Post #260
850 words, 4 minutes to read
Audio summary by student volunteer Kimberly Duong.
Summary: A longitudinal British study finds that the absolute number of police appears unrelated to crime rates or trends, but that how police are deployed is important.
Calls for more police not based on evidence
This is the time of year when cities across the Canada debate how much money to spend on policing. Police forces lobby hard to have increases in numbers and budgets, arguing that this is required for public safety. Policing is often the single biggest item in municipal budgets, so these debates are important.
In many cases there is a strong public desire to have more police officers on the streets with the idea that this will reduce crime and ensure public safety, a belief that police forces encourage. The feeling may be especially strong in areas with high crime rates. It seems logical – the more police officers there are, the more crimes can be prevented or solved.
However, previous research on this topic has not supported the call for more police as being a good way to stop or reduce crime. A systemic review and meta-analysis (that is, an analysis of the results of many other studies), which focused on the U.S., concluded that the overall effect of police force size on crime was so small as to be insignificant.
A recent article by 4 British researchers explores these issues in a very sophisticated way. . They conclude that the relationship between police workforce size and crime is complex and is influenced by many factors.
The authors set out to explore the relationship between police workforce size and crime, using data from 42 police forces in the United Kingdom over a 13 year period. They found that simply increasing the number of police officers does not always lead to lower crime rates. In fact, the connection between police size and crime is weak and inconsistent across different types of crime.
Gross numbers aren’t a helpful indicator
First, as is the case with studies in other fields (such as pupil-teacher ratios in schools), focusing only on gross numbers is not very illuminating. For one thing, where there is more crime there might well be more police, so the causal relationship, if there is one, could be that more crime leads to more police, not that more police reduce crime. Also, the way in which police are deployed tends to be very similar across police forces, making it harder to know if different strategies might work better. Then, too, police do many other things other than investigate crime, and often play only a minor role in crime prevention. As the authors put it, ‘endogeneity, the reality of the causal relationship between crime and policing is inevitably more complex than any statistical model could accommodate.’
Also, crime levels are about much more than the police. Many things affect crime levels and crime prevention. These include social factors like poverty, unemployment, and education levels, as well as community trust in the police. High levels of poverty and unemployment can create conditions where crime is more likely to occur, regardless of how many police officers there are. Communities with poor relationships with law enforcement may be less likely to report crimes or cooperate with investigations, which makes it harder for police to prevent or solve crimes.
How police are deployed matters more
The effectiveness of police, the researchers conclude, depends more on how they are deployed, what training they receive, and how they interact with the community than it does simply on how many there are. As one major review concluded, Changing policing strategy is likely to have a greater impact on crime than adding more police’. For example, a large police force that lacks proper training or engages in poor community relations may not be effective in reducing crime.
Community policing strategies, which encourage police officers to work closely with community members, can be effective in reducing crime. In these approaches, officers are not just focused on making arrests but on building trust and preventing crime through proactive engagement with the community. As another example, targeted patrols in high-crime areas or specialized units for certain types of crimes (like drug trafficking), can be more effective than just increasing the overall number of officers. However the evidence on which strategies are best, or just how they would work, is not yet strong and may vary from one community to another.
This study found several factors that seemed to matter to police effectiveness. One is, understandably, turnover in the police force. Higher turnover rates are associated with less effect on crime rates. Turnover itself may be affected by a whole range of issues related to pay, working conditions, or public support.
The ratio between sworn officers and support staff may also matter. In this study, a higher ratio of support staff to front line officers was associated with lower crime rates, a counter-intuitive result. One hypothesis is that support staff can take over more routine tasks, allowing sworn officers to focus on the most important functions that only they can do.
Much remains to be learned about effective policing practices. What we can conclude is that The idea of police forces using basic officer-to-population ratios to make staffing decisions appears outdated and simplistic. Sadly, important public policy discussions and decisions are often based on the simplistic use of single numbers.
The John Howard Society of Canada blog is intended to support greater public understanding of criminal justice issues in Canada. Blog content does not necessarily represent the views of the John Howard Society of Canada. All blog material may be reproduced freely for any non-profit purpose as long as the source is acknowledged. We welcome comments (moderated) and suggestions for content. Contact: blogeditor@nulljohnhoward.ca
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