Most Candidates Running on Crime Don’t Have Much Power to Solve It

Politicians around the country have promised in the closing days of the midterm election to crack down on crime. Would-be governors will crack down on crime. Senators will crack down on crime. Members of Congress will do it, too. Obviously, their opponents won’t.

The law-and-order messaging is often disconnected from the nuance of crime trends (in 2022, homicide is up in some places, but down in others like New York City; yes, Oklahoma has higher violent crime rates than California). But it’s also devoid of the reality that these offices generally have little power to bend crime trends on the ground tomorrow.

Crime surges and falls for reasons that experts don’t fully understand, and it’s hard for even the most proven ideas to quickly reverse its direction. But the people with ready levers to pull are not sitting in the Senate. And your current sense of order in your community is definitely not controlled by your congressman.

“You’re not going to fix the problems from there,” said Jeff Asher, a crime analyst and consultant with AH Datalytics in New Orleans (and a former Upshot contributor). “If you want to fix the problems, go run for mayor.”

Your governor isn’t going to solve a spike in murder, he added. And it’s generally not the governor who’s been failing to solve it, either. As for Senate candidates who say they will make sure we keep criminals behind bars who don’t belong on our streets?

“U.S. senators don’t determine state prison release policies,” said John MacDonald, a professor of criminology and sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. “Who you elect to Senate is going to have zero impact on state prisons.”

When voters choose candidates for higher office thinking of crime, they often misunderstand where and how criminal justice decisions get made, said Amy Lerman, a political scientist at Berkeley. The federal government controls a small fraction of the whole picture. In the U.S., there are 51 prison systems, and about 18,000 police departments.

If you see a police officer while walking or driving around your community, that officer is most likely a local one. And those local officers generally report to locally elected bosses like sheriffs, or people appointed by locally elected officials like mayors, said Thomas Ogorzalek, a visiting scholar at the Center for Urban Research at CUNY.

Those are the people, in turn, who decide what share of the city budget the police get, how many officers they’ll hire, where those officers will focus, if they’ll wear body cameras, and whether they’ll work alongside violence interruption workers, social workers and mental health clinicians.

This may seem counterintuitive to voters: Broad crime trends are often national in scale (that was the case when crime plummeted across the country starting in the 1990s, and when gun violence surged just about everywhere during the pandemic). But it doesn’t follow that the answers are primarily federal ones.

“We have a national problem that isn’t solved at the national level,” said Phillip Atiba Goff, a Yale professor and co-founder of the Center for Policing Equity. “But our national narrative makes it harder to solve it at the local level — which is the only level where it’s going to get solved.”

The federal government does play an important role. It funnels money to states and local governments, and often uses that money to incentivize local police to shift policies. Major components of the 1994 crime bill, for example, dedicated federal money to hire local police officers, fund victims’ services and construct state prisons.

The federal government has also sent military-grade equipment to local police, although research suggests that has done little to reduce crime. In its other roles, the federal government offers technical assistance to local agencies and supports research on which policing strategies work.

And it has a bully pulpit. President Biden signed an executive order in May directing federal law enforcement to restrict tactics like chokeholds and no-knock warrants. While the order has a limited reach, it could still nudge cultural changes among local departments. And individual senators and members of Congress can use their own megaphones to push policing priorities to local officials.

As a whole, Congress could play a bigger role — but often chooses not to.

“One of the reasons that we talk about the federal government having so little authority is not just because it can’t do a lot of things, but also because it won’t do certain things,” said Thomas Abt, a senior fellow at the Council on Criminal Justice, a nonpartisan think tank, and chair of the Violent Crime Working Group. “The single biggest thing that the federal government could do to limit violent crime in particular would be to pass reasonable regulations that limit access to deadly firearms.”

Relaxed gun laws at the federal and state level have allowed more guns on the street and made the problem of local violent crime worse, said Darrel Stephens, a retired chief of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department, and former longtime head of the Major Cities Chiefs Association.

With that solution off the table, the Council on Criminal Justice released earlier this year a report on tangible actions that could reduce violence now, all of them aimed at local officials. A central tactic involves identifying the small subset of residents and places that drive the bulk of violence, a pattern that occurs across cities. Officials can then target those areas with police resources, outreach workers, city programs and community partnerships.

“The strongest evidence deals with focusing on concentrations,” Mr. Stephens said, including crime that victimizes a small concentration of people. “What you’re trying to do is to tailor your response to your understanding of what’s contributing to the problem.”

That might mean changing traffic patterns on specific streets, or offering behavioral therapy programs to particular residents. That level of specificity isn’t something you would expect a senator or governor to know much about: this intersection, this family, this apartment with unsecured doors.

Local officials, on the other hand, oversee many of the levers voters may not think of as part of crime policy — whether that’s street lighting, public schools, summer jobs programs, recreation departments or housing programs. And they wield the most influence over other kinds of disorder, like uncleared trash, graffiti and vacant properties, that may shape the sense of unease voters connect to their fears of crime.

Those other tools are “extremely important,” said Art Acevedo, a former chief of police in Houston, Austin and Miami. He offered as an example pre-K education, citing the greater likelihood that students who eventually drop out of school will go to prison.

Mr. Acevedo lamented national politicians who parachute into communities after mass shootings, offer prayers and no legislation, while local police and elected officials face those families and manage everyday violence.

“When it comes to actually being closest to it, and actually focusing on good policy — rather than good politics — it’s those local officials,” he said.

There is a parallel case that good crime policy at the state and federal level is inseparable from education investments, safety-net supports and housing programs that could help break up concentrated poverty and despair. Research, for example, suggests that people newly released from prison who are given federal health coverage through Medicaid are less likely to return to prison.

But these interconnected benefits play out over years, not immediately in the midst of a crime surge. And this is not the conversation about crime that’s happening in 30-second campaign ads and on debate stages with an election around the corner.