NewScientist gives a longish article (“Police forces turn to science to put their tactics on trial“, 7 November 2015, paywall) on reforming police practices to be more like, well, conventional medicine – that is, evidence based:
For thousands of years, law enforcers have trusted their intuition and instincts. But one in every 26 police efforts to reduce crime actually have the effect of increasing crime, says Lawrence Sherman, director of the Institute of Criminology at the University of Cambridge. “To do things without knowing the consequences is to act unethically,” he says.
Only one in 26? Is that a typo? 3.8 percent of efforts backfire? I am not appalled by that statistic. I also suspect he was quoted slightly out of context, as a literal reading of his quote would ban all experimentation.
Now, new police officers across the UK will be taught how to understand and implement scientific evidence in policing, and how to run their own experiments and trials – made possible in part by a £10 million injection of cash from the UK government and the Higher Education Funding Council for England. The US has also begun to push for a more scientific approach to policing with the recent launch of the American Society of Evidence-Based Policing (ASEBP).
Early results from several trials show that some common police practices are ineffective, or even harmful, while others highlight ways to ensure that people are all treated fairly.
Despite my earlier comment, this is actually good news. For a past example of a semi-random policy implemented by police, consider the New York City Guiliani-era “broken windows” policy, as defined and examined by The National Bureau of Economic Research:
During the 1990s, crime rates in New York City dropped dramatically, even more than in the United States as a whole. Violent crime declined by more than 56 percent in the City, compared to about 28 percent in the nation as whole. Property crimes tumbled by about 65 percent, but fell only 26 percent nationally.
Many attribute New York’s crime reduction to specific “get-tough” policies carried out by former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s administration. The most prominent of his policy changes was the aggressive policing of lower-level crimes, a policy which has been dubbed the “broken windows” approach to law enforcement. In this view, small disorders lead to larger ones and perhaps even to crime. As Mr. Guiliani told the press in 1998, “Obviously murder and graffiti are two vastly different crimes. But they are part of the same continuum, and a climate that tolerates one is more likely to tolerate the other.”
In Carrots, Sticks and Broken Windows (NBER Working Paper No. 9061), co-authors Hope Corman and Naci Mocan find that the “broken windows” approach does not deter as much crime as some advocates argue, but it does have an effect, particularly on robbery and motor vehicle theft. They use misdemeanor arrests as a measure of broken windows policing.
Over the 1990s, misdemeanor arrests increased 70 percent in New York City. When arrests for misdemeanors had risen by 10 percent, indicating increased use of the “broken windows” method, robberies dropped 2.5 to 3.2 percent, and motor vehicle theft declined by 1.6 to 2.1 percent. But this decline was not the result of more of those involved in misdemeanors being incapacitated from further crimes by being in prison: prison stays for misdemeanors are short and only 9.4 percent of misdemeanor arrests result in a jail sentence, the authors note. Furthermore, an increase in misdemeanor arrests has no impact on the number of murder, assault, and burglary cases, the authors finds.
Their research is important because such policies, regardless of efficacy, are touted by their promulgators as their credentials for other political offices; evaluation of results is important. But that’s not the point of the NewScientist article; the researchers want to conduct small field studies which can then be analyzed to create policies used nation-wide that they have good reason to believe will be effective.
There’ll be resistance from established power structures, I should think, based on protecting power and privilege, but for those who are more idealistic, learning how to properly construct field trials and interpret resultant statistics to give a final evaluation to a proposed new policy will be a critical component of this approach.
In some ways, I see this as an extension of the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment was about the use of reason, of rationality, when pursuing, in barest essence, questions about courses of action. Back then, they were more concerned about politics and science – has the king been selected by God, or just why should he be obeyed? The use of observation and reasoning to discover that water could be the source of disease, and then that disease is caused by germs, and not malevolent daemons. But the use of statistical methods have come later to some fields; indeed, the very term evidence-based medicine is somewhat shocking in the implications that some activities that bill themselves as medicine not only lack any sort of evidence as to their efficacy, but may bill themselves as effective due to effects not supported by science itself.
Evidence-based policing may not have the same outré implications, but the existence of the term (and associated supporting organization, mentioned above) does serve to remind us that one of the most critical functions of government may not have benefited as much, in terms of ideal efficiency, as has other sectors of society. Recent unrest between community and law enforcement in Ferguson, MO, have served to stir up calls for reform of law enforcement, but popular calls for reform neglect to precisely specify what makes for effective reform. Will a similar, evidence-based effort for police reform be available to those who are eventually handed the task? Or will we merely hope the recipients of the task have the wisdom, acquired from who knows where, to reform organizations possessing woes the origin of which are not formally researched and recognized – i.e., the Great Man approach to solving problems.
As (to borrow a phrase from my sister) a story-junkie, there’s great attraction in the Great Man approach, but as a science groupy, I must deride that inclination and hope someone has done the necessary, arduous (or an even stronger adjective) research to discover how to best reform a police organization. Otherwise, we can only hope someone gets it right.
