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City Journal Audio
Re-Grounding Criminology in Reality
01:00:26
Three leading criminologists—, , and —discuss ideological influences on the study of policing. The panel is moderated by Manhattan Institute scholar for the 2024 George L. Kelling Lecture.
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- [00:17]
A
Welcome everyone. I'm Hannah Myers, Director of Policing and Public Safety for the Manhattan Institute. This lecture series is named for late Manhattan Institute scholar George Kellinger, and we honor in particular his commitment to grounding scholarship in honest observations of reality. Everyone here knows that this can be genuinely uncomfortable in criminal justice because the realities of crime and punishment and victimization are often not what we wish they were. And they reveal things about human behavior and community dynamics that are tense enough to inspire a never ending supply of crime novels and TV procedurals. But dangerously, in recent years, the study of crime and criminal behavior, like many academic fields, has given into this discomfort and drifted away from rigorous science rooted in evidenced reality. Instead, it has embraced ideological narratives, in particular about race, identity and the expendability of the criminal justice system itself. This bias has crept into university departments, think tanks and even groups like the American Society of Criminology. And it doesn't happen in a vacuum. Policymakers pass laws based on research that doesn't accurately capture reality. And police, prosecutors, judges, correctional officers must operate under these unevidenced policies. This creates agencies and strategies that are less efficient or resourced, innovative, and the net result harms the safety of our most vulnerable, vulnerable communities. Tonight we are incredibly lucky to have three of the world's leading criminologists who will discuss what this ideological sway looks like from inside the academic world and how we can all move criminology back toward a scientific grounding. I want to give a special thanks to David Weisberg who is here with us from Israel where he has been pursuing his work during a multi front defensive war. Something it's hard for us here to imagine, no matter how bad New Jersey is now. I wanted to list all of our panelists awards and the journals they've published in and the grants they have received. But they are too accomplished and it took too long. I timed it several times so I'm going to give quickish introductions and then we'll jump right into the discussion. Anthony Braga is the Jerry Lee professor of Criminology and the Director of the Crime and Justice Policy Lab in the Department of Criminology and at the University of Pennsylvania. Anthony has published numerous peer reviewed journal articles in top criminology journals, medical and public health journals and sociology journals. He has authored four books and edited nine volumes with leading presses including National Academies Press, Oxford University and Cambridge University presses. Anthony's projects have received millions in funding from grant making institutions such as the U.S. national Institute of Justice and Arnold Ventures and he's served on four national research Council Committees. Anthony is a Fellow of the American Society of Criminology and is its 2021 recipient of the Vollmer Award. He is also the past President and Fellow of the Academy of Experimental Criminology and a recipient of its Joan McCord Award, just to name a few. John McDonald is professor of Criminology and Sociology and Director of the Master of Science in Criminology at the University of Pennsylvania. He studies crime and violence, race and ethnic disparities in criminal justice, and impact of public policy on safety. John has a special expertise in how the science of urban planning can make our cities healthier and safer. John has received millions in grants from top agencies and funders including the National Institutes of Health, the center for Disease Control and Prevention, as well as private foundations. John has held prestigious positions including the University of Cambridge, RAND Corporation, and the US Department of Justice. He is the co author of Changing the Science and Art of New Urban Planning. He has been published from Princeton University Press and the co editor of three other books. He has been published in numerous prominent journals relating to crime, urban planning and sociology and he is also lead editor in several journals and has been a journal referee in some 30 others. Just the tip of the iceberg of his accomplishments. David Weisberg is a Distinguished professor of Criminology, Law and Society at George Mason University and and Executive Director of the center for Evidence Based Crime Policy. He's also the Walter E. Meyer Professor Emeritus of Law and Criminal justice at the Hebrew University Faculty of Law in Jerusalem and serves as Chief Science Advisor at the National Policing Institute. David is an elected member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities and an elected Fellow of the American Society of Criminology and of the Academy of Experimental Criminology. He serves on numerous committees including the Steering Committee of the Campbell Crime and Justice Group. David is author or editor of 37 books and more than two hundred and eighty scientific articles. He was founding editor of the Journal of Experimental Criminology and served as the editor of the Journal of Quantitative Criminology. He is editor of the Cambridge University Press Element Series in Criminology and his many, many awards include the Stockholm Prize in Criminology, the Israel Prize, and the August Vollmer Award, and so many more. These gentlemen know criminology. So John, I'd like to start with you. One of your special research focuses is racial and ethnic disparities in criminal justice. Particular ideological narratives about these disparities became the focal point in huge criminal justice policy changes over the past few years. How do you define the difference between constructive research into racial Disparity versus using disparity to push ideological work and goals.
- [05:54]
B
That's a good question. Historically, at least in criminology, when we talked about disparities, we try to distinguish between what's racial discrimination and what's a disparity. And I think what's happened in the last 10 years is that distinction's gotten blurred and there's been a lot less constructive dialogue about how can we minimize disparities, but recognizing you're gonna have disparities in the criminal justice system. I mean, we have disparities in poverty, we have disparities in educational attainment, we have disparities in who's committing criminal offenses. So you're gonna have disparities. The question is, how do we get to the kind of de minimis amount of disparities? So I think that's the constructive dialogue is focusing on what are the policies and practices that can minimize disparities. But you can't expect that, you know, outcomes in the criminal justice system are going to look like a random sample of the population. And that's one of the. One of the problems that the narrative that's been spread, especially in mainstream media and increasingly in criminology, where we've kind of forgotten, you know, our basics, which is, you know, you should be thinking about what the right benchmark is for any decision disparity. And that benchmark certainly is not just a random sample of the population.
