Strategies to Reduce Crime: Facts, Figures & Recommendations (Issues 2006)

Crime

By David B. Muhlhausen, Ph.D.

State and local officials are the front-line forces making America safer, implementing effective policies to get violent criminals off the streets and behind bars. Combined with aggressive and intelligent local police methods, these efforts are helping to reduce crime across America. However, Members of Congress should affirm the proper division of authority between the federal government and the states in combating violent crime by reducing federal intrusions into state and local crime-fighting activities. Federal officials have enough to do in fighting international terrorism and providing homeland security without taking on street crime.

Recommendations

Have state and local officials, not the federal government, take the lead in preventing and suppressing gang-related street crime. While the President is right to acknowledge community and faith-based groups’ roles in helping to prevent gang membership, the federal government’s track record suggests that it should stick to helping local jurisdictions handle tasks they cannot do by themselves, such as coordinating the flow of information among federal and local law enforcement agencies. In September 2004, the National Gang Intelligence Center was created at the Federal Bureau of Investigation to do just that.
Eliminate the remaining grants under COPS that exist almost entirely of pork barrel projects that are not awarded on a competitive basis. Congress and the Administration were correct to end the remaining wasteful and ineffective police officer hiring grants administered by Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS). Eliminating funding for the COPS hiring grants was supported by well-founded observations. The COPS program did not meet its goal of placing 100,000 additional officers on the street. The program is ineffective as a crime-reduction policy, and there is little evidence to suggest that it significantly advanced the community policing movement, which began several years before the creation of COPS.
Encourage state and local officials to continue the trend of keeping violent criminals incarcerated. Over the past decade, America has experienced an unprecedented drop in crime. In terms of public policy, a major factor contributing to falling crime rates was the increased use of incarceration. After controlling for socioeconomic factors that may influence crime rates and observing trends in multiple jurisdictions over several years, research indicates that incarceration reduces crime significantly.
Support the death penalty. Federal, state, and local officials need to recognize that the death penalty saves lives and, where appropriate, remove unnecessary barriers to its timely implementation. While constitutional protections, such as due process and equal protection of the law, need to be rigorously upheld in the criminal justice system, the criminal process should not be abused to prevent the lawful imposition of the death penalty in appropriate capital cases.
Decriminalize socially and economically productive conduct. Adopting new criminal penalties in an effort to control productive social and economic conduct, such as employment or production, is not a costless exercise. Using criminal penalties inappropriately undermines the moral authority of the criminal law and, as a practical matter, over-deters productive economic conduct at a real cost to society. The creation of new federal crimes should be resisted.
Redirect funding away from federal crime grant programs if less than 10 percent of the money is earmarked for scientific evaluations of effectiveness. For more than four decades, Congress has enacted numerous social programs aimed at crime prevention. Congress should review these programs and require their directors to present impact evaluation data on effectiveness. No congressional funding for any federal crime prevention program should be appropriated without also funding rigorous program evaluations. Anecdotal examples are not sufficient direct evidence that a program has reduced crime.