Edward Glaeser: prediction

Transcript context

…Why does it seem that urban crime has moved upward again? And, at least possibly, this seems to predate the pandemic. What’s our best model of that? Most of the changes in crime are very hard to explain with very much. I wrote a paper almost 30 years ago now, called “Crime and Social Interactions,” that goes back to observations that early 19th-century French social scientists made, basically that the existence of pure effects in crime means that you just get lots of variation that’s not very easy to explain. I think we shouldn’t also, though, forget that it’s possible that some of this has to do with changes in policing practices. The evidence on policing practices leading to the reduction in crime is actually pretty thin. Most of the people who dabble in this area believe that there’s an elasticity of crime with respect to the quantity of cops that seems pretty strong. That comes from just various quasi-experiments, like throwing more cops at the neighborhood seems to reduce crime, but the styles making a difference is much harder to tell. There’s a great paper by my colleagues, Roland Fryer and Tanaya Devi, that shows that after there were pattern-of-practice investigations of police forces that followed a viral incident of a police shooting, that crime rates spiked enormously, apparently, because police stopped going to high-crime areas when they came under investigation. I think that’s the kind of thing that would make me very worried about things like defund the police. While I think it’s absolutely true that we should demand that police treat every citizen with respect, and we should have metrics that keep them under account, and we should have a system of incentives for police chiefs to require this, we certainly can’t defund the police. In fact, in general, if we’re going to ask the police to both prevent crime and to behave more respectfully to everyone, that’s going to require more funding for the police, not less, because I don’t believe there’s a free lunch here, as I don’t believe there’s one anywhere else. Will NIMBY come to dominate the American Southeast? Is that the political equilibrium everywhere once you get enough development?…

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