Why More Cops Are the Last Thing We Need

In September, The Crime Report published a piece describing a non-peer reviewed “thought piece” by Harvard Professors Christopher Lewis and Adaner Usmani called “The Injustice of Under-Policing in America” in the American Journal of Law and Equality.

In it, the Harvard professors call for 500,000 more armed cops, who will arrest 7.8 million more people per year. In other words, these two professors are proposing the greatest expansion of militarized police and surveillance in modern Western history, and they call it “the only way” to live up to “progressive” and “egalitarian” commitments.

A close examination of this article reveals systemic ethical and intellectual flaws in elite academia.

Alex Vitale

The entire article makes bad arguments based on faulty data; lacking rigor that one would expect from serious academic writing. The Harvard professors claim: 1) the U.S. has way more prisoners than other countries and 2) way fewer cops.

This is bad, they say, because: 3) prisons bring little benefit for their costs and 4) cops bring big benefits for their cost.

There are major flaws in their data and reasoning related to claims 2 and 4.

The U.S. does not have fewer police than our industrialized counterparts. After we questioned their data, one of the professors responded that they chose to use the number 697,195 from the Unified Crime Report R (an FBI reporting survey) even though they knew many local agencies weren’t included and that perhaps all federal police were excluded.

The professor estimated that including those missing officers might raise the number to 900,000. The professor then admitted over email that the U.S. census count is actually 1,227,788 police. That’s 76 percent higher than the number they chose to use in their public article.

Using this number would mean the U.S. has “1.1 times the median rate in rich countries.” (Further, the professors did not mention to readers that they chose to exclude private police forces, and there are about 1.1 million private police in the U.S.)

The Article’s “Core” Problem

The author’s “core” points are (3) and (4) above about the relative cost/benefits of prisons and police. But this is where the article goes off the rails.

The most alarming aspect of the article is that it repeatedly ignores the costs of more police. The article presents the main cost of their proposal as 7.8 million more arrests. They call it the “main downside,” and it is the only one they even mention.

The professors then dismiss the costs of 7.8 million more people arrested as far outweighed by all the amazing benefits of police.

Virtually every subpoint they make is flawed (including their failure to count millions of unrecorded police assaults or even mention that they are excluding them as a “cost” of policing), but we want to highlight the big one: more arrests are not the only social cost of 500,000 more armed cops!

It’s incredible to see an article published in a major academic journal about the “costs” of police that ignores the major negative public health impacts of policing, and the central role police have played for 150 years in preserving inequality and blocking investments in progressive social welfare.

The professors dismiss the concern that more cops would lead to more police violence by merely asserting the opposite. The professors “guess” (their word!) that adding more armed cops might actually “cause” there to be “less police violence,” which they inexplicably define only to include police homicides (and not stops, frisks, home raids, arrests, beatings, taserings, traffic stops, handcuffing, sexual assaults, etc.)

When trying to explain this “guess,” the reasons they give for more police reducing homicides are laughable, make no sense, ignore a field of scholarship on why police violence happens, and are unsupported by citation to any research whatsoever.

Indeed, eschewing the cherished academic norm of providing evidence for important assertions, the professors say that they are only offering “speculative reasons.” This kind of armchair “guess” has no place in an academic journal.

They do not account for research about how more cops leads to more trauma and inequality, which lead to non-homicide deaths in the short term and even, by their own admission because of the link to more inequality, more homicides in the long term.

(To take one of many examples, police violence has been shown to increase infant mortality in Black children and to “substantially decrease the birth weight and gestational age of black infants residing nearby”).

The American Public Health Association recently issued a statement that police violence is a major public health crisis that should be addressed by reducing our reliance on policing.

A primary function of police has been to protect private wealth and to surveil, infiltrate, and crush every major progressive social movement seeking to reduce social inequality since 1900. It’s why police infiltrated labor, civil rights, anti-war, and LGBTQ movements for decades. It’s why they now crush environmental, abortion, animal rights organizing, etc.

Take a look at a case that occurred at the beginning of the pandemic, when the New York Police Department, charged and arrested fruit and vegetable sellers seeking a $1 raise. They had been deemed essential workers, but couldn’t feed their own families.

Further, police are and have always been central to gentrification, redlining, evictions, immigration enforcement, civil forfeiture, depletion of wealth in poor communities, etc.. And they are preparing to play a central role in anti-abortion and anti-trans enforcement, as well as the enforcement of anti-democratic voter restriction laws.

Alec Karakatsanis

Ironically, although the Harvard professors claim to have reached this “500,000 more cops” idea as a last resort, they do not even bother to address the century of historical and social science research discussing how the expansion and militarization of the modern police is itself is one of the biggest barriers to the “egalitarian” society that they say they want and that they admit would reduce crime.

For example, even beyond expanding incarceration and surveillance, the police lobby has used enormous financial and political capital to push a fascist agenda: endorsing far-right politicians like Donald Trump and calling on them to increase border militarization, end DACA, support private prisons, and even roll back the Affordable Care Act, etc.

To take one of hundreds of examples, state and local police unions routinely support right wing extremist politicians like Marjorie Taylor Greene, Nicole Malliotakis, Elise Stafanik and almost every election-denier running for major office.

Far more ubiquitously and more subtly, police are a major organized force in local elections most people don’t pay attention to, such as judges, clerks, auditors, city council, county executives, etc. They are one of the main reactionary right-wing forces in local politics generally across all issue areas.

