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More Cops, Less Crime?

By Kent Scheidegger et al.

In conjunction with James Q. Wilson's op-ed about the recent Pew report on incarceration and crime rates, Bill Stuntz states about a week ago: One of the key lessons of the Iraq surge is that putting more boots on violent ground tends to reduce the violence. The same lesson applies in American cities, but for the most part, the lesson hasn?t been learned. For reasons that mystify me, the same state and federal governments that shower money on urban school systems give nearly nothing to urban police forces. That gets it backward: the correlation between more money and better schools is weak at best; the correlation between more cops and less crime is very strong. There's much more to Professor Stuntz's post, including: Overstretched big-city police forces tend to make lots of drug arrests, because those arrests are easy to make?and too few arrests for violent crimes, which require more manpower to investigate...continue to full post

Full post as published by Crime and Consequences on March 31, 2008 (boomark / email).