- [07:17]
A
Why do you think it's worked its way in so much?
- [07:21]
B
You know, it's hard, except that I've noticed that people forget our own history. You know, it's hard to stay up on literature. Also, if a narrative gets out, especially a powerful one, especially something like a disparity relative to the population, say it's five to one, people immediately think that that sounds terrible. And so I think that's what happens. And it just becomes kind of gets baked into the narrative. And it's hard then for people to stand up and say, actually we actually have good evidence that that's not the right metric. We want to compare. And, you know, it takes courage, I mean, for people to say that when that's not kind of the prevailing narrative.
- [08:10]
A
Yeah. Anthony, I'm going to ask you a question next. You pioneered research into. You've done a tremendous amount of work embedded in police departments, most notably with the Boston pd. These types of engagements are really important because police have a wealth of data and real life experience. And a scholar can. Which a scholar can translate into best practices and analyze trends and suggest solutions broadly Speaking, how has growing ideological bias impacted these types of collaborations and their effectiveness?
- [08:43]
C
Yeah, there's been some direct impacts. I mean, in general, universities encourage their faculty, staff and students to launch projects that embrace the goal of trying to create public value. In particular, there's been a move within universities towards social policy labs. For example, at Penn, we have the Crime and Justice Policy lab that are really intended to engage government in meaningful ways to solve very complicated social problems. And in the area of crime, trying to improve public safety. Labs that have partnered with criminal justice agencies and particular police departments have received extra scrutiny and negative attention within the universities. The most notable of this was the University of Chicago's crime lab, where they do tremendous work in the city of Chicago. They work with everybody who wants to do something with public safety, whether it's community groups, social service providers, criminal justice agencies, but in particular the Chicago police. And he had a sociology professor, in the wake of the George Floyd murder and subsequent protests, leading an effort to defund the crime lab. So you had defund the police, and then you had defund the University of Chicago crime lab. And a lot of scrutiny that was being put pushed towards the financing of that lab, the support that it was getting from the university to try and dismantle this effort, while at the same time bringing attention to that person's research center. So you have tension along those lines with labs. And the work that I've done, I've had colleagues politely challenge me on using, as they would say, biased police data in ways to, to identify crime hotspots that they suggest undermines communities safety, When I say, well, what do you mean by bias? They say, well, it comes from a police department and they have racial disparities. So of course the data's gonna lead you in the wrong direction. Where I point out, well, if you actually look at the research work that's being done, at least in some of the hotspot studies, and David and John have had these experiences, you see that these are studies that analyze calls for service data, and police do not control who call them for help. And when you do analyses to look at dense concentrations of calls for service, these are parts of the community that are asking the police for direct action. And there's no reason that when police focus on these areas that the types of interventions lead to overly aggressive or indiscriminate policing. You can frame them as community problem solving ventures that can minimize harm in lots of different ways while still controlling crime. So when you're working with police departments in academia, especially over the last several Years. There can be a bit of a dance and an art to it, given people's concerns.
- [12:00]
B
By the way, I would say just to add on that that is a common narrative that you hear, that you can't trust the data. I think it's, you know, it's not a legitimate narrative. And most people know that they're not acting in good faith. I mean, they're basically saying that because it undermines the whole enterprise by saying that the data's terrible. Then how can you do science if the data's no good?
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A
Is that data from police departments?
- [12:26]
D
Yeah.
- [12:26]
B
I mean, but like as Anthony said, if you look at calls for service, if you look at people who have been shot, if you look at, you know, ambulance pickup data, if you look at crime report data, they're all correlated in space and time. So, I mean, even if there is some bias, say, for example, in arrest data, it doesn't change the overall patterns, which is, you know, the most. Where crime is the most concentrated. It's correlated with a whole bunch of things.
- [12:57]
D
Yeah. Let me just say I did some analyses because lawyers in particular have the view that police data ratchets up the crime in the minority communities. Let's say the hot spots become places where there's a lot of minorities or others who are impoverished, et cetera. And when I looked at this, at least in Baltimore, I found out that the police. There are two types of calls. One is citizen initiated, the other is police initiated. Police initiated calls make up between 20 and 12%, depending on the department of the calls. We looked at these calls in Baltimore. Almost none of them were for violence or drugs. So this idea, something that the police are ratcheting up the data is just wrong. But it fits the ideological argument that people want to have. It's what they want to believe. You know, it's not. And here's the problem. There's a difference in what you want to believe and what is true.
- [13:53]
A
Actually, I want to ask you a follow on then to that, David. You've expressed that for many scholars, the goal of policing is no longer to prevent crime in a procedurally just way. Instead, procedural justice is now the central aim of criminology and crime prevention. An afterthought. Can you explain that?
