Can Criminal Justice Reform Survive a Wave of Violent Crime?
Lets start with the Covid explanation. There are numerous ways the pandemic and its fallout could drive shootings and homicides. High unemployment alongside school closures meant a greater number of young men out on the streets. The pandemic also shut down all sorts of programs and interventions that cities have relied on to confront violence. Studies have linked rising crime not just to persistent economic disadvantage, but to the fear that comes with sudden changes in economic prospects, a fear Covid brought with it in spades. The pandemic was deeply stressful and traumatic, and its costs were concentrated in already vulnerable communities. It would be shocking if something with the psychological, economic, and emotional impact of Covid did not contribute to a rise in violence borne of stress and strain. Poll results suggest that Black support for policing is deeply ambivalent. The causal story linking violence to the protests is also plausible, but more complicated. The most common story is the so-called Ferguson Effect, which argues that police respond to protests by working less hard, which in turn leads to more crime. Rigorous studies, however, have generally failed to find any real connection between this sort of depolicing and homicide rates. There is also evidence that peoples views about the legitimacyor illegitimacyof law enforcement may influence their willingness to carry and thus use guns even more than concerns about being stopped by the police or victimized themselves. This would suggest that at least some of the lethal violence is the product of anger at police forces that kill far too many Black men, as well as at the remarkably violent, riotous way the police responded to last summers protests. To use this violence to justify doubling down on conventional approaches gets the lesson exactly wrong. In fact, complicating the protest story even more is a recent working paper reporting that Black Lives Matter protests between 2014 and 2019 appeared to lead to a sizable reduction in police killings. Given that such killings are one of the leading causes of death for young Black men, this is no small effect to consider. And even if the protests did lead to some sort of net increase in homicide (the paper also reports an increase in nonpolice homicides, but while bigger than the reduction in police killings, that number is less carefully estimated and likely overstates any actual effect), the better solution is to focus on nonpolice alternatives in response. Yet while the connection between reforms and the rise in homicide is weak (at best), and while it is important to emphasize this truth, the impact of this observation on policy is unclearbecause the connection between crime and the politics of crime is itself unclear. Crime policy certainly reflects trends in crime, but it also is often driven more by broader fears about social disorder and unrest. The politics of criminal legal reform are messy, but they are not random, and understanding how they operate can help us better understand the future ahead.