There is an endless debate about crime, its causes and how to reduce it. Police forces face pressure to curtail aggressive patrolling, increasing the cautiousness of the police; consent decrees have cut back the role of stop-and-frisk and other “broken window”-type police tools; and there are calls for defunding the police and for progressive prosecution.
Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson has claimed that “jails and incarceration and law enforcement is a sickness that has not led to safe communities,” and recently, he established an Office of Gun Violence Reduction.
Reducing aggressive patrolling and creating new departments are not just pointless; they are counterproductive. I have studied the American experience, and when aggressive patrolling is significantly curtailed, whatever the reason, crime rates increase.
A perfect example of the deadliness of this combination is the homicide rate. According to the FBI, the number of homicides in the U.S. increased by about 4,000 from 2018, which is about when the coalescence of these inhibitions on the police began to manifest, to 2022. That’s approximately a 30% increase. More shocking still is the distribution of these homicides. The increase in the total number of Black people killed was twice that of white people, even though there are almost five times more white people than Black people in America.
The decrease in aggressive patrolling is not the only reason for this deplorable situation, but it is one of the causes. The combination of forces that was meant to benefit minority communities has had an opposite and devastating effect. What Johnson calls a “sickness” goes a long way toward reducing the number of violent crimes in American cities.
It is undeniable that policing suppresses crime rates, but here lies the deadly confusion in the public discourse. Although policing suppresses crime, it does not eliminate the conditions that give rise to criminality. If Johnson’s “sickness” were cured, crime rates of all kinds would skyrocket, but maintaining the status quo will not stop the seemingly endless progression of perpetrators through the criminal justice system. It will just keep more people alive and safe.
Creating a new bureaucracy to fight gun violence will not do much, either. Numerous programs are being implemented to attempt to reduce the probability of recidivism through education and counseling and to reintegrate offenders into society. These programs are laudable, certainly beneficial for some people, but overall are of limited effect even in reducing recidivism, let alone dealing with the conditions that generate criminality in the first place. They, like aggressive policing, do not deal with the causes of crime.
You can take all the present offenders off the street or convince them to change their ways. And yet society will continue to produce the quite awful assembly line of mostly young men who troop through the criminal courts, who lack even rudimentary marketable skills, such as the ability to read or perform math, and who have been deprived of supporting, loving two-partner families, all of which conditions them to gang affiliation for whom lawless behavior is a way of life.
As banal as it is to say, the root cause of most crime is poverty, and neither eliminating the police, constructing innovative diversion programs nor creating new departments will deal with that. Poverty will continue to exist and generate yet more product for the assembly line of the justice system.
The true sickness is the conditions that so many infants endure through no fault of their own, which lead to these outcomes. The solutions being proposed and inane rhetoric from people such as Johnson are just massaging the symptoms rather than dealing with the real problems.
This is a solvable problem. Young infants — from birth to 3 or 4 years old — must be in a stimulating environment for their brains to grow to capacity. It also affects cognitive development — how much potential a person can achieve. Infants in impoverished households are much more likely to be in deprived rather than stimulating environments and to suffer the consequences. There are estimates that children by the age of 3 on average (and thankfully there are many exceptions) in impoverished households hear anywhere from 4 million to 30 million fewer words than a child in what most of us would call a normal environment. It is not just nurturing the brain through stimulation that is impeded. Children in impoverished homes are much more likely to lack a safe and nurturing environment, leading to serious developmental issues.
Harvard University’s Center on the Developing Child notes that “significant deprivation disrupts the way in which children’s brains develop and process information, thereby increasing the risk for attentional, emotional, cognitive and behavioral disorders later in life.”
A report published in the June 2014 issue of the American Psychological Association’s Monitor on Psychology states that “the list of problems that stem from neglect reads like the index of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders: poor impulse control, social withdrawal, problems with coping and regulating emotions, low self-esteem, pathological behaviors such as tics, tantrums, stealing and self-punishment, poor intellectual functioning and low academic achievement.”
Thankfully, due to heroic family members, other interventions and the plasticity of the brain, most of these children do not end up enmeshed in the criminal justice system, but at the same time, they are often, through no fault of their own, deprived of the potential to develop cognitive abilities for more demanding and higher-paying jobs.
The greatest tragedy is that this is a solvable problem. Compared with the cost of crime, interventions to offset the disadvantages of deprived environments would be cheap.
Identify and help single mothers through at-home interventions that increase the probability that a child will develop his or her potential and will have a chance to escape the cycles of poverty. Ensure that the child is read to and, to the extent possible, shielded from abuse and neglect.
That would do more than all the police and prisons put together to reduce the future crime rate.
Ronald J. Allen is the John Henry Wigmore professor of law at Northwestern University.
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