- [14:12]
D
Okay, I'm not sure I said no. Look, I think I've had this discussion with some of the people who are strong advocates of this, for example, Tom Tyler and others. And I should note that Anthony and I have done the largest experiment showing that the procedural justice actually can be helpful. So I'M not anti procedural justice in any way, but I've had this discussion a number of times that some people work in this area, and I think it's becoming, at least it became more common over the last few years. Believe that the police should not be focused on doing something about crime that creates all this negative stuff we should do is we should focus the police on procedural justice. And in the long run, that will help reduce crime because they believe there'll be more cooperation with the police, et cetera. That seems to me to put things on their head. We pay an enormous amount of money for police departments because we need them to do something, not procedural justice. Actually, that's what we want them to do. We need them to reduce crime, to keep order, to keep traffic under control. These are all their jobs, and we want them to do that with procedural justice. In other words, we want them to be respectful to citizens, to listen to what they have to say, to show that they're not, don't have biased motives, et cetera. And in that situation, it seems to me what I've said to people, I've said, if you put procedural justice first, what happens if it doesn't lead to crime control? Because there's not a lot of evidence that if you behave in procedural just ways, it will lead to crime control. The only experiment that shows that is one that Anthony Mai ran. But the point is that we want the police to do certain things. Procedural justice is not what we hired them for. We hired them for carrying out crime control, safety, all kinds of tasks in the city. And we expect them in a democratic society to, to do that in procedurally just ways. And I think turning that argument around like that is a disservice.
- [16:05]
A
Can I ask you, David, so you've pioneered research into crime concentration, including a paper that they did for Manhattan Institute, showing that even over many years, about 5% of streets in New York experience about 50% of the crime. That was just a plug. But you mentioned that in a recent application for a grant which you received related to crime concentration from the prestigious National Science foundation, reviewers made comments with shockingly ideological takes. Can you describe these and how these represent a problematic departure from the past?
- [16:38]
D
I came prepared because I'm not going to read a long thing or anything, but I couldn't say this quite the way the reviewer said it. So I applied for a grant, which I received, which was reinforcing this work I've done over many years, showing that most crime is concentrated in relatively few places. And if that's true, you can get extra bang for your buck, an extra dosage if you like, by focusing on those hot spots, by the way, not only with policing, but with social interventions. And so I had an opportunity where I could do this in 70 to 80 cities, no one's ever done that before, to see if the data we found in eight cities and across some other studies that were done were correct. So I applied to the National Science foundation, got a very, very good science review about the methods that we use. And then I got these as two major concerns that I have to respond to. I'm only going to read you one of them. Part of it. The first, they say at the outset our proposed research, meaning my research, they're quoting me. Our proposed research does not deal with the question of how. Please, please. But rather focuses on the opportunities that can accrue when crime is more concentrated in small numbers of streets in the city. That's what I was looking at. Right, so, so nothing to do with policing. I didn't say, I mean, I said something about policing, but it could have been about social service or anything. But then they say, he says, listen to this. But they also clearly know, as respected voices in the discipline, that when police, police black communities, they exhibit brutality, savagery and discrimination that are rarely reproduced by officers in economically powerful or predominantly white communities. Now you could argue about this point. There's evidence one way or the other, but it's certainly not something you can just say as if it's all true, right? So while hotspots policing research may enhance or may have enhanced those researchers careers, in other words, my career, okay. It is important for them to look into whether their research findings from hotspots policing have been applied in an ethical and procedurally just manner in the communities. Anyway, you get it, right? So it struck me two things here. First, I'm writing, I'm writing something proposing something that is about basic science, about whether crime concentrates in city. And what I get back is a kind of ideological whatever about, you know, how bad the police are on one level, how they're always brutal and savage, et cetera. Some nuance to this. There are police that are brutal and savage, et cetera. But the point is that's what I get back. And beyond that, I get a criticism of me for having done that work because I must know how bad the police. And to be frank, I thought it was like advancing my career. First of all, I'm pretty advanced already. I don't need to advance it that much.
- [19:13]
A
It's true. I only give a Little sample.
- [19:15]
D
But beyond that, the point is that it's outrageous to the credit of the National Science foundation people that are there. I got funded. I wrote a response to this saying, I'm well aware of these kinds of problems, but the fact that this could be seen as, as acceptable review. And by the way, I'm not going to read it. There's another review, very similar, very similar to that one. And this is the National Science Foundation.
- [19:43]
A
You've all been through the research grant application process at a high level numerous times. Do the two of you, have you seen a similar shift in priorities to permit more ideology and less science?
- [19:54]
C
Oh, yeah. I mean, I could go on and on. I'll give two examples. One is a very large federal funding agency put out a solicitation for programs that were to evaluate programs that were designed to decrease gun violence. And there's a theme in the work that comprehensive approaches, ones that blend criminal justice, social service and community based action, are best positioned to control gun violence. And there was this really good initiative in a city that the police were a partner to, not necessarily leading, but part of the strategic coalition. Interesting work. Gun violence, going down, things to learn. So I said, okay, perfect, perfect for the solicitation. Get into the details of the solicitation. We will not fund any programs that involve the police. So I think to myself, okay, a best practice, comprehensive approach. Here's an interesting program that cities could really learn from and no one's going to get a chance to learn from it because they don't want to fund something that supports the police. As I said, I can go on and on. A major private foundation strangely changed their application requirements that not only did you have to present the importance of the.
- [21:27]
B
Idea.
- [21:30]
C
The rigor of the methodology that you were going to pursue to go after that policy question, but then there was a whole new section on the identity of your team, team members. To which I thought, what does this really have anything to do with pulling off the research project at hand? Luckily, the lab that we have at Penn is very diverse, so I was able to talk about diversity. And we did get the money. It didn't hinder us from getting the money, but it just really showed a shift in what funders were thinking about beyond just the science of it.
- [22:08]
B
Yeah, I've also noticed that some solicitations have specifically asked for engaging community groups in the research. And that doesn't mean I'm a big supporter of good qualitative work interviewing people, connecting with people in the community. But this isn't that. This is more of like the research project has to involve a community, community group, but a community group doesn't do research. So that seems to be another example of things moving away from a focus on science and evidence to more ideology.
