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America the Safe |
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Why Europe's Crime Rates Have Surpassed Ours |
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By Eli Lehrer |
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Posted: Saturday, June 1, 2002 |
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America's streets are becoming safer, even as crime has exploded in Europe. Decentralized control of policing efforts has enabled the United States to catch more criminals, while long prison sentences prevent them from striking again. European law enforcement agencies would do well to emulate those practices. After he beat an eighty-year-old grandmother, took a mother with a stroller hostage, and robbed eleven London banks in broad daylight, Michael Wheatley was finally nabbed by British police in late April. Dubbed the Skull Cracker for his habit of pistol-whipping victims, Wheatley had transfixed the London tabloid press with a series of dramatic, violent crimes. Scared Londoners, however, had more to worry about than just the Skull Cracker: In April alone, one gang used a battering ram to steal $14,500 of merchandise from a jewelry store near the city's commercial center, another took to ramming cars into storefronts, and teenage thugs robbed pedestrians of their mobile phones all over the city. Last year, London saw more serious assaults, armed robberies, and car thefts than New York; 2002 could see London's murder rate exceed the Big Apple's. The same pattern can be seen throughout Europe-indeed, in much of the developed world. Crime has recently hit record highs in Paris, Madrid, Stockholm, Amsterdam, Toronto, and a host of other major cities. In a 2001 study, the British Home Office (the equivalent of the U.S. Department of Justice) found violent and property crime increased in the late 1990s in every wealthy country except the United States. American property crime rates have been lower than those in Britain, Canada, and France since the early 1990s, and violent crime rates throughout the European Union, Australia, and Canada have recently begun to equal and even surpass those in the United States. Even Sweden, once the epitome of cosmopolitan socialist prosperity, now has a crime victimization rate 20 percent higher than that of the United States. Americans, on the other hand, have become much safer. Preliminary 2001 crime statistics from the Federal Bureau of Investigation show America's tenth consecutive year of declines in crime. While our homicide rate is still substantially higher than most in Europe, it has sunk to levels unseen here since the early 1960s. Overall reported crime rates have dropped almost 40 percent from their all-time highs in the early 1970s. Reported property-crime victimization rates have dropped even more: In 1973, nearly 60 percent of American households fell victim to such crimes, by 2000 victimization had declined two-thirds to around 20 percent. Among the economically powerful democracies in the Group of Seven, only the Japanese now have a lower victimization rate than the United States. So why have America's streets become safer even as crime has exploded in Europe? Many commonly cited explanations don't hold water: America's falling population of males in their teens and early twenties helped reduce crime in the early 1990s, but crime continued to fall even as youth populations began to swell later in the decade. While the American Enterprise Institute's John Lott has shown that greater gun ownership reduces crime, this deterrent effect can't explain more than a small part of America's recent success. It's now easier to carry concealed weapons in some parts of the country, but Lott acknowledges that gun ownership levels are about the same as they were when crime hit its all-time highs in America thirty years ago. Third-world immigration, the bugbear of the European right, may drive crime rates up, but violence and theft have also spiked in countries that let in few immigrants. There is, in fact, a simple explanation for America's success against crime: The American justice system now does a better job of catching criminals and locking them up. But why are America's police agencies performing better than their counterparts elsewhere in the developed world? Local Policing Local control may be a critical difference. America has local police departments-think Sheriff Andy Griffith and Deputy Barney Fife-while massive regional or national agencies provide almost all of the law enforcement in nearly all of the other industrialized countries. With about 16,500 police agencies--more than 2,000 of which employ only one officer--America's policing system might seem disorganized and amateurish at first glance. All of England has only thirty-nine local police departments, and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police run most of Canada's police agencies. France and a bevy of other nations have unified national police agencies. But when it comes to learning from mistakes and adapting to new circumstances, small organizations have their advantages. While smart police chiefs have always tried to adapt styles of policing to the particularities of their communities, well-intentioned reform efforts during the American crime explosion led police agencies to discourage officers from making too much contact with citizens and community groups. This eventually sparked a backlash in the form of the "community policing" movement of the late 1980s, which began to encourage police officers and citizens to form crime-fighting partnerships. While some of those efforts were better at producing press releases than arrests, the movement overall has to be counted a success. Today, styles and philosophies of policing can differ enormously in two suburbs of the same city that would share the same police department almost anywhere else in the developed world. In Simi Valley, a sleepy Ventura County suburb full of Los Angeles police officers and Ronald Reagan memorabilia (his library is there), police scatter kids who hang out in front of movie theaters and reprimand pedestrians who spit on the sidewalk. A jaunt down the 405 freeway in Long Beach, a sometimes chaotic, diverse city full of immigrants, police encourage so-called "positive loitering" by handing out stickers to well-behaved juveniles around parks, movie theaters, and schools. Spitting goes unnoticed. Both approaches work: Long Beach and Simi Valley have each reduced crime by more than a third since the mid-1990s. American police departments can adapt more easily to their communities than their counterparts in the EU and elsewhere not only because they are smaller but because they need to respond to local elected leaders and voters. Police represent the largest or second largest spending program in nearly every city and town budget. Mayors, city council members, and voters keep close tabs on local police. As representatives of municipal government rather than agencies of a distant provincial council or the national government, successful American police chiefs shape their agencies to fit the desires and demands of local constituencies rather than distant bureaucrats. In their quest to adapt to the needs of their communities, the best American police departments have created a culture of innovation. While a handful of larger police departments (New York, Chicago, and San Diego most prominently) do