Now on to police. As Tony Bouza made so clear in his book, Police
are very
good at investigating crime, not so good at preventing it. Short
of a police
state (Officers always in sight), more police will not decrease
crime. That is
not if used in the normal way. Certainly things like community
policing,
community organizing, and other ways of doing things differently
can make a
difference.
No flame suit needed, but I posted this study when it was released,
and I thought it might be appropriate again. Excerpts from the press
release below. (But what do I know if I can't spell the name of the
local drug store correctly. I shop there - is that not enough? Guess
I should have known better than to trust list gossip.)
http://www.fsu.edu/news/2005/06/24/more.cops/
Jonathan Klick, the Jeffrey A. Stoops Professor of Law at FSU, and
Alexander Tabarrok of George Mason University, found a 15 percent
reduction in crime in the police district where the White House and
National Mall are located when additional officers were on duty
during high terror alert days. The study was published in the Journal
of Law and Economics.
The findings are significant because social scientists, lawmakers and
others have long wondered whether spending more money on additional
police is the answer to reducing crime. Klick and Tabarrok's study
suggests that it is.
Klick, who in addition to his law degree has a doctorate in
economics, goes as far as to say that doubling police forces—or at
the very least increasing them by 25 percent—may be a good idea,
although there may be a point of diminishing returns. Already more
than $65 billion is spent annually on police in this country.
"We're pretty confident that if we increase police forces by one-
fourth, we would get our money's worth," he said.
After the Office of Homeland Security implemented the terror alert
system, Klick, who was working in Washington at the time, noticed
police officers on every corner during high alert times—a reason that
had nothing to do with the city's crime rate. That gave him and
Tabarrok the opportunity to conduct a so-called natural experiment to
see the effect the increased police presence had.
They reviewed data between the day the alert system began, March 12,
2002, and July 30, 2003, a period in which the alert level rose and
fell four times. The changes in the alert system proved to be
important because the researchers were able to replicate the results
each time the alert level was raised and reduce the possibility that
the results were due to other factors.
They found a drop of about three crimes per day, or 15 percent,
around the National Mall area where the increased police were
concentrated during the high alert periods. Overall, crime was down
in the city by an average of seven crimes a day or 6.6 percent, Klick
said.
The reduction was mostly in the so-called street crimes—burglaries,
stolen cars and the like. The increased police presence had no effect
on murders and other crimes that typically take place out of sight.
Becca Vargo Daggett
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