- [22:51]
A
Anthony and all of you, to your immense credit, you3 have enough standing and accomplishments to feel some professional security despite calling out this bias in the of account academy. But what are the professional risks for criminologists, for lesser, newer, younger, other criminologists who speak up about the problem? And how much does fear suppress complaints and discussion? And how could criminologists be made to feel safer raising concerns?
- [23:18]
C
Yeah, I mean, part of the issue is as the field continues to shift in a particular ideological direction, the people that appraise your work and what you've achieved in your career are also more likely to have those ideological biases. So for young scholars who are trying to get their work out there, they face peer reviewers who may not be very interested in the kinds of work that they're doing unless they bow in different directions or take a very critical look at the criminal justice system. So peer review is an area that sort of connects back to the submitting for grants where young people in particular are vulnerable. I mean, I've got enough publications, I get something rejected. Big deal, right? But for a young person who needs to publish or perish, and if they aren't able to place their work in high quality scientific journals because of peer reviewers, getting folks who are not accepting work for ideological reasons rather than from methodological ones is a really big problem. And I know we've all had these issues. I was reviewing for a major sociology journal and there was a fatal flaw in this paper. It's like, hey, this paper can't get published because there's something wrong with this. They're not applying their models to the data correctly. However, the two other reviewers really liked the story it was being told, so they sort of held their nose and pushed it forward. And as some of you may know, you usually get three reviewers. So if two say OK and one says no, you get a revise and resubmit. And that's the other part of the peer reviewer problem is if you have peer reviewers who are ideologically biased, it also passes bad science through.
- [25:24]
B
Yeah, it's interesting because in the late 90s, I started studying racial disparities in the juvenile justice system. And I had the hardest time trying to get that work published. Maybe I was too early because, you know, now it's, you know, it used to be the bias in criminology was towards studying offending. Remember criminal careers, David? There was like a whole subfield on criminal careers. Now a lot of young scholars, they don't want to understand the ideology of criminal offending. They want to focus more on just, you know, the problems with the criminal justice system. And hey, look, there are problems that in the criminal justice system that need be fixed. But it's a missed opportunity, I think, just to be critical, not to be constructive. And I also think we've got a whole generation that hasn't been studying criminal offending. You know, we don't know enough about, like, the changes in criminal offending patterns other than what we're all experiencing. You know, porch pirates, you know, repeat property theft. All these things are happening. But we don't have criminologists the way we used to really focused on trying to study offenders.
- [26:32]
A
Are you finding that students themselves are not learning to be scientists?
- [26:39]
B
I think we're pretty. I think I've been fortunate that the students we interact with are. But I think still there's a strong pull towards more of a focus on social justice and not on reducing co crime, public policies that improve safety. So I think I understand that part of that's a cultural dynamic just in larger society. But it does worry me that we're going to have all the best research on criminal offending. It's going to be research that was conducted in the 80s and 90s.
- [27:15]
A
Well, let me ask you, David and John. In last month's issue of the Criminologist, which is. Is the American Society of Criminology's newsletter, you two strongly criticized an essay from the summer as seeming to mark a transition in the Criminologist from a place for exchange of ideas and critical discourse to one where polemical essays are published that aim at a particular political agenda. Can you tell us what concerned you so much about the essay and what the response has been?
- [27:45]
B
Well, so the essay was. It was part of the general pattern of these essays. One was on originally on eliminating the name of a major award. And then this essay was trying to connect what they called copaganda. So it's like propaganda about the police with the, you know, with the Israeli Hamas war. And first of all, I don't see any connection, but it had nothing to do with criminology as far as I'm concerned. And it was also, frankly, pretty offensive, some of the things that were written in that essay. And I thought, hey, it's a newsletter, but it's supposed to be about the field of criminology. It's not supposed to be a place for, for these kind of polemical essays. And it also concerns me when academic societies start making political statements. And it also concerns me when universities do, because we're not supposed to be an academic society is not supposed to be the critic, it's supposed to be the place for critics. And so, so when it becomes a critic, then you start thinking, all right, this now become a political organization. This isn't really a scholarly organization anymore. So that was my concern.
