apolitical crime policy

Briefly-- this post reminded me of an important fact about the debate over crime. Discussions of crime and crime prevention tend to be deeply political and often quite harsh, with differing camps making various accusations of each other. Liberals' concern for rights of the accused is often represented by conservatives as a failure to be tough on crime. Conservatives' tendency to push for harsh punishment and aggressive enforcement is often represented by liberals as a slouch towards totalitarianism.

But the actual small-scale policy prescriptions that work best to reduce crime tend to be rather apolitical, or so it seems to me. Much has been made of the aggression of the Giuliani-era police force in New York city, and the enormous reduction in crime during that period. (I find the NYPD's record on racial equity and the number of violent acts against black men during that time very disturbing.) But the people who know the best all seem to think that the gains weren't from racial profiling or more aggressive police actions, but from the increase in the number of police officers and the large increase in information-sharing within the department. Boots on the ground and intra-agency interoperability and communication seem to be the most important facet of reducing crime in our nation's cities. And those are both things that I find people of most political stripes are amenable to.

Of course, nothing is apolitical, and I can imagine how these policies, taken to extremes, could become controversial. Hiring additional police officers is an expensive fix, and any public expenditure involves complicated tradeoffs. I certainly don't want to live in an over-policed society, and I am not one of the people who thinks that if you aren't doing anything wrong, you have nothing to fear from the police. But in general, I think that the additional cops on the beat, and the emphasis on rapid information pooling and cooperation within departments, has been a frankly spectacular success in New York and should be emulated.