Fighting Crime Requires More Police and Less Prosecution
A conversation with economist Jennifer Doleac about recent research findings on the pandemic crime wave and other hot criminal justice topics.
Putting more police officers on the streets reduces homicide and violent crime, research shows.
Photographer: Stan Honda/AFP/Getty Images
The nationwide jump in shootings and homicides early in the pandemic and the rise in other crimes that followed in some places have made crime a hot topic again in the US. It has been a prominent one for academic research for a while, with economists in particular flocking to the field as a testing ground for research strategies that aim to sift causes from data. To get a sense of how recent findings fit with the national discussion on crime, I talked to Jennifer Doleac, an economist at Texas A&M University who not only studies crime but hosts a podcast on new research, Probable Causation, and has organized the Criminal Justice Expert Panel, which sums up expert opinion on crime questions. This summer, Doleac, who has also written a few columns for Bloomberg Opinion, will become executive vice president of criminal justice at Arnold Ventures, a leading funder of crime research. Following is a much-abridged transcript of our conversation and a list of research papers referred to in it.
Justin Fox: My overarching question is, what just happened over the past three years with crime in the US, and what can high-quality research tell us about why?