- [29:14]
D
David Yeah, I guess my concern was also about the process. And you know, there's a kind of, there's a kind of process going on more generally kind of situation where, you know, a lot of things are linked together that may not necessarily be linked together and shouldn't be, but you know, it's sort of like, I hate to use the term fellow travelers, but like people who are moving in the same direction. So all these things, you know, all these things are part of, you know, of one ideology, if you like, you know, Israel and the Palestinians and justice for Aborigines, they're all part of the same argument. There's no difference between them. But the process. This article, you know, spoke about Israel in a way that is really offensive and it was also just not very factual. For example, it said that, you know, it's now been proved that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. And they cite an article from the New York Times. They're saying, but the actual it comes from the icc and the ICC never said that. They said the Palestinians have a plausible right to be protected from genocide. Those two things are very different. Okay, to begin with, whether you like the ICC or not. And this article is published in a way that started with that as an assumption like Israel is a bad, Israel is a genocidal country, et cetera, right? And then it goes on to use the same scope to understand policing, right? And talks about the protest, for example, without any mention of the anti Semitic and you know, violence and things of this sort. So when we saw it, just John actually saw it first and sent it to me, this group of people that were engaged with each other and to Anthony. And we couldn't understand how this thing got published in the general newsletter of the American Society of Criminology. So John wrote the president, Anthony wrote the president of the society, and I wrote the vice president. The vice president told me he didn't even know about the article. He's a co editor of the newsletter. And the president said, well, we wanted to recognize more conflict, criminologists these are conflict criminologists. But Anthony, I think rightly raised the issue. Would you have let this go through if it had potentially offended another minority group? I mean, Jews are a minority group. And she didn't really respond to that. Maybe she didn't want to respond to that. I don't know. She just said we don't peer review this. Now imagine, as I said, when she said we don't peer review that it had something about blacks or Latinos or other minorities in America, it would have gone through immediately. So the process here is part of the problem. But it does reflect again that idea that it's okay if it's about all the victim groups that go together, that there's no distinguishing between them, et cetera. And yeah, it's pretty disturbing. I think they got the message though from us reacting. And just one more comment. John and I, John and I wrote this article and one of the things we decided not to do is respond to the article. The article is so stupid, to be frank, which I'm happy to be recorded about. The article is so nonsensical, so idiotic that we didn't want to give it credence by arguing against its arguments that often could. Just two people in criminology that are rather well known are saying something about two people in criminology that we've never heard of, who are some, you know, are not known researchers. So, you know, that's the world as it operates. But yeah, the process here was miserable.
- [32:43]
B
And I even said, you know, there could be a place, you know, we even said this too, that you know, for spirited debates like I'm, you know, so you could have two sides to an issue and have argument essays. That's great. We used to do things like that, but just have a one sided kind of polemical essay and then send it out to everyone and, and not think about the effect. It might have seemed to be kind of another just disturbing trend.
- [33:09]
A
Well, speaking of disturbing trends, David, academia can be notoriously cutthroat and political arena where appointments and tenure are extremely competitive. You mentioned an incident recently where it was clear just from a job listing that diversity was prioritized above actual candidate quality qualifications. Can you talk about this, how widespread it's become at universities and what the result is on departments and their work?
- [33:34]
D
Yeah, what I was referring to when we talked was a student of mine sent an application to Rand and was one of the short group but was not hired. And they sent me, then she sent me the ad. You know, this thing you have to respond to. So it has criminologists. That's what they're hiring. Then it has half a page diversity. And then after that it has what the job description is and the qualifications you want. Now, this is a very tough issue because I think all decent people will agree about the importance of having diversity, of having at least fairness and justice. And we hire people, not excluding groups. That's how all this started, I think. But when you put a half page like that at the beginning. Yeah, again, remember I said about procedural justice before, it's where you put something and you put it there. You know, the medium is the message, McLuhan said, and you put it there. It says, this for us is the key issue. It seems to me, again, that we want qualified people who have the skills needed and we want to tell them they're not going to be excluded because they're from a particular racial group or minority and that we are really sensitive to this fact. But putting that first, that creates, it seems to me, a different message across the board. I spoke to. When I was at the American Society of Criminology meetings, I spoke to a recent student of mine who got their PhD recently. And basically the conversation was sort of, you know, well, if you studied policing, they don't want to have anything to do with you. This has got one of the best trained people I ever trained, and I've trained a lot of good people here, including him. So which I'm very.
- [35:11]
C
I'd be nowhere without David.
- [35:12]
D
No, that's not true. You'd be famous without me. But I feel proud that you. In Yiddish, we say nachos from it. I get nachos from it. But anyway, so he was basically telling me he felt excluded, both in terms of the job market and in terms of when he tells people who's working in policing and there's something wrong with that, it doesn't mean the opposite extreme is what we should be going to. But there is something fundamentally wrong with that. And I think this is now something that is being talked about among people who are afraid to say things because you're right, if he says something, it'll hurt him. Plus, more generally, I don't think any of us want to come out against having diverse faculty, having diverse student body, of having fairness and justice. When we hire people in terms of not excluding certain people, it's a very tough issue. But there's something. When I saw that ad, I said, there is something upside down here.
- [36:04]
A
And are you three seeing professors leaving the field, leaving universities and Transferring out of frustration with this.
- [36:13]
B
I've seen some younger scholars decide not to pursue academic careers because of the feeling that their work wasn't going to be valued. Which is a shame. I haven't seen anyone kind of more of a senior level frustrated. The other thing to connect to what David was saying though is a lot of the adverts mention critical criminology, which I know most people in the room don't know what that means, but it's basically ideological criminology. It's not science based. It comes out of post modernism. And the fact that a number of research universities say that's who they want to hire. I think that'd be fine if you're a philosophy department, but a social science department. It's strange to me when that becomes the main position. These aren't positions. That's not an area of scholarship where you're going to get NSF grants traditionally or you're going to do big experiments or you're going to work with agencies. To me that suggests that some departments feel like they have to hire somebody in that area. And so that's the signaling. And so that was not as much true this year, but the year before it was, I would say almost half the job adverts emphasized critical criminology and critical race theory or some kind of things like that specifically in the job advertising.
- [37:45]
C
And I would say I don't know folks who it was. The only reason why they left. However, people want to belong somewhere. So if they're doing a certain kind of work that they don't feel is valued or respected by their colleagues in their department, they are much more likely to move on. And that was directly. It wasn't the only reason why I moved on from a unit university earlier in my career, however, I definitely felt that my colleagues didn't appreciate the work that I was doing and that I was a better fit somewhere else. Where they had a tradition of collaborating with agencies, working with the police, working with anybody who wants to work with you.
