I’m going to start with a bunch of caveats. A) This is crude data analysis. B) It it based on incomplete Uniform Crime Report data dependent on reliable data reported (not a given). C) I may have simply done this wrong. It’s 2AM. D) This is important: arrests are NOT good for their own sake, but most policing is discretionary. And arrests can be a decent proxy for proactive policing. All that said, there’s something important going on here, based on last year’s UCR Arrest data, limitations and all.
Arrests in the US (again with the very important caveats, above) dropped 1% in 2018, 10% in 2019, and then 25%(!) in 2020. That’s shocking. As much as 29% increase in murder. If this is good data, this is very consistent with a “Ferguson” like “George Floyd protest” effect.
For whatever reason (I have my theories), police policed less in 2020. At least when they had a choice not to engage. That’s not good, despite what less policing advocates say.
The kind of arrests down most are _exactly_ the crimes police can simply choose to ignore. “Suspicion” (though it’s a super small category of <1K. I’d ignore this were the name not so perfect) down 65%. Prostitution down 43%. Vagrancy (also small and not arrestable in some places) down 36%. Liquor arrests down 37%.
Maybe police were busy with other things, maybe they didn’t want to—for Covid or fear of viral video or bad morale reasons)—but for whatever reason, they didn’t. Arrests were down 25% as violence was up a similar and record level. This is kind of unheard of.
Curfew/loiter arrests were down 41%. Disorderly down 29%. Drunkenness arrests down 39%. Runaways down 58%. None of these are huge categories, by they way, but they are all indicative of cops not engaging when they could have, and did more in 2019.
Big categories? DUI is a great example of proactive policing. Cops don’t _have_ to stop a swerving motorist. Might lead to force. For better or for worse, police arrested 22% fewer DUIs in 2020 (590K). Drug arrests down 27% (895K). “Other assaults” down 14% (700K).
Arrests up? Weapons, up 3%. I’d guess cause more people had weapons and knew how to use them. Murder arrests were up 2% (and also negligent manslaughter). Since murder was up 29% arrests should have been up more. Arson (not many) up 8%, presumably related to riots.
What’s this mean? That’s the quiz. But if these data are correct (again, no guarantees) there was a huge demonstrable decrease in police enforcement in 2020. A perfect example of what reformers want: less policing. Was that the cause of violence, I don’t know. but it matters.
Pls don’t overthink this. Shootings/murders up a record level in 2020. Covid was a global pandemic. The rise in violence was uniquely America. And so was de-policing. No, such a correlation doesn’t automatically equal causation, but it might. I’ve heard of no better theory.
Arrests, while technically the front end of incarceration, are basically unrelated to mass incarceration. Violent crime and long sentences are the driver of prison. I guarantee that even a massive 1/4 decline in arrests will have an approx 0% impact on prison population.
People are not going to prison for sentences related to the category of “all other arrests.” The point is that policing that _might_ lead to such an arrest matters, and is not being done. (Again, arrests are not “good,” they can be a proxy for policing being proactive.)
I looked at the largest UCR categories of arrest by race. Everything declined substantially. For each of these categories (*except DUI) Black arrests declined a greater % than white arrests. Good or bad? Not my point. But these are noteworthy indicators of unequal depolicing.
