I’m deeply cynical about social service programs reducing crime. First need is for defining how each program purportedly achieves its goals, and then accountability based upon measurable results. Too much in social services is kumbaiyah, as in educational policies. Billions in increases, nothing in achievement.
Someone interested in this topic might take a look at the State Police. State cops are often better educated, better trained and better paid than their town and city colleagues.
But while it is true in a number of states that State Police do criminal investigations, by and large our best and our brightest officers are traffic cops.
Is this a wise use of our resources? Issuing more speeding tickets is unlikely to bring the crime rate down. But that’s what State Policemen do for a living. Go figure.
Re: "macrocriminology." If Tip O'Neil was a criminologist, he would stuck to his view that "all crime is local." Recent research on crime control by police strongly supports this, with a conclusion that "small is beautiful" and that carefully tailored tactics tagerting very small local areas are the most effective police response to crime. Scaling this up as a policy-driven strategy to the macro level is very hard! There is no cut-and-paste policy recommendation, just an injunction to do things differently that are hard and have not been done here in the past. I'm conceding that corrections should be amenable to scaling up to macro level (btw, this means states), but prosecution is so hopelessly linked to local politics and voters that it would be difficult to make this fly. The emergence of new data sources like the Real Time Crime initiative, promise (note) we may be able to do better understanding crime patterns at the macro scale, but responding to the findings is a problem. Canada has a better political model here, as does the UK.
I’m deeply cynical about social service programs reducing crime. First need is for defining how each program purportedly achieves its goals, and then accountability based upon measurable results. Too much in social services is kumbaiyah, as in educational policies. Billions in increases, nothing in achievement.
Someone interested in this topic might take a look at the State