- [38:33]
B
One point I was going to follow up on. Anthony mentioned earlier about the attempt to defund the University of Chicago crime lab. I also think that that's. It's kind of easy to go after researchers, you know, I mean, it's research, you know, it's, you know, people aren't going to feel a public safety risk if the research ends. You know, people need the police there all the time. So I feel like it's easy to escape. And it also gives way too much power. You know, we're always trying to advance evidence based policy. But you know, it's a slow incremental process. It's not like, you know, agencies are sitting around waiting for academics to tell them what to do. I mean it seems like everything's been inverted. This idea that you're okay if you stop doing the research, then somehow the policy is going to change. Yeah, it'll probably get worse. Anything, you know, but I think it's just, it's a power play.
- [39:35]
A
I see lawmakers now frequently commissioning and citing criminal justice reports that are designed to reach the conclusions that they want about bill reform, about whatever. I was going to list some examples, but I won't. But when you finding is that when you actually look at the actual data, it's missing the bigger impact or the actual goals of public safety. What does that look like from your vantage in academia?
- [40:01]
C
Go ahead, David. Then I can go.
- [40:03]
D
Yeah, I think this is. Look for me the trouble when I train students, I say to them, our job is to tell the truth. Sometimes the truth, sometimes what your data show and not what you would want. You know, they're contrary to what you should, but that's your job. Our job, tell the truth. Now, we're not politicians, we're not other sorts of departments that are mostly concerned with ethics or things like this. Our job to tell the truth and provide the information. The problem out there is that there is a people want to hear the truth. They want that they, that they believe not necessarily the truth as it exists. And I think that has colored the way a lot of this is done. But let me just add another perspective to this. There is in the United States, I believe, something like $20 million a year spent on policing research. Maybe 30, I don't know, what would you say 20, probably 20 between Arnold and Nij and others, maybe a little bit more. NIH has a $45 billion a year budget. Right. How much can you actually do? How much information can you actually provide? How much can you, you help police agencies, correction agencies? Let's talk about policing. How much could you really help? There are a million questions in policing, but the question of inequality, equity, those have sort of taken up a lot of the field. And the truth is, if there's only a little bit of money, it means you're going to have no evidence about what works or very little. You're going to have little evidence about how the police should work to do their job in ways that are perceivably just. All this is going to fall by the wayside because you have a very smart Small group of people providing, you know, going after a very small amount of funds to pursue research in this area. So part of the problem is government. Government does not provide the resources, so we can provide the evidence, rigorous evidence. So if you don't have the money for rigorous evidence, then you get a lot of this kind of like just talking, you know, talking heads, kind of like, we are here. Perhaps, in a way, you get a lot of talking. You don't get a lot of evidence about what you're doing. I hope we're basing on evidence. But anyway, unlike this or unlike us.
- [42:10]
B
Yeah, I think the NIH funds more research around dental care than it does around.
- [42:16]
D
Yes, 10 times, which actually, you know.
- [42:19]
B
Most of us from college appreciate that.
- [42:21]
D
Research, but as you get older, we all have more.
- [42:24]
B
But I mean, there is an element of, you know, more resources would certainly could help, but they have to be directed the right way. I mean, there are certain. There are big challenges out there. I mean, you think about something like police shootings, you know, what do we know about what reduces police shootings? I mean, this is an important topic and there's very little support. I mean, there's plenty of people writing papers on police shootings. But, like, you know, what are the examples where departments, you know, why is it, for example, that Dallas has a fifth of the police shootings, is Phoenix, but they have like the same rate of gun violence, you know, what's.
- [43:02]
D
Or.
- [43:02]
B
Although Dallas has gone down. But, you know, what is it about certain departments that the shootings are so.
- [43:08]
D
Much lower than others?
- [43:09]
B
I know people in this room probably say, yeah, New York City, it's true. But also New York doesn't have a lot of guns, you know, so. But when you take into account things like that, you know, there's these tremendous differences across agencies. That's the kind of thing the federal government, if they really cared about reducing police shootings, should have had a major RFP to focus on. And, you know, the last one I can think of was in the. David, that was like the 80s, right, when there was NIJ sponsored all that series of.
- [43:41]
D
Yeah, Chip Stewart.
- [43:42]
B
Yeah, CHIP Stewart, Reagan Administration.
- [43:45]
C
I mean, a lot of the problems, I think, going back to what David and John were saying is people want the studies that support their view of the world. And we haven't talked about the media, but certainly the studies that get publicized in the media are often the ones that fit the journalist's narrative on what the nature of the problem is and what we should do about it. So, for example, our colleague Charles Lefler, he does a lot of studies of raise the age, changing the age of majority between the juvenile justice system and the criminal justice system. And I collaborated with him on a study in Massachusetts that showed actually after they passed Raise the age, it increased recidivism. It had this very negative backfire effect. Other states have found similar types of results, either no effect or a backfire effect. Increasing recidivism. Boston Globe has been promoting Raise the age expanding Raise the age in Massachusetts. We have sent them the study, we have sent them op eds and say, hey, voters need to know about this. Here's some real evidence. This is the actual experience in the state of Massachusetts. Crickets.
- [45:14]
A
It's tragic.
