Are More Cops the Answer?

http://www.eastbayexpress.com/oakland/are-more-cops-the-answer/Content?oid=3547248

Professor Zimring has been working at Boalt Hall since 1985 and is known as one of America's most senior criminologists. He has spent the last decade supporting the policies of current New York City Police Commissioner Ray Kelly — New York's top cop during the early 1990s, who is largely responsible for instituting policies like stop-and-frisk, and was reappointed by Mayor Michael Bloomberg in 2002.

For example, two New York City criminologists, John Eterno and Eli Silverman, have concluded that New York's crime stats have been distorted over the years by the police department's CompStat system, which tracks crime trends and applies substantial pressure on police commanders to reduce crime in their districts. In their groundbreaking 2011 book, The Crime Numbers Game: Management by Manipulation, which was based on surveys of 491 retired NYPD captains and in-depth interviews with 30 of the former cops, Eterno and Silverman found that NYPD supervisors, under pressure to deliver favorable figures to the CompStat-obsessed brass and politicians, routinely downgraded offenses and encouraged officers to omit certain types of crimes from reports. This is why NYPD could claim a 50 percent drop in assaults between 1999 and 2006, even while hospital records for these same years showed a 90 percent increase in emergency room visits for assaults, a 129 percent surge in ER visits for firearms assaults, and a 15 percent rise in hospitalizations for assault-related injuries, Eterno and Silverman found.

The flawed NYPD statistics exposed by Eterno and Silverman form the bedrock of Zimring's research.

At the same time, research by other leading academics attributes the underpinning factors of criminal behavior to wealth disparity, education gaps, and other disadvantages resulting from generational poverty — and not to the number of police officers a city employs. "Police are not the solution to crime," said Lauren Krivo, a professor of sociology at Rutgers University. Krivo has studied the social and economic conditions of inequality that produce criminal behavior for decades.

McCrary also has asserted that economic and demographic issues are among the most overstated factors in what causes crime, a claim that Krivo said was "completely incorrect."

"In numerous neighborhood crime studies, the strongest and most consistent predictor of the level of crime is the level of disadvantages facing members of the community," Krivo said. "This has been shown for decades."

Krivo has administered multiple long-term studies of crime and inequality in dozens of US cities with backing from the National Science Foundation. Krivo most recently studied crime in 91 cities, taking into account numerous variables about the social and economic conditions of neighborhoods. Her research showed that violent crime is prevalent in certain neighborhoods because of income inequality. The source lies in the structural conditions of urban neighborhoods that lack jobs, opportunity, and access to good schools, health care, and other benefits that upper- and middle-class people usually take for granted.

A recent IBM study on police expenditures, Cashing the Public Safety Dividend, included additional critiques about the link between the number of cops and crime rates. Like McCrary's research, the IBM study used economic theory to conceptualize how police spending and force levels relate to changes in public safety. But instead of using elasticity, the IBM authors found that police spending is more readily explained in terms of having a declining marginal rate of return. Up to a certain point, hiring more cops might help reduce crime, but above a certain point, the returns — the crime rate — simply don't change, the authors found. In fact, a city can spend too much on its police, neglecting other services and investments that can worsen income inequality and result in more crime.