Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, May 2, 1994 TAG: 9405030001
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A7 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: RICHARD MORAN
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Adding more police officers may be good politics; it may even make a few people feel safer; but it will do next to nothing to reduce crime and violence in America.
As hard as it may be to believe, there is no direct relationship between the number of police and the rate of crime in a community. In 1991, for example, San Diego and Dallas had about the same ratio of police to population, yet Dallas had twice as much crime reported to the police.
Cleveland and San Diego, meanwhile, had comparable crime rates even though Cleveland had twice as many police per capita. Moreover, Washington, D.C., has both the highest murder rate and the most police per square foot of any city in America.
Although police departments were established in America more than 150 years ago, no research study has been able to demonstrate that adding police lowers the crime rate. In fact, the relationship often appears to work the other way around.
Rising crime rates cause police ranks to swell as politicians respond to political pressure by hiring more cops. While more cops do not translate into lower crime rates, less crime does tend to reduce the number of police over several years. This is what happened in New York City during the 1970s. A dwindling crime rate, combined with a budget crisis, reduced the Police Department from a high of 31,830 officers in 1970 to a low of 21,838 officers in 1981 .
If you're still not convinced that adding more police won't lower crime, let me tell you about what happened in Kansas City, Mo. For research purposes, the South Patrol District was divided into three comparable areas. In one, police patrols were doubled and sometimes tripled. In another, police patrols were eliminated, although the police continued to respond to citizens' calls. In the third, no changes were made.
After a year, what do you think happened? Absolutely nothing! The crime rate stayed the same in all three areas. What's more, the public didn't notice the difference in police patrols. In other words, no one even felt safer.
But what about foot patrols? Don't they reduce crime by improving the exchange of information between citizens and the police? Once again, the answer appears to be no. A Newark, N.J., study found that foot patrols had only a marginal effect on crime rates. A cop walking the beat did make people - especially shopkeepers - feel safer in their neighborhoods, but it did not reduce crime. Since foot patrols can produce a false sense of security, they may actually be a negative policing strategy.
Please understand that I am not saying that the police don't matter, that we could just disband them and crime wouldn't increase. Indeed, during the Boston police strike of 1919, crime, especially looting, increased enormously.
What I am saying is that given some level of police presence, adding more police will not reduce the crime rate. The reason is that police work is essentially reactive. Police arrive on the scene after a crime has been committed, which is why they are better at arresting criminals than at preventing crimes.
Community policing is designed to address this problem by making the police proactive - stopping crime before it happens. But since the police already spend about 85 percent of their time attending to noncriminal matters, community policing is mostly public relations - old wine in new bottles.
Besides, does anyone seriously believe that a Constable on Patrol - a cop - can do anything about the social, political, racial and economic causes of crime in the inner city?
Research findings indicate that police discover in progress only about 2.5 percent of all crimes. Even if the nation's police forces were doubled from 1 million to 2 million, we could expect, at best, only a modest decrease in crimes. Adding 100,000 new police officers would reduce the crime rate by only about one-quarter of 1 percent. At a cost of $8.9 billion (about $90,000 per crime prevented), adding more police does not appear to be a feasible approach to crime reduction.
For the majority of cases, the police must rely on citizens reporting crimes already committed. Although more police patrols might reduce the time required for police to arrive on the scene, response time is not important in reducing crime. Nor is it all that important in apprehending criminals. Despite all the hype about phoning 911, people wait an average of six minutes before calling the police. Even if the police arrive instantaneously, most crimes are already "cold" and the criminal long gone.
But wouldn't adding more police result in more arrests, more people going to jail and, hence, fewer criminals on the streets? Not really. With our prisons already overcrowded, there is no place to lock up convicted felons. The number of criminals sent to prison does not depend on how many people police arrest. It depends on how much space there is in prison.
In 1992, for example, police arrested more than 14 million people, even though local jails and state prisons can hold only 1.2 million inmates. It doesn't make much sense to arrest more people unless you have a place to put them.
A 10 percent increase in our nation's police forces might allow police to spend a little more time investigating each case, but unless a crime victim is able to identify a suspect, investigation is generally unproductive. In most big-city police departments, detectives spend less than four hours on each felony. And most of that time is taken up by paperwork. In any event, there is not a fixed population of crooks out there. Arresting a drug dealer, prostitute or fence, for example, simply opens a job opportunity for another person to fill.
Adding more police may be a good way for the president and Congress to demonstrate to the American people that they are tough on law and order, but it is not an effective strategy to reduce crime. The awful truth is that there is no law-enforcement solution to the crime problem.
Richard Moran is a professor of sociology at Mount Holyoke College, where he teaches criminology.
by CNB