- [45:15]
D
Yeah, Just let me just kind of one more thing and then we'll open it up. Also the American Society of Criminology. So I've given a talk on saying someone was criticizing and they said, they said, we all know the police can't reduce crime. So, you know, I've run a series of experiments that show the police can prevent crime. But at the same time, Anthony and I have written elsewhere that the police should work with the community to prevent crime. Community is a critical issue. Huge. But the fact is that the police don't work the community in a concentrated way and they use, they focus in on crime hot spots. They'll still have a deterrent effect of some sort. We believe a greater effect if they work with the community. But the point is the person, this is a. A person who will be asked to give advice on these sorts of issues. I won't say what it is, and they could say this confidently because evidence is not the issue for them. I actually said, I said, where is the evidence? Where is the evidence for this? Where is the science? No one responded. So the point I'm making is that there is. Academics are pandering is what I'd say. They're pandering to get their stuff in the paper, to get published in journals and things of this sort. That's a very bad idea. I can say from a long career that if you stick to the science and keep showing the rigor, that that stuff will last longer than the things that aren't science based. But in the short run, pandering perhaps works pretty well.
- [46:38]
B
Just to follow on, I was having conversation about a year ago with David Kennedy, John Janjane. He was saying to me that he was testifying or giving a talk in front of New York City Council, and that topic came up and he said, no, there's actually a National Academy of science report that you were, you know, that David was the co editor of showing convincingly. That's one of the areas where you have the best science from all these hotspots, experiments and quasi experiments that police can reduce crime. And he said it was like he was telling them about science, some mystery, you know, like, wow, this actually exists. I think part of it is people don't know. You have a younger generation maybe in these jobs. But it's also they just don't want, maybe people just don't want to know. But it's, I mean, your grandmother would know that that would make sense. I mean, science in some way is just proving the obvious, which is if you put a bunch of police in an area and they concentrate on, you know, on criminal offenders, they're going to have a criminal crime suppression effect. I mean, it's common sense.
- [47:41]
D
Well, you know, I always said that I knew my work would have, would be successful when people started telling other people that. It's obvious.
- [47:51]
A
Well, now I'd like to open up to questions. Yes, there's a microphone coming.
- [47:57]
C
Thanks. I have two related questions. Number one, do you think the gatekeepers of the academy have any idea how diverse divorced their dogmas are from the public's understanding of what's happening on the streets? And the second thing is, is there any hope of some alternative to the, to a peer review system that views everything that comes at it through one distorted prism?
- [48:28]
D
Yeah, I can if you want.
- [48:30]
A
Yeah.
- [48:33]
D
Yeah. You know, I recently on this panel too, it's just stuck in my mind because it happened last week. So there was also this view that, you know, citizens don't like policing, citizens don't like hotspots, policing and all this kind of stuff. And I just done a survey in Phoenix, Arizona on I think it was 50 crime hotspots. We interviewed seven or eight people in each of those places and when we asked them, do you want the same amount of police, more police or less police? More than half said more police. The other 40% said about the same amount and about 7% less. So when you talk about the disconnect between the academy, if you would ask people in the academy, they'd say these communities don't want it. I mean, I was interviewing people at the hot spots, right. At the places where you have the most police activities probably as well. So, you know, there is a kind of disconnect and it shouldn't be surprising in a society that has so many disconnects from an Israeli. Looking at an American society today, in recent elections I mean there's a disconnect for sure. I don't know if you can change the gatekeeper. It's very difficult. I think it was Churchill that said democracy is a terrible form of government but it's best we have or something like that. I think the peer review is a big problem to be frank, because the majority of the people who is doing the peer reviews, that's the majority of the people that may not have new ideas, et cetera, but it's very hard in the system. What could happen is I thought that review from the National Science foundation that I read to you before was outrageous. It was personal about me, it was anti police, it stated things without any reference to science or reality and it was talking about something that had nothing to do with my grant. But yet that got through to me as one of the two most important comments that they received. Now that suggests that I did a pretty good job on the methods. But anyway, part of it is I think the control comes from recognizing what shouldn't be there. Same thing in the Criminologist. That article should not have been published. There should have been gatekeeping for that article. You can't abandon the peer review system, you can't get rid of the unfairness, can't get rid of all the unfairness in life, et cetera. But there should be a boundary beyond which you don't go. And I think that NSF example is an example of that boundary as are other examples.
- [50:44]
B
I think one thing, I mean there was a push towards open access journals that might have a little less gatekeeping but that's not. I'm not sure that's a good solution either because they can solve gatekeepers. What I would like to see is the referees comments, maybe not published in the article but published like someone has a comment and then you get to respond that way if the, if they're being an obstructionist or they're making arguments that aren't backed by evidence, they have to stand behind their own words. I also would actually like to get rid of the anonymous review process. I'd rather, if you feel strongly it's fine in the spirit of academic debate. We can debate, but I think there's something wrong when it's anonymous. I'm co editor of the Journal of Quantitative Criminal Terminology and when we see a review where it doesn't happen that much, but when we see reviews that are particularly snarkier mean, you know, I'll reach back and I'm following on David's good practice because he preceded me of asking the reviewer to maybe revise it and tone it down and, you know, be more reasonable, but that, you know, some version of opening it up so it's not blind review. I think think would help because then people have to stand behind their words more.
- [52:08]
D
Go ahead.
- [52:08]
A
Too daunting.
- [52:10]
C
I was just going to say.
- [52:13]
D
In.
- [52:13]
C
Terms of the gatekeeping with the peer review, I think that having more training in a code of best practices for the editors because I do notice that over the course of their career, careers as editors, they tend to get better because they learn and they see. But there needs to be some definite changes.
- [52:35]
D
For sure.
- [52:39]
A
Yes.