Police also spend huge sums of money from their budgets, private police foundations, and union dues manipulating public opinion by spreading misinformation. Nearly every major police department operates the largest PR operation in city government. The LA Sheriff alone has 42 full-time employees working in on PR. Chicago police have 48 full-time PR staff, a 1200% increase since before their murder of Laquan McDonald.

‘Concentrated Disadvantage’

This brings me to the strangest problem with the article. The professors claim to agree that the underlying causes of crime and violence are “concentrated disadvantage.”

The authors agree that the “root causes” of serious crime are the very inequality and distribution of social investments that cops protect. In this way, the article is not just pro-police but profoundly cynical and nonsensical.

They admit that inequality is the biggest factor causing crime, but they conclude that social investments to reduce inequality (like early childhood education) are “infeasible,” so they base their whole article (and forthcoming book project) on assuming it is impossible to make the world more equal.

 Weirdly, although they dismiss increased targeted investments in early childhood education for the poor as so “infeasible” that the infeasibility forms the basis of their scholarly collaboration, they seem to think that reducing the U.S. prison population by “two million” prisoners is somehow feasible.

They never explain how and, as noted above, they do not even notice the glaring problem: the very police interests they seek to make more powerful have been one of the key forces in higher prison populations.

Over email, they repeated a “pessimism about what kind of social policy alternatives to policing are feasible.”

And like many political elites before them for 100 years, they conclude that the answer to structural inequality is … more police. Of course 500,000 more cops to control poor people isn’t a surprising proposal if you start from the premise that social change and a more equal society aren’t possible!

This is just dangerous, de-politicizing nonsense dressed up as fancy scholarship.

Elite academia is awash in this stuff—keep in mind these are two elite professors at one of the most elite universities in the U.S. who include a paragraph where they celebrate their own article as “rigorous normative argument.”

Flawed Scholarship

Finally, against all this that they ignore, the real “core” of the article is a highly dubious empirical assertion that more police reduces “serious crime”—which they apparently define to exclude all white-collar crime, environmental crime, crime by police themselves, public corruption, etc.

At bottom, the article is really just arguing: police are so good at reducing what the authors call “serious crime” that we should have a lot more of them! If this claim is incorrect, all the other major conclusions of their article would be reversed.

To make this claim, the Harvard professors offer no original research.

The core thesis of the paper, on which every other key claim rests, is just a repeat of a highly controversial opinion of a different pro-police professor and propagandist, whose co-authored 2017 article on this point they cite in a single footnote.

They do not even bother to cite the contradictory research that has for several decades suggested that more police officers do not reduce crime (as police and the Harvard professors narrowly define that term).

Based on this thin, flawed research, they “guess” that adding 500,000 cops would lead to 4,000 fewer homicides. (They never explain why even that flawed research supports a linear relationship to homicides.) So, their ultimate normative claim is that dramatically increasing the power of the militarized police surveillance bureaucracy at a time of rising fascism is worth reducing U.S. homicides by less than 20 percent.

Despite all of the obvious omissions the authors confidently proclaim that the costs “pale in comparison to the benefits” and calling an alternative view on the costs of police “implausible on almost any accounting.”

There is a debate in criminology circles about the extent to which more police reduces the narrow category of behavior cops call “crime.” We have both written about most of this research and how bad it is.

But there is a small group of influential pro-police professors who argue that more police marginally reduces “crime.”

Other criminologists disagree. But to present this biased, contested, flimsy research (done mostly by people working with/for cops) as unassailable scientific consensus and then to base an entire article (and forthcoming book) on that claim without acknowledging that it is even disputed is unacceptable behavior by academics committed to the pursuit of truth.

The student editors of this journal should not have permitted these claims to be made without acknowledging the extent to which they are scientifically disputed.

This is the scholarly equivalent of citing one or two big-oil-funded climate change studies that contradict dozens of other independent studies and presenting the former as a scientific consensus while not mentioning the latter even exist. This kind of ethical judgment would be seen as outrageous in almost every other academic context.

All of these are not clerical errors. They are omissions and distortions that undermine the integrity of academic discourse.

‘Pro-Police’ Academia

 Many people know that the ticket to stardom in elite university spaces—the key to tenure and grants and institutes and chairs and fancy invitations—is to publish pro-police scholarship (and to serve power generally).

In criminology and the economic journals who publish criminology in particular, there are small groups of reviewers who control access to many of the major journals, and many well-meaning academics outside criminology aren’t aware of just how unserious much of modern criminology is.

But this article, which casually proposes the greatest expansion of the militarized police surveillance bureaucracy in modern Western history, is a moment of reckoning for well-meaning people in the academy

What standards of intellectual rigor should we expect from a “social scientist” and a “philosopher” at the highest levels of the academy? What role should intellectuals play on the precipice of fascism?

We are terrified about the role of professors like this in the normalization of the coming authoritarian moment, and of their role influencing journalists and others in elite liberal spaces, and of the role they play in shaping the kind of “conventional wisdom” that makes it into corporate media.

Professors like these are also de-politicizing a generation of students who could dream bigger and who could develop a far more sophisticated understanding of state violence and power, and they are modeling poor intellectual habits for a generation who we need to be so much more humble, accountable, critical, and accurate.

This essay is derived from a longer substack post.

Alec Karakatsanis is Executive Director of Civil Rights Corps and author of Unusual Cruelty: The Complicity of Lawyers in the Criminal Injustice System. Alex Vitale is Professor of Sociology at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center and author of The End of Policing. They welcome readers’ comments.