IT'S HARD FOR COPS TO DO THEIR JOBS WHEN THEY GET MALIGNED ALL THE TIME

‘Criminal (In)Justice’ Review: In Defense of Policing

A crime-policy expert’s data-backed report on what works on the street. The upshot? ‘More policing means less crime.’

 

By Elliot Kaufman

 

 

The Wall Street Journal

Aug. 17, 2022

 

 

When it got ugly—in the streets, the parks and the subways—and New Yorkers had nowhere left to turn, they elected Mayor Rudy Giuliani. He turned to the Manhattan Institute, whose “broken windows” policing philosophy would prove crucial to the city’s restoration in the 1990s. But years passed and there arose a new king over Egypt, who knew not Joseph. Police were pulled back, while prosecutors advocated nonprosecution. From 2009 to 2019, arrests dropped more than 25% and imprisonment 17%. These trends accelerated in 2020, and America saw the largest single-year homicide increase in its history. Many cities have since set homicide records or post-’90s highs, accompanied always by an unsettling deterioration in public order.

 

Into this storm arrives “Criminal (In)Justice” by Rafael Mangual, the Manhattan Institute’s head of crime-policy research. He takes up the arguments of criminal-justice reformers and teases out their weaknesses: the context they leave out, the limits of what they can explain and the costs on the other side of the ledger. The result is a serious challenge to the narrative of mass incarceration and racist, trigger-happy police.

The average person arrested for a shooting in Chicago in two recent years had nearly 12 prior arrests. Yet it remains an article of faith that the U.S. justice system is too punitive, locking up too many for too long. To hear some tell it, every second guy in prison is there merely for smoking a joint. But it isn’t true, Mr. Mangual explains. Around 90% of U.S. prisoners are state prisoners, only 4% of them are locked up for drug possession, and many of those have pled down from other offenses. “The vast majority of American prisoners,” writes Mr. Mangual, “are violent, chronic offenders” who “have received more than one ‘second chance.’”

Just 40% of state felony convictions result in a prison sentence, and the median violent offender serves less than two and a half years. America has far more prisoners per capita than Western Europe not because our justice system is uniquely cruel, he argues, but because wehave far more violent crime.

Posed against this harsh reality, progressive reform can look a great deal like escapism. New York’s 2020 bail reform, Mr. Mangual writes, prohibited judges from considering in pretrial-release decisions the danger that defendants pose. Some call that a victory for civil liberties, but New Yorkers can attest that treating a smaller jail population as an end in itself has been a disaster for public safety.

Turning to police shootings, Mr. Mangual treats readers to a master class in the rhetoric of reaction: The problem is exaggerated, most solutions won’t work and the ones that do would jeopardize more important objectives. Force, he shows, is used in only a tiny percentage of arrests, and deadly force even less so. In 2020 the NYPD responded to 74,378 calls involving weapons yet shot only 12 subjects. That’s way down from 145 in 1972—before most of the “militarization” that is now often blamed for police shootings. Defunding the police could stop some shootings, but it would facilitate many others. “One of the most consistent and robust findings in the criminological literature,” writes Mr. Mangual, is that “more policing means less crime.”

This means that reformers err in thinking of racial minorities primarily as victims of strong policing. From 1993 to 1999, during Mr. Giuliani’s policing revolution, the gun-related homicide victimization rate for black New Yorkers fell from under 40 per 100,000 to about 10, a stunning improvement. “The people who benefited most,” Mr. Mangual observes, “are precisely the people we’re told are singled out by the system for unfair treatment.”

These days the charge is systemic racism, meaning racially disparate outcomes. It strikes Mr. Mangual as deceptive, however, to sidestep intent. Blacks are more likely to be incarcerated than whites, but shouldn’t it matter whether this is due to invidious discrimination or differences in violent crime rates? Mr. Mangual produces “a mountain of evidence,” as he puts it, that police attention and enforcement are allocated so unevenly because serious crime is allocated the same way. Around 4% of a city’s street segments will tend to see around half the city’s crime.

In the hands of activists, racial disparities in drug arrests, despite similar rates of use, are proof of racism. Mr. Mangual has a subtler explanation: Since criminals tend not to specialize, police use drug enforcement as “a pretextual attack on violent crime.” Given limited resources, focusing enforcement on dangerous areas is a way to catch gang members and other violent criminals more likely to harm others.

“A truly racist cop,” a black police officer once told Mr. Mangual, “isn’t the guy constantly getting out of his car, frisking people, and clearing corners to try and prevent s— from happening. A truly racist cop is the guy that says, ‘F— ’em. Let ’em kill each other.’ But the haters [of police] want us to act more like the racist and less like the go-getter. So, what does that say about them?”

Reformers are on trial in “Criminal (In)Justice,” but they also set the agenda. Mr. Mangual disputes their arguments and makes concessions where he can—cash bail, no-knock raids, qualified immunity—the better to parry the progressive thrust. He is highly effective and never wobbly, but he is playing defense, contesting the reformers’ story rather than telling his own. It has been that kind of decade. Ironically, as I turned to Mr. Mangual’s conclusion, reading in New York’s Riverside Park under the afternoon sun, a stranger interrupted and offered to sell me drugs.

The publication of Mr. Mangual’s book is well-timed. The results of depolicing and decarceration are already visible on the street, and from San Francisco to Baltimore, voters have noticed. “Criminal (In)Justice” reads as a data-backed note of goodbye and good riddance to our recent period of “political expediency and performative virtue,” of the posturing promise to reap the rewards of leniency without paying any price in crime and disorder. As public animus refocuses from the cop to the criminal, politicians may even come to ask Manhattan Institute scholars how to return cities to their law-abiding citizens, again.