- [52:44]
E
Hi everybody. My name is Sarah Thompson. I just earned my doctorate from Rutgers University. And I really appreciate your work on place based on and hot spots and problem oriented policing. I used a lot of your research in support of my dissertation, which was a very niche topic that nobody is interested in. But regardless, I just want to say, I would say I'm Clarkist in my approach to crime. Like I support Dr. Clark. I'm a student of his and I would identify as a crime scientist. So I do have questions, but know that they're coming from that place because I had read the article about, you know, it's not as bad as people think. And what struck me was the disconnect about what safety is. And I think it's also important to talk about when you're talking about a hot spot, what type of crime are you talking about? Are you talking about drive by shootings or are you talking about porch theft? You know, and those two crimes are very different. And I know that there's some disaggregation with regards to property crime and violent crime. But even with that disaggregation, assault is very different than drive by shooting. Right. Vandalism is very different than robbery. Sorry, I came prepared with my own notes actually, but so I just kind of wanted to get a sense. Sorry, I'll make it quick.
- [54:12]
A
I know I'm kind of.
- [54:13]
E
Yeah, no, I understand. But I would like to start a conversation about what is safety and what is a safe place and how can we tap into those entities even beyond the police. And I know your article kind of mentions the parks department, et cetera, even as it relates to clearing up a vacant lot. You're talking about landlords, you're talking about land ownership. And so, you know, I just kind of wanted to push the narrative a little bit to just kind of challenge you to kind of identify what is a hotspot. And how do you address that by further Disaggregating what sort of crime you're talking about because especially from a situational crime prevention approach, that would be important.
- [54:58]
A
Do you feel like the answer speaks to the.
- [54:59]
D
Well, you should just push the article. You know, it's not as bad as they think it is. Right. Which is a report for the Manhattan Institute. Now, I'll just say we are thinking about those sorts of things. It's very hard to disaggregate everything at a very microgeographic level. But all those things are important. Right. And by the way, that research is the first research in hot spots that is able to look deeply at the social context of these places, in part because we received support from the National Institutes of Health, which provided a very large amount of money to look at social questions. You like the kind of questions you're asking. So hold on for a book which is coming out in a year, if you'll.
- [55:36]
B
One thing you can do is like the Cambridge Crime Harm Index idea that Larry Sherman and others have done, which is you just reweight the crimes based on their social costs. And then that might give a better appreciation to the diversity of crime so that shootings are 25 times as serious as an assault. But you're still going to find you're going to find a lot of the same hot spots.
- [56:05]
D
Barak Ariel found that they're both the same. When he did that, the correlation was like 90%.
- [56:10]
C
I can only say I agree with you on disaggregation.
- [56:17]
D
And you have to look at his work because he does that a lot.
- [56:22]
A
Yes.
- [56:29]
D
I don't think he's got a mic. Yeah, sorry.
- [56:31]
F
Thank you. So we've talked a lot about the impact of ideology on this topic, which I frankly find having gone to the University of Chicago, very disturbing and food for thought. But, you know, having grown up also in New York over the last 35 years has been really a collapse in violent crime. Murders are down 75%. So when you think about the impact of policy or something else, to what do you attribute that delta over time and what is the role of policy going forward in making us safer?
- [57:05]
D
So how do we explain the Delta of a 75% crime drop?
- [57:12]
B
There's positive.
- [57:24]
D
Yeah. I was on a panel on crime trends of which we. From the National Academy of Sciences, which we talked about this. Look, there are many causes of the. Probably many causes of the crime drop, including, by the way, I think policing, but also including other employment, other. Other social issues that contributed and changing government in other ways. Right. It's very hard. But I will say something just relevant to what we're talking about. When I came to New York very early on and asked the police commissioner, I won't say which police commissioner, I said, we ought to do a study of what you're doing here at CompStat, because, you know, everybody's saying there's a big crime decline. So we could start now and do this study. And I spent about 20 minutes explaining to the commissioner why it would be be a good study to do, you know, in that fancy office they have in New York City compared to others, anyway, and then he looked me in the eye and he said, david, you could only bring me bad news. Okay? So, yeah, I think that's an evidence based problem in a different direction. When I told that to a leading physician at a medical center, he said to me, oh, my God, we wouldn't. If we had a treatment for lung cancer or for breast cancer, we would want to know whether it really works or not. So I think there's another side to the story, which is not about the ideological move to one direction, but about the politics of policing and other things that often presents us getting at the truth.
- [58:45]
B
We did, though, if you think about during COVID and just at the start of COVID the rise in shootings that started, see this in March, starting in Philadelphia. You see Chicago, New York, a lot of people didn't want to believe it was happening, but there's pretty clear evidence that when the police pull back, also when you close stores, you know, summer jobs shut down, you know, for a subset of the population, you know, things fall apart pretty quick. So, I mean, I think one of the keys right to New York has been an effective police force force for a long period of time. But, you know, you saw that uptick happen even here. Not as bad as Philadelphia and Chicago. And, you know, you see it persist in cities where the police haven't really got back to, you know, the work that they were doing. You know, it only takes 1,000 armed, you know, mostly men, you know, who are willing to shoot at each other, cause a shooting epidemic in a big city.
- [59:53]
A
Well, on that note, I'm so sorry. I know. I'd love to take more questions, but I know we like to stick to time here, so please join me in thanking our panelists.
- [60:13]
C
Thanks for joining us for the weekly 10 Blocks podcast featuring urban policy and cultural commentary with City Journal editors, contributors and special guests.