Source: Citycrimestats.com, 12/31/20
Lopez inserts one of his experts, criminologist Richard Rosenfeld, to close out the brief discussion of the possible causes: "All three played a role. What's difficult is to assign priority to one compared to the others."
In other words, readers are to understand that it's anyone's guess whether "fallout" from racial justice protests was a bigger factor in the rising murder rate than the pandemic or a flood of new guns-and Lopez pretty clearly nudges readers toward guessing the answer is that it was.
Correctly identifying causes is crucial, since the causes point to different solutions. "In the short term," Lopez writes,
there's solid evidence for policing-specifically, more focused policing, targeting the people and places most likely to be violent. With some of these strategies, the police work with other social services to lift violent perpetrators out of that life.
He then quotes another of his experts to leave no room for argument: "I'm as much a reformer as anybody, but the short-term solutions around high violence are mainly punitive. There's no getting around that." (In case you were wondering whether "proactive anti-violence practices" really meant anything but more punishment.)
"Here's proof that cops are good" seems like a good way to get a gig at the New York Times (Vox, 9/27/21).
The link Lopez uses to back up his claims of "solid evidence" behind policing directs readers to a piece he wrote for Vox in September (9/27/21) with a headline that made clear his position on this issue before the Times hired him: "Murders Are Spiking. Police Should Be Part of the Solution."
One problem with Lopez's argument in the piece-which is much longer and includes more nuance and caveats than his Times version-is that he used evidence about overall reductions in crime to make arguments about homicide, when in fact the two don't move in tandem. (Indeed, overall crime rates have gone down during the pandemic, as Lopez has elsewhere acknowledged-Vox, 7/21/21.)
Two key studies he relied on, for instance, noted that they found no or minimal reductions in violent crime with increased policing. A third (NEBR, 12/20) emphasized that while it did find a small reduction in homicides,
reducing funding for police could allow increased funding for other alternatives. Indeed an array of high-quality research suggests that crime can, in certain contexts, be reduced through methods other than policing or its by-product, incarceration.
That's particularly noteworthy, given that the study found that increased policing also resulted in more arrests for low-level crimes like loitering and drug possession, which in turn places more burdens on the most affected communities: crippling court fees and fines, plus the effects of even brief incarceration like loss of income, jobs or housing, breaking up of families and disruption of mental health and health services. And for all that, increased incarceration doesn't even increase public safety or reduce recidivism.
In other words, if policing in some form can modestly bring down murder rates, it also incurs very real costs, above and beyond budgetary ones-which are rarely if ever measured in these studies.
In the Vox piece, Lopez did acknowledge many caveats to the bold argument made in the headline. He noted that the research suggests that not just any policing works, for instance. This is where the "proactive policing" idea comes in, a favorite of policing proponents, and a big part of the argument that a police "pullback" causes the rise in crime. It's true that many studies have found that specific, focused policing practices have produced some (mostly small, short-term) decreases in crime. But a) that's not what most police departments do, except in a few ad hoc short-term programs (Police Quarterly, 1/20), so it could be expected to have had next to no impact on the nationwide homicide rate, and b) the studies once again don't take into account the costs of these programs, including the negative impacts on heavily policed communities, mentioned above.
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