gun charges also appear inaccurate—not to mention that his greater emphasis on diversion may actually reduce overall gun violence.

It is also important to note the inaccuracy of trying to pin rising homicides on efforts to “defund” the police. In a December 2020 press conference, for example, Gregg Sofer, at the time the U.S. attorney for the Western District of Texas, tried to blame Austin’s rise in homicides on the city’s recent decision to cut police funding. The problem? Homicides had started to rise well before the cuts, in no small part because the budget in question did not go into effect until October 2020, so almost none of the proposed cuts would have occurred until 2021 at the earliest—and most of the 2021 cuts involve simply shifting which agencies are responsible for certain tasks. What’s more, Sofer did not acknowledge that the police department’s budget had risen by nearly 50 percent since 2013, while crime rates remained basically flat.

Other invocations of “defunding” have overstated its impact as well. Bloomberg CityLab, for example, reported that while most cities increased police spending for 2021, a few, like New York City, did cut it. The Bloomberg article put the cuts at approximately 15 percent, a number that likely came from the widely reported figure of $1 billion that Mayor Bill de Blasio claimed he cut from the NYPD’s $5.6 billion budget. Except when examined more closely, many of de Blasio’s cuts are based on aggressive budget assumptions and—as with Austin—reductions in police spending that come from moving the jobs to other departments at some future point. All told, the reduction was closer to $400 million—but about $300 million of that depended on projected reductions in overtime pay, and, as of March 2021, the NYPD is on pace to miss that reduction by around $150 million.

Hard to excerpt this one -- it dives deep and swims broad.