Cities That Reduced Arrests For Minor Offenses Also Saw Fewer Police Shootings [View all]

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Udi Ofer
@UdiACLU
Police shootings AND crime fell in jurisdictions that cut low-level arrests. Cities that reduced low-level arrests did not experience an uptick in violent crime compared to other cities during same period. Great research by @samswey

Cities That Reduced Arrests For Minor Offenses Also Saw Fewer Police Shootings
In response to nationwide protests last summer over the murder of George Floyd by police, many cities and states have tried to change their approach to policing…
fivethirtyeight.com
6:59 AM · Jul 28, 2021

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/police-arresting-fewer-people-for-minor-offenses-can-help-reduce-police-shootings/

In response to nationwide protests last summer over the murder of George Floyd by police, many cities and states have tried to change their approach to policing. One such strategy is to make fewer arrests for low-level offenses in an effort to reduce the number of potentially violent encounters between the police and the public. Virginia, for instance, banned police from pulling people over for exclusively minor traffic violations earlier this year. Meanwhile, Oregon decriminalized drug possession. Louisiana restricted police from making arrests for certain misdemeanors, asking police to instead issue summons. And cities like San Francisco and Portland, Oregon, began sending clinicians instead of police to help people suffering from a mental health crisis.

These efforts are all part of a shift that has been underway in America’s largest cities for a number of years now. But despite the effect these changes have had in reducing violent encounters with the police, these efforts have still experienced significant backlash, particularly from some in law enforcement who have blamed rising murder rates on police “pulling back” and being “defunded.” This criticism has intensified as murder rates have risen, even though most cities’ police budgets weren’t cut by much in 2021 and murders still ticked up in cities that increased their police budgets.

I’m a data scientist and founder of the Police Scorecard, a research group that analyzes policing data to better understand how to end police violence. We are still waiting for the federal government to publish arrests data for 2020 and 2021, but what we do know from previous years is that low-level arrests are in decline, and that appears to have helped reduce the number of shootings by police — not made violent crime worse.

Data from the FBI Uniform Crime Report shows arrest rates have generally been declining since the 1990s, when crime rates were much higher than they are now. These declines have been accelerated, in more recent years, by changes in policing in America’s largest cities. For example, police departments serving 86 of America’s 100 most populous cities reported 30 percent fewer total arrests in 2019 than they did in 2013.1 This decline was particularly pronounced among low-level offenses, or offenses not involving crimes against people, sex offenses, weapons offenses or serious property and financial crimes. In America’s largest cities, arrests for low-level offenses declined during this period by 38 percent, with arrests for disorderly conduct, curfew and loitering violations, gambling, prostitution, drunkenness and liquor law violations all falling by more than 50 percent — the largest reductions of any offenses reported. It wasn’t just changes in policing that reduced low level arrests — policy changes enacted by city councils, local prosecutor’s offices and state legislatures likely contributed to these declines as well.

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