provide many new techniques and practices, at least as many successful innovations come from small and midsized police agencies, which centralization has eliminated in the rest of the developed world. Moreno Valley, California, police have developed a national model for fighting graffiti through rapid-response police-community partnerships; Minneapolis police have built the world's best computer system to monitor pawn shops for stolen goods; and Jacksonville, Florida, police could teach other agencies a few things about neighborhood renewal. Relatively small American police departments also put more cops on the street. While conventional management theory suggests that administrative savings come from consolidation, larger departments tend to have more blue-uniformed bureaucrats and fewer crime fighters. Only about a third of France's 130,000 police officers, for example, work on the streets. As agencies get smaller, however, they send a greater percentage of their staff to work the streets: In Garden Grove, California--which has one of the lowest police officer-citizen ratios of any American city--85 percent of officers work the streets in one way or another. Larger agencies (including American ones) face an almost irresistible temptation to move the best officers onto specialized teams directed at particular types of crime or feel-good community involvement programs. While all police departments need some specialists--a green academy graduate can't substitute for a veteran homicide investigator--the most successful agencies keep such special assignments to a minimum. Lowell, Massachusetts, the city with the largest crime decreases in the United States during the 1990s, eliminated nearly all of its special units. And other highly successful departments have followed suit, eliminating or restructuring their special task forces in order to assign more officers to patrol duty and answering citizens' calls. Long Prison Sentences Superior policing does little good without a commitment from the justice system to keep violent thugs off the streets. The United States has the longest prison sentences in the Western world. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics and its counterparts in other countries, a convicted armed robber can expect to serve about four and a half years behind bars in the United States, a little more than two years in Great Britain, a bit less in Germany, and less than eighteen months in France. The United States imprisons nearly 700 out of 100,000 citizens as compared to about 125 in the United Kingdom and Canada, 100 in Germany, and about 60 in most of Scandinavia. Some of these countries may actually have fewer thugs than the United States, but those left unpunished do enormous damage. While building and staffing prisons costs a great deal, letting criminals roam free costs even more. One violent criminal can do more than $1 million worth of damage in the space of a year. A single armed robbery costs society more than $50,000, and a hardened thug can commit 100 such crimes in a year. The European elite still seems to regard Americans' desire to lock up violent criminals as an index of barbarism and America as a nation gripped by violence and infatuated with rough, frontier justice. With violence and theft exploding all over the developed world, however, one has to ask which type of society is barbaric--one that punishes criminals, or one that lets them prey on law-abiding citizens? Not surprisingly, overwhelming evidence demonstrates that keeping criminals locked up reduces crime. British academic Donald E. Lewis's comprehensive 1986 examination of studies on the correlation between sentence length and crime rates (published in the British Journal of Criminology) concludes that doubling the length of the sentence for a crime will cut the likelihood that criminals will commit that crime by a little less than 50 percent. In a comprehensive comparison of crime rates in the United States and Great Britain, a Bureau of Justice Statistics researcher and the head of Cambridge University's Criminology Institute hit on the key fact: Crime rates fell in the United States as punishment increased and rose in Britain as punishment decreased. As James Q. Wilson has observed, "Coincident with rising prison population there began in 1979-80 a steep reduction in the crime rate as reported by the victimization surveys." America's criminal justice system has plenty of flaws. While nearly every other developed country has too few local police agencies, the United States has too many: More law enforcement agencies patrol Washington, D.C., (population 572,000) than all of the United Kingdom (population 59.6 million). And the crime picture isn't entirely copacetic: Although murder rates have fallen sharply in the United States even as they rise elsewhere, ours still remains second only to South Africa's among wealthy nations. While most murder victims have some connection to the drug trade or other organized crime, Americans also kill each other at high rates in their homes and streets. American law enforcers could learn a good deal from foreign police agencies when it comes to cracking down on the drug gangs that commit most murders, and should probably provide more funding for domestic abuse awareness programs and battered women's shelters. While keeping thugs locked up helps society, prison conditions remain abysmal: Black and white supremacist gangs run many correctional facilities, guards receive too little training, and male inmates face a constant threat of rape. Efforts to reintegrate prisoners into mainstream society, likewise, border on negligent. Per-inmate funding for rehabilitation has fallen steadily even as more people have gone to prison. But there is still a lot that the rest of the world can learn from our experience, as problems that European sophisticates still view as uniquely American take root elsewhere. Even as the United States has replaced many of its worst housing projects with mixed-income townhouse developments, multifamily estates on the outskirts of London, Paris, and other European capitals have become at least as dangerous as their American counterparts were during the 1970s and 1980s. As welfare reform and a strong social message that crime does not pay push many former members of the American underclass into the workforce, an entrenched welfare culture grows in many European countries. Writing in the fall 2001 Public Interest, Charles Murray noted that his predictions of a decade earlier about the emergence of a British underclass had come true. By the late 1990s, British levels of unemployment, family breakdown, and violent crime among the welfare underclass were the same or higher than were America's in the 1960s and 1970s. Americans should not take too much satisfaction in our becoming a safer nation. While crime in America has declined rather spectacularly, it still stands well above the level of civic peace our grandparents enjoyed. But America has moved in the right direction while Europe has moved in the wrong one. The combination of engaged, community-oriented police and ample investment in incarceration is turning the United States into the safest large Western country. Europeans may want to emulate American policies--God forbid!--if they hope to win their own wars against crime. Eli Lehrer is a senior editor of The American Enterprise. |
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