Progressive Policies Won't Stop the Crime Wave

Eric Levitz, writing at New York's Intelligencer blog, views 2020's 30 percent year-over-year increase in murder not as a political liability but as yet another reason to support a progressive reform agenda-one that reduces the footprints of incarceration and policing.

Levitz argues that progressive policies have a track record of controlling violent crime, and that the social costs of law-and-order approaches may be too high.

Levitz overstates the effectiveness of progressive alternatives and understates the evidence behind traditional crime control, muddling some conceptual questions in the process.

As historians such as Michael J. Fortner and James Forman, Jr. have shown, much of America's turn toward law and order after the mid- and late-twentieth century crime wave was driven by those in low-income, minority neighborhoods.

Levitz himself acknowledges that "a recent Yahoo News/YouGov survey found that concern with crime was significantly higher among the demographic groups that suffer the highest rates of firsthand victimization."

Numerous studies have causally linked policing with significant crime declines, including a study of municipal expenditures on policing that found "Reduced victim costs of $1.63 for each additional dollar spent on police in 2010, implying that U.S. cities are under-policed." Levitz tells readers that such analyses don't actually militate against his argument about how proper cost-benefit analyses shake out, because they fail to account for less visible social costs associated with law enforcement; but the same can be said about assessments of the toll that violence takes on communities-which goes far beyond the property damage and costs associated with injuries sustained by the victims.

As for incarceration, Levitz hangs his hat on the claim that "Long prison sentences do not deter crime, and are actually counterproductive for public safety." But the evidence on deterrence is more mixed than his piece lets on.

https://www.city-journal.org/progressive-policies-wont-stop-the-crime-wave