Trump's Bad Criminology

Why crime has fallen from its historic highs in the late 1980s and early ’90s no one has been able to state definitively. Proponents of particular policies, whether “three strikes you’re out,” “broken windows,” or “stop-and-frisk,” will of course attribute those approaches, although there is just as much data—perhaps more—showing that none had a significant effect by itself. Moreover, they might have done more harm than good, resulting in disproportionately high incarceration rates among young men of color, stoking resentment and distrust in communities where they were disproportionately deployed, and trodding on Constitutional rights. Perhaps reductions in the use of lead paint and leaded gasoline, or the waning of the crack epidemic, or the spread of technology, or some mix of these and other factors, could help explain the safer environment many Americans now live in.

For it is, overall, safer—something that in Monday’s debate with Hillary Clinton (as has been the case throughout his campaign) Donald Trump would not acknowledge. Responding to a question on how to heal America’s racial divide, he insisted that his opponent’s answer lacked two important words: “law” and “order.” Of course, the pairing is no longer the dog-whistle it once was, since everyone can hear it loud and clear. The same could be said about Trump’s stated preference for “stop-and-frisk” as a way to counter a (nonexistent) spike in crime. He praised former New York mayor and current advisor Rudolph Giuliani while insisting stop-and-frisk was “tremendous beyond belief” in reducing violent crime in New York City, where it was perhaps most infamously deployed. But the data shows no such thing. At the height of its implementation in 2011, nearly 700,000 New Yorkers—90 percent of them African American or Latino—were stopped; 88 percent were innocent of any crime. The majority of those who were arrested were charged with nothing more than marijuana possession.

During the debate Trump also criticized current New York Mayor Bill de Blasio for ending the practice, though in fact former mayor Michael Bloomberg, recognizing its problematic aspects, had already begun to curtail its use in 2012. He said de Blasio further failed in not challenging a federal judge’s ruling finding New York’s discriminatory implementation of the practice unconstitutional, thus leading to an increase in the city’s murder rate. This is untrue: Murders in New York have gone down even more since 2011, from 515, to 352 in 2015; this year the city is on track for even fewer.

Should we give Trump the benefit of the doubt?

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