The problem is that the data does not tell the story that the clerisy want to believe. This is in part related to individual ideology and to the well known issue that people are very poor at correctly estimating risk. It also sometimes relates to personal political leanings. As an example, the year long propagation of the War on Women meme was based on no credible empirical data. The two broad planks were 1) Women earn only 70 cents on the dollar for the same work, and 2) There is a Rape Culture on campuses. Both have been empirically refuted. For example, even the White House economists disavow the 70 cent canard. This has been deeply researched across the OECD for thirty some years and we know why people earn different incomes and it has nothing to do with either race or gender. It is driven by choice of profession, education attainment, intensity of work effort (hours per week), duration of work effort (number of years), flexibility of work effort (capacity to adjust work schedule to work needs), etc. Once you take these issues into account, there is no pay gap for equal work. Which makes sense given that such discrimination has been illegal for fifty years.
Same with the Rape Culture issue. For major crimes, the crime rate is down by 50% over the past twenty years and university campuses are incredibly safe. That is not to say that crimes don't happen there. They do. But they happen at a lesser rate than most other places.
These two campaigns were clearly driven by political considerations, principally an effort to increase female voter turnout and with the expectation that it would favor one party over another. As it turned out, the campaign ended up having the reverse impact than intended. Regardless of political intent and efficacy, there is separately an ideological element that is much smaller in number but likely much more vocal. Adherents to third wave feminism, liberation theology, post colonial theory, critical theory, postmodernism, critical race theory, ideologies etc. are particularly susceptible to these appeals. The dividing line between cynical political exploitation and sincere emotional ideological belief can get very blurry.
What are some of the modern tropes about crime and policing in America today whether pushed for political or ideological reasons or simply part of the foggy cognitive milieu? I would posit that they are:
Crime is increasing and is an increasingly serious issue.As Malanga shows in his article, these are faith based beliefs not rooted in the available data.
There is estrangement between the populace and the police forces intended to protect the populace.
Police are becoming increasingly high-handed in their interactions with the public.
Police disproportionately target their activities at minorities.
The police are increasingly ineffective in their activities.
The police stop citizens for Driving While Black
Police racially profile the populace
Read the whole thing.When Congress passed the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act in 1994, legislators mandated that the attorney general begin studying and reporting on excessive use of force by police. Soon after, the Bureau of Justice Statistics developed a series of recurring studies that measured everything from police behavior in specific situations, like traffic stops, to incidents in which police use force. Much of the data was based not on reports by local police departments, but on direct surveys of citizens, providing some 20 years of information on how the police interact with American citizens, and how those citizens see the police.
If Congress believed that this new data might provide some context and insight for national debates about the use of force by police, such as the one we’re having now in the wake of grand jury decisions not to indict police officers for their role in deadly incidents in Ferguson and Staten Island, legislators were largely mistaken. After the Ferguson grand jury made its ruling, President Obama told the nation that “the law too often feels like it’s being applied in a discriminatory fashion.” Since the Ferguson incident involving Michael Brown and officer Darren Wilson last August, the New York Times has published stories about communities where minorities get stopped more frequently than whites, implying racial discrimination. But these stories ignore Bureau of Justice Statistics data showing that crime victims disproportionately identify minorities as perpetrators of crime, too. Senator Rand Paul has even used Ferguson to launch an attack on the war on drugs, saying that it puts the police in a difficult situation in dealing with the public—though drugs had little to do with the confrontation between Brown and Wilson (except as they may have influenced Brown’s aggressive behavior).
Despite such pronouncements, two decades of data on police interactions with the public don’t support the idea that something extraordinary is afoot, that the police are becoming “militarized” as President Obama has suggested, or that distrust between police and local communities has produced an enormous spike in conflicts. By contrast, the data show that significant crime declines have been accompanied by a leveling off and then a reduction in confrontations with the police, as reported by Americans of all races.
The upshot is that, political and ideological campaigns to the contrary, Americans are much safer than they were twenty years ago, both from criminals and from the police. So what are the numbers for the past twenty years?
50% decline in crime.Alternately: We are much safer, we have to deal with the police less often than we did in the past, we are satisfied in the nature of interaction with the police, and we see ourselves being treated equally by the police (whether we are black or white or whether the officer is black or white).
24% decrease in the rate of interactions with the police on an annual basis.
African Americans report a decline of 33% in instances of police use of force. For the entire population, there was a 16% decline in reported instances of police use of force.
88% of people interacting with the police for any reason indicated that the police behaved properly, including 83% of African Americans.
Both whites and blacks have the same validation of police stops regardless of whether the officer initiating the stop was white or black.
25% decline in the overall prison mortality rate (deaths in prison). African Americans have a mortality rate in prison that is 17% lower than that of whites
Multiple DOJ studies indicate that arrest rates are proportionate to crime rates.
The DOJ has no studies indicating racial differentials in traffic stops when taking into account traffic infractions.
So if the picture is so much better than it was, why the angst? Politics and ideology are part of it. Shortness of human memory is likely a contributor. And probably just a cultural orientation is a factor as well. We tend to measure ourselves against the shortfalls from some idealized perfection rather than on our improvement against some past benchmark. Yes, violent crime is down 50% but we still have violent crime.
Still, it is interesting to me the yawning gulf between political/ideological assertions and measured realities.
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