It's hard to find much to disagree with in Simon Jenkin's eulogy to the lost hope of sensible thinking about criminal justice. I'm not sure which is worse, David Cameron's shameless flip-flop in the face of tabloid hysteria (pretty shocking to hear Ken Clark described as 'the paedophile's pal'), or Ed Milliband's equally shameless attempt to outflank him on the right.
What's most depressing, of course, is that this type of get tough, lock 'em up 'policy' is, on almost all available evidence, worse than useless. Whether we're talking about system contact and deviancy amplification, the well known link between experience of heavy-handed criminal justice interventions and lower levels of trust and the legitimacy of the law, or what happens to people once they actually get to prison, the more heavy handed and punitive the system, the more likely it is that the behaviour of those caught up in it will worsen, not improve.
It's not surprising that newspaper hacks appear incapable of thinking along such subtle lines (although it's hardly rocket science). Most British newspapers are unable to see anything in other than total black and white (for all that, as Orwell foresaw, black sometimes becomes white and particularly vice versa). What is depressing, though, is yet another pathetic abdication in the face of their imagined power. As Jenkins notes, the idea that tabloid newspapers represent the country is frankly laughable, and the evidence that they affect the way people think thin indeed.
Friday 24 June 2011
Sunday 12 June 2011
Police numbers
First post for a while: I thought it was about time to start the blog up again.
The number of police officers is becoming more and more of a hot issue (see for example here, here and here). In fact I guess it always is. The prime reason for believing that the number of serving police officers should be maintained, or even increased, is of course always that crime will increase if they are reduced.
It seems such a simple equation: more police officers equals less crime, and less police officers equals more crime. So simple, in fact, that most criminologists assume it must be (deceptively) wrong. In general I think I agree. The police are far from the being the only institution that might affect the causes of crime, which lie in a complex mix of personal, social, institutional and environmental factors. Certainly self-report surveys find only weak associations between offending and the risk of sanction - in other words, when people think about offending, they don't really think about how likely they are to be caught by the police if they do break the law. Even when it comes to more definite preventative measures this seems to be much more to do with 'target-hardening' by individuals and organisations than it does with police patrols or other activities.
All in all it seems rather unlikely that police 'crime-fighting' activity can have much impact on the general level of crime, for all that it might be effective in relation to specific areas and/or specific crimes. This was certainly the consensus in academic work up until about 2000. Studies regularly found either no association between numbers of police and levels of crime, or indeed a positive association (i.e. more police were associated with higher levels of crime, even in studies which included relevant statistical controls).
But I've been doing a piece of work in the last few days that has challenged my assumptions. Looking at a small body of papers published in the last 15 years or so, it seems the number of police officers may indeed have a negative association with recorded crime rates. Based on a number of observational studies, quasi-experiments and natural experiments, there's a surprising consensus around an elasticity of about -0.3, which would imply that a 10 per cent increase in police officers leads to a 3 per cent reduction in crime.
Now, there are a number of problems with the research I've been looking at. Most obviously, it usually looks at associations between numbers of police and recorded crime, which is obviously only a small fraction of actual crime. Another is that much of it has been produced by economists and has as such an impoverished theory of crime causation, essentially rational choice theory, that may not provide a robust enough causal mechanism for the observed correlations. In other words there are significant doubts that the research can explain the associations it uncovers. Yet if nothing else these studies raise some very interesting questions.
I'll write more when I'm finished. It's always interesting to have your preconceptions put under the spotlight, I think ......
The number of police officers is becoming more and more of a hot issue (see for example here, here and here). In fact I guess it always is. The prime reason for believing that the number of serving police officers should be maintained, or even increased, is of course always that crime will increase if they are reduced.
It seems such a simple equation: more police officers equals less crime, and less police officers equals more crime. So simple, in fact, that most criminologists assume it must be (deceptively) wrong. In general I think I agree. The police are far from the being the only institution that might affect the causes of crime, which lie in a complex mix of personal, social, institutional and environmental factors. Certainly self-report surveys find only weak associations between offending and the risk of sanction - in other words, when people think about offending, they don't really think about how likely they are to be caught by the police if they do break the law. Even when it comes to more definite preventative measures this seems to be much more to do with 'target-hardening' by individuals and organisations than it does with police patrols or other activities.
All in all it seems rather unlikely that police 'crime-fighting' activity can have much impact on the general level of crime, for all that it might be effective in relation to specific areas and/or specific crimes. This was certainly the consensus in academic work up until about 2000. Studies regularly found either no association between numbers of police and levels of crime, or indeed a positive association (i.e. more police were associated with higher levels of crime, even in studies which included relevant statistical controls).
But I've been doing a piece of work in the last few days that has challenged my assumptions. Looking at a small body of papers published in the last 15 years or so, it seems the number of police officers may indeed have a negative association with recorded crime rates. Based on a number of observational studies, quasi-experiments and natural experiments, there's a surprising consensus around an elasticity of about -0.3, which would imply that a 10 per cent increase in police officers leads to a 3 per cent reduction in crime.
Now, there are a number of problems with the research I've been looking at. Most obviously, it usually looks at associations between numbers of police and recorded crime, which is obviously only a small fraction of actual crime. Another is that much of it has been produced by economists and has as such an impoverished theory of crime causation, essentially rational choice theory, that may not provide a robust enough causal mechanism for the observed correlations. In other words there are significant doubts that the research can explain the associations it uncovers. Yet if nothing else these studies raise some very interesting questions.
I'll write more when I'm finished. It's always interesting to have your preconceptions put under the spotlight, I think ......
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