More cops doesn’t=t mean less crime

 

Incoming Clark County Sheriff Bill Young is going to seek a referendum asking citizens to approve money for more cops in order to make people feel safer.  Poor Las Vegas has a police-citizen ratio below the national average, as if there is something magical about such numbers.  There is one problem with adding more cops: it never has made much difference.  At least that is what all the research has noted during the past 50 years or so.  David Bayley, a nationally recognized expert on the police (Dean of the School of Criminal Justice at SUNY-Albany) opened his book, Police for the Future, with these lines: AThe police do not prevent crime.  This is one of the best kept secrets of modern life.  Experts know it, the police know it, but the public does not now it.@

Despite such knowledge among all the experts, the police continue to pretend that if more cops are not hired, all hell will break lose.  Sheriff-elect Bill Young has made the usual argument - totally lacking in empirical foundation - that we need more cops to keep up with population growth.  Nonsense!  Studies have shown that even when a police force is reduced (e.g., through layoffs resulting from budget cuts) the crime rate is unaffected.  Comparisons among different cities shows different crime rates with almost identical police officers per capita.  For instance, one study showed that in a recent year Chicago, with the highest number of police per capita (4.1 per 1,000 population) had a crime rate barely above San Diego (8,638 v. 8,483), which had 1.5 police per 1,000.

Research has also showed that increasing the response time to reported crimes does nothing to the overall crime rate. This is because the vast majority of crimes are Acold@ by the time the police are notified - that is, well before the police even know about a crime, the offender is long gone.  If the police arrive within one minute of a crime being committed, then they are more likely to make an arrest; as the time increases, the changes become correspondingly remote.  Likewise for greater use of detectives investigating crimes and more police seen in patrol cars. Concerning investigations by detectives, they do little to solve crimes, unless there is a specific named suspect. When there is a named suspect, there is about an 86% chance of clearing the crime by an arrest; when there is no named suspect, the chances are reduced to only 12%.  And the majority of all cases have no named suspect. None of these effects the crime rate.  It may give citizens the illusion that they are safer, but they are not.

Seen from a longer view is the fact that (as I reported in an earlier column in The Mercury - AWhere did the money go? - October 3, 2002) between 1971 and 2000 the overall crime rate in the country as a whole (and in Nevada) changed very little, with violent crime actually increasing.  This despite a 1500% increase in expenditures for police and other components of the criminal justice system.   Today there are more cops on the streets than ever before.  And people today are more likely to live in fear of crime than 30 years ago, largely caused by increasing media attention to crimes, with the famous slogan, Aif it bleeds, it leads.@  Years of research on the relationship between the media and crime has consistently found that the amount of crime reported on the local news is far greater than reality - especially homicide, which is the least likely of all crimes to actually occur but the most likely to be broadcast over the airwaves.