Reports on 2023 in the United States are in, and a banner one is this: crime plummeted last year.
According to the New York Times, citing FBI data, Detroit recorded its lowest murder figures in roughly half a century; homicides and shootings in Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and most other major cities dropped precipitously; and car thefts were the only “serious” criminal category that didn’t see notable drop-offs over the course of the calendar year. In Minneapolis – which, after the police murder of George Floyd, became the epicenter in 2020 of the largest wave against racial injustice since the civil rights movement – homicides reportedly fell by 9% last year, gun violence by roughly a quarter, and carjackings by half.
This is, of course, good news.
To be frank, I’m skeptical (all of us should be) about the utility of crime statistics. They over-rely on police activity (what police reacted to) rather than victimization (what actually happened to people), meaning that those statistics often don’t reflect harms people experienced that they didn’t report to police (which is the majority of harms).
And, for decades, scholars have convincingly questioned the legitimacy of police-reported crime statistics, for many reasons. I’ve seen this in my own research: as I wrote about in my first book, changes to how police in Chicago catalogued crime in the early 1960s provoked an illusory but powerful panic about supposedly spiking crime.
Nevertheless, while crime statistics often lie, body counts usually do not, and at the minimum it’s pretty clear that fewer people were murdered in 2023 than in preceding years. Again, that’s a good thing.
The question is: why? In a nation overrun with weapons that for years has been lurching evermore toward violence, why did violence decline in 2023?
If you were to believe the Minneapolis police chief, Brian O’Hara, the drop in crime in that city was singularly a product of the police force he commands. The same of the New York City mayor and former NYPD officer, Eric Adams, who at a press conference last week touted the NYPD as the “finest police department on the globe” in announcing that crime in New York was down year-over-year.
Similarly, a press release from the Chicago police department gave some credit for that city’s declining crime to community partnerships, but the majority of its praise on the subject went to, well, itself.
Such claims are interesting. Were police just magically better at their job in 2023 than they were in other years? If police do a “good job” and are the sole reason why crime goes down in the years that it goes down, are they doing a “bad job” and are the reason why crime goes up in the years that it goes up?
The insanity of trying to discuss policing in this country is that most policymakers, and many citizens, refuse to accept that those two questions are intractably related. It is intellectually incongruent to answer the first in the affirmative and the second in the negative. Year after year, for more than half a century, the United States has poured more and more money into policing and argued that it does so to keep people safe.
Even in times of austerity, when funding for pretty much everything else gets slashed, funding for police generally rises. In times of plenty, funding for police rises. It rises when crime is high, and it rises when crime is low. When cities find that they need to trim budgets, the one thing that they almost always won’t meaningfully touch is their police department.
While as part of his austerity measures last year, Adams did threaten to delay the induction of new NYPD officers, he also authorized $150m (yes, million) more on overtime in 2023 for police to patrol New York’s subway system than in 2022. That investment paid off with an almost non-noticeable increase in arrests for serious crimes and about $100,000 in fines for fare evasion, largely grifted from poor people, at the same time that Adams divested from other city services while blaming it all on the costs of housing incoming migrants to the city.
No one can provide compelling evidence that this makes any sense. For decades, year-over-year crime rates have experienced peaks and valleys. The same is not true for spending on police, which moves ever-upward. Expressed visually, the two lines would look like a series of waves on the one hand (crime), and a straight line upward on the other (police spending).
I’m not sure what conclusion people could muster from that besides to say that how much we spend on policing doesn’t actually matter, at least in the socially positive sense. If we spend X billion of dollars on policing when crime is high (or perceived to be high), and if crime rates don’t decline as a result of said investment, then why do we consider that to have been a good investment?
And, in the opposite direction, why do we not question our investments when funding for police is at all-time highs and at the same time, said investments don’t precipitate a drop in crime statistics? Even the most ill-informed financial planner would advise against this based on the evidence.
Maybe it’s not entirely our fault. On this matter, and as Americans, we are conditioned by blinkered political visions and blinded understandings of history to accept that the way things are are the way that they must be. And perhaps that’s a universal human condition; grasping for what we don’t know (what could be) is much harder than holding on to what we do (what is). But there is a uniqueness, I think, to the political wizardry of US-style policing: it has instantiated itself so firmly as the answer to societal issues that we are left with few obvious off-ramps from it when we witness or experience such societal problems.
“Call the police” is what we are taught to do when we sense that we’re in danger, across all the enormous spectrum that “being in danger” entails, from the very real to the very racist. “Call the police” is what we are told to do if we get in a fender-bender because insurance won’t take your call without a police report. “The police” have become the social default if someone has a mental health episode or doesn’t use a turn signal or uses the wrong kind of drug in public or panhandles for loose change in the wrong location or sleeps on the wrong bench when they have nowhere else to go. Ad infinitum.
In contrast, the key lesson of recent decades is that how we approach public safety is utterly nonsensical. If investing billions into police every year doesn’t meaningfully influence whether or not people are safer as they go about their lives, would not our investments be better made elsewhere?
Chicago, for instance, recently began a guaranteed income pilot program, allotting an unconditional $500 per month to people living in economic precarity, versions of which have been adopted in other cities, too. Why do we not at least try new modes of operating to give people the things they need and that will better ensure they’re shielded from harm: access to both mental and physical health resources, to housing, to domestic abuse protection, and so on?
My hope for 2024 is that we start asking better questions about these systems, so that we can find better answers.
Simon Balto is assistant professor of history at the University of Wisconsin. He is the author of Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago from Red Summer to Black Power
