Doing Better
Earlier this month my next-door neighbor’s house was robbed. I live in a typical working-class neighborhood on the west side of Detroit. My neighbor is an elderly African American man who lives alone in his family home. Until a few years ago, his mother lived with him. His children and grandchildren live up the street. He has lived in our neighborhood for all his 70 plus years and is well known. He returned home in the early evening and found every light in the house on, drawers open, cherished possessions on the floor. His handgun was stolen. He said, “They really didn’t take much of anything, but I just feel so violated.”
Within a day, every neighbor that I know stopped me to tell me the story of the break in. Everyone was concerned about supporting our neighbor, understanding that he was shaken by the experience. Every single conversation I had about the incident ended the same way. Each neighbor said, “We have to look out for one another more. We can do better.”
The police never came to investigate. No one expected them to. Despite the efforts by government officials to convince us that spending money on police makes us safe, people in the community know better. In response to a real violation, a situation that creates feelings of vulnerability and powerlessness, not one person said, “We need more police around here.”
This is a small experience of a minor crime. But it tells us a lot about how little people think of the police as a source of safety.
Just prior to the break in, a new study came out in California that supports this widespread community understanding. The Catalyst California group and the ACLU of Southern California used a new state law to analyze data on how police spend their time. Their conclusion was “police departments don’t solve serious or violent crimes with any regularity, and in fact, spend very little time on crime control, in contrast to popular narratives.”
The study based on actual records of police practices found “police spend most of their time conducting racially biased stops and searches of minority drivers, often without reasonable suspicion, rather than ‘fighting crime.’” For example, in Los Angeles 88% of the time LA sheriffs spent on traffic stops was for officer initiated stops rather than responses to calls. Most did nothing more than intimidate the drivers.
Detroit is not different. The Detroit Justice Center has documented that nearly ½ of all prosecutions are for minor traffic offenses. Yet solving serious crimes takes little time and produces poor results. Arrests for murders hover at 41% and for rape, the arrest rate is 12%.
Study after study has demonstrated that more police do not result in greater safety.
In 2016, a group of criminologists conducted a systematic review of 62 earlier studies of police force size and crime between 1971 and 2013. They concluded that 40 years of studies consistently show that "the overall effect size for police force size on crime is negative, small, and not statistically significant."
Over the course of this year, we have seen an escalation of police violence. From petty efforts to intimidate protestors and those who would challenge their power in court to the killings of people suffering from mental illness, our police are operating without restraint. The administration thinks the solution is to spend more money doing what has already been proven to not work. In this coming year, all of us need to engage with our neighbors and ask how we can concretely and practically look out more for one another. We can do better.