A choice not easily made apparently.

From Crime plunges in El Salvador as criminals are sent to prison by Hans Bader.  

It is a common argument for justice reformers to disparage the link between policing and crime.  During our recent brush with Defund the Police, the argument was that not only were police forces (even majority black police forces) biased against blacks but that the degree of policing was irrelevant.  Policing could be reduced or suspended without any impact on crime commission.

It was an argument without empirical evidence (as, seemingly, were most political arguments of 2020-2021).  Indeed, it was an argument against all the evidence from all history and from around the world.  

Yet it is a happy delusion sustained in certain corners of the MSM commentariat and in the secure corners of academia where apparently most bad ideas which cannot survive the rigors of the real world go for life support.  

Bader is reporting on the successes in dramatically reducing sky-high crime in El Salvador through a mix of policing, prosecution, and punishment.  The article is full of links to the research demonstrating that policing is negatively correlated with crime commission.

The murder rate has fallen by two thirds since 2018, and crime has fallen by 75%, in El Salvador as it has imprisoned large numbers of criminals. The country has put a hefty 2% of its adult population in prison. This is due to the anti-crime policies of its current president, Nayib Bukele. 

 

As Edgar Beltran notes at Law & Liberty,

In 2015, El Salvador reached a sky-high 103 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants. The year before Bukele came to power, it was 51 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants. Now, it is 17.6, about half the rate of American cities such as Philadelphia or Chicago….Bukele is, by far, the most popular, democratically elected leader in the world. Independent polls have his local approval rating around 80 or 85%. The explanation is relatively simple: El Salvador went from being one of the most violent countries in the world, absolutely dominated by criminal gangs, to reducing crime by 75%. Bukele promised to end crime and he delivered….by putting in jail almost 2% of the adult population of the country.

But the article has a cautionary note which marginally sustains the concerns utopianists and ideologues have with effective policing.

While El Salvador’s President Bukele has successfully fought crime, he is also disturbingly power-hungry. He got his judicial appointees to approve his running for reelection, even though that violates El Salvador’s constitution.

It highlights a philosophical dilemma for utopianists and ideologues.  They want simultaneously to have a no punishment criminal justice system as well as a system which does not encourage authoritarianism.

However, all experience sustains the observation that criminal justice systems with no consequences to law breaking create crime and crime creates demands for authoritarian responses.

The easy and natural response would be simply to enforce the law, detect the criminals, prosecute them and punish them when convicted.  That produces low crime and low support for authoritarianism.  But you have to abandon the naive idea of a no punishment criminal justice system.  A choice not easily made apparently.