‘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. He reviews the book Criminal (In)Justice: What the Push for Decarceration and Depolicing Gets Wrong and Who It Hurts Most by Rafael Mangual. Excerpts:

"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."

"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 we have far more violent crime."

"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.”"

"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.”"

"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?”"