One of the most commonly held misconceptions about police in this nation is that if there are more police on the streets, there will be less crime. A new report from the New York Times, however, reveals that despite a 16% drop in the number of officers in the past decade, crime has not risen, but dropped significantly. This is in line with scholarly research that rarely reaches the news media. For example, in 1990, despite the fact that Los Angeles had 33% more police officers per capita than Houston and Seattle, violent crime in Los Angeles was double that of Houston and two thirds higher than Seattle (David Bayley, Police for the Future, 4). As far back as 1967, the President’s Commission on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Justice pointed out that differences in crime rates between various cities cannot be attributed to variations in the numbers of police per capita. That is, more police does not mean less crime. This is a well-known fact in police studies, but politicians and police deliberately propagate the opposite view.
In a recent article for Conrad Grebel Review, I examined the idea that “community policing” is a less violent alternative to militarized models of policing and I believe I showed that this is not the case: community policing can actually be more violent. One of the arguments that community policing theorists make for increasing the number of police is that even though it is known that police do not actually reduce the crime rate, the presence of police make people feel safer. Therefore, to increase the public perception of crime reduction, cities should put more officers on the street. This is an explicit argument made by Wilson and Kelling in their famous “broken windows” theory and shows that despite popular conceptions that more police equals lower crime, the data does not support the myth.
