What Would a More Effective Policing Strategy Look Like in D.C.?
Chip Brownlee: Based on trends in violent crime and homicide since the pandemic, do Trump’s actions feel necessary? Or is the president exaggerating about violence in D.C. and the other cities he called out?
David Kennedy: He’s not exaggerating — he’s lying. Violent crime in Washington, D.C., is at a 30-year low. Baltimore is showing the lowest homicide and shooting numbers since they started keeping track. Chicago is seeing a 30 percent year-on-year homicide reduction. As with all of these things, it’s difficult to know exactly what is going on.
We don’t know exactly why, but something that is true in many of these cities — including Baltimore and Philadelphia — is they’re pursuing evidence-based violence prevention that we know can work: focused deterrence, community violence intervention with credible messengers, and hospital-based violence prevention.
There is a whole portfolio of demonstrably effective approaches that have been developed over the last couple of decades. And that’s the portfolio that the administration has cut off at the knees. They have systematically withdrawn funding from those areas. And in many or most of the cities that are showing these dramatic, sometimes historic declines, they are doing this work, and it is working. And it’s almost the exact opposite of what the administration is now making happen in D.C.
Based on what you know about policing, what do you make of the administration’s strategy?
There are a number of very predictable dynamics we know a lot about. It’s not uncommon for both police departments and the federal government to deploy surges of various kinds. The best case that can be made for what’s going on in D.C.— strictly from a crime prevention perspective — is that there are more law enforcement personnel active on the street than there were a little while ago. That’s not unusual. Police departments often move their own officers into particular neighborhoods to address a newly elevated crime concern. They might take people off desk duty and put them into the field.
It’s also not unusual for federal law enforcement to form up with local law enforcement in task forces, increasing personnel and activities for various reasons. The Trump administration did that quite a bit in the first term, often against the desire of local departments and elected officials. The record for that kind of thing is clear: It can make a positive difference, generally for a very short while, and then things typically go back to where they were before.
When you say the evidence is clear, is that about surge policing in general, or about federal-local partnerships?
Both. Typically, especially for serious violent crime, simply having more people around doesn’t make much difference. That’s easy to understand if you think about gun violence — it’s very unusual for something to happen in real time where officers can intervene. By the time someone calls 911, the incident has almost always already happened. Moving people quickly to the scene won’t prevent it.
The remaining function is detective investigation — figuring out what happened and taking someone off the street to hold them accountable or prevent the next incident. Having a lot of officers on the street is not detective work.
It’s just the nature of violent crime that, for the most part, simply increasing numbers doesn’t make a big difference. The exception can be very careful deployment of officers to geographic hot spots — known as “hotspot policing.” We know that can make a statistically significant difference, though not usually a transformative one. But that’s entirely dependent on local knowledge of the hotspots and what’s going on there.
Simply moving people into an area is the least effective version of hotspot policing. The work that really makes a difference — particularly a sustained difference — is problem-solving, partnerships with local communities, and addressing the underlying issues driving the violence. Presence alone doesn’t get you that, especially if the people deployed have no local knowledge and may not be welcomed by the community.
What kind of impact could deploying the National Guard, in particular, have?
Generally, the National Guard is not trained in ordinary police work. They’re not trained for rapid response to 911 calls or detective investigation. With respect to street crime and serious violent crime, they may be present, but they won’t have training or background in what to do, through no fault of their own. That’s simply because their regular function is not police work.
It’s also incredibly important for any police presence to be seen as welcome and legitimate in the community’s eyes. An extremely concerning — and clearly anticipatable — response is that neighborhoods in D.C. may withdraw. We see this when police are perceived as illegitimate after egregious police misconduct or controversial shootings. People stop cooperating, stop calling 911, and stop sharing information.
That ties into something else I wanted to ask. Clearance rates and solve rates are important to preventing future violence. If this damages community relationships, could that harm clearance rates and have an impact down the road?
Normally, police solve violent crime because people in the community tell them what’s going on, and they’re able to act on that information. When communities don’t feel they’re being policed properly, they stop helping. It’s very common for what’s seen as illegitimate policing to result in spikes of violence. And I’m very concerned about that in this instance.
This is very common. Washington is just a little south of Baltimore. After Freddie Gray died in police custody in Baltimore, there was an extraordinary spike in violence. Same in Chicago after Laquan McDonald was killed. This happens all the time. We saw it with zero-tolerance policing in New York and across the country — it alienated communities, and they stopped coming forward.
The kind of indiscriminate sanctions that he is calling for is exactly the kind of thing that alienates communities and will make violence worse.
What does the research suggest should be done instead?
Any level of violence is too high, but if the facts are that D.C. has turned things around since the spike in the pandemic and is seeing 30-year lows for serious violence, then they should keep doing what they’ve been doing. With respect to homicide in particular, D.C., like every city, should be pursuing evidence-based homicide and gun violence interventions — the same ones driving historic reductions in places like Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Oakland. And those are exactly the things that the administration has clawed back the funding for.
What ties all of this stuff together now is the recognition that homicide and gun violence in cities is always driven by very small numbers of violent groups.
The interventions that have been developed to address that include community violence intervention, focused deterrence, street outreach with credible messengers, and hospital-based violence prevention. We know they work because they’ve either got a really solid evaluation portfolio, or there is very strong reason to think they work because they follow the right logic.
Chip Brownlee is a reporter at The Trace covering federal policy related to violence prevention and firearms. This article is published courtesy of The Trace.
