We've all heard the arguments for defunding the police over the past several years. More importantly, we've all seen the real world results of attempts to follow through on these ideas. But there's an alternative argument which has been put forward by a pair of academics at Harvard. In a paper published in early 2022 Chris Lewis and Adaner Usmani argued that the U.S. is actually under-policed compared to many comparable countries. They recommend a very different approach to the one embraced by BLM activists.

In their piece, “The Injustice of Under-Policing in America,” Lewis and Usmani argue that to reduce violent crime, the U.S. needs to drastically reduce its prison population via shortening sentences — and increase its police force by half a million officers. Their work cited evidence that crime is reduced more by increasing the probability that an offender will be caught and detained than it is by enacting stringent repercussions for those who are caught.

That's the summary but the article itself is a lot more complex. The starting point is the idea that America has high rates of incarceration compared to other developed countries. The authors argue that's not necessarily true if you look at incarceration per the amount of homicides rather than per capita. In other words, America has more incarcerated people per 100,000 than other countries but it also has more murders per 100,000 than those countries. And if you adjust the data to use the level of homicide as the denominator instead, you find that US incarceration rates are not that far above the norm but its policing levels per homicide are extremely low.

The authors argue that evidence there are not enough police can be found in the homicide clearance rate in the US.

...it is true that in comparative context the police in the United States do not solve many serious crimes. America’s clearance rate is the lowest of all comparable countries, as Figure [fig_clearancerate] shows.7 The median developed country records around one homicide-related arrest per homicide that occurs. In the United States, however, the figure is 0.56.

...The clearance rate, as measured above, is the product of police focus (homicide arrests/police) and the police footprint (police/homicide). To demand that the rate be as high as it is in countries with much higher police/homicide ratios is to make unrealistic demands of American police officers. Given reformers' general pessimism about policing, this is a particularly strange expectation. Why should we think American police officers would be able to do something that no other police force in the developed world has accomplished?

The authors summarize the evidence by saying that, in the US, we emphasize long sentences for those convicted over a high certainty of arrest for crimes. They argue that this is not an effective way to reduce crime. What would be better is a high certainty of arrest with less severe sentences for those arrested. And to get there we'd need to have fewer people in prison but a lot more police officers.

Perhaps the US, like the rest of the developed world, ought to emphasize policing and penal certainty rather than incarceration and penal severity.11 Perhaps the US ought to shift resources from incarceration to policing until the balance between the two looks more like the balance in the rest of the developed world. The implications of such a move -- which we call The First World Balance -- would be dramatic. The US currently has 3.X times as many prisoners as police officers. If it raised no revenue but simply used the money saved by cutting prison populations to hire police officers until the ratio was the same as the ratio in the developed world (about 3.X times as many police officers as prisoners), the new United States would have only have about 300,000 prisoners and 1.X million police officers. That is, The First World Balance, if implemented in the US, would be a world of two million fewer prisoners and half a million more police officers.

This is a different argument from the "defund the police" argument made by BLM activists but the thrust is clearly in the opposite direction. The authors argue that policing would be better and crime lower if there were a lot more officers to do the work.

Naturally, an argument that we should fund a lot more police officers has its critics. The authors' most vocal critic was a Harvard Law grad named Alec G. Karakatsanis.

In their count of U.S. police, Lewis and Usmani only include publicly employed officers in the United States. Karakatsanis argued that a full picture of policing in America should include federally employed officers such as the FBI, the DEA, and border patrol, as well as private officers, such as those employed by universities and residential communities. Including these categories would increase the count by hundreds of thousands.

In a reply two weeks later, Lewis and Usmani countered that changing the number of police officers per capita to the higher estimate did not change the crux of their argument. Even using Karakatsanis’ count, they were still able to demonstrate that the United States has a lower police to homicide ratio than other comparable countries.

The paper has already gained some public attention. Last year the the San Francisco Deputy Sheriffs’ Association tweeted it out and recommended people read it. It's easy to see how hiring a lot more police would be appealing to police unions, but the underlying question is whether the authors have a point, i.e. that the US is currently under-policed based on its level of violent crime. If so then it doesn't matter which side is for or against this or how the police feel about it. What matters is the unnecessary harm being done to citizens by the current (too low) staffing levels.

Instead of just restoring pre-2020 policing levels, something some cities are still struggling to do, maybe up-funding the police and bringing in a lot more officers ought to be a major national goal moving forward. 

Frankly, this is something I think could be a winning issue for the Trump campaign. He has already framed himself as the "law and order" candidate but the rhetoric around tough sentencing could be changed up with a focus on more policing and a greater likelihood of arrest. Set a goal of 400,000 new officers over 4 years. Make it an explicit rejection of defund the police. Of course there would be opposition to such a plan, but we've already run a real world experiment going in the opposite direction. It was a complete failure. Now is a good time to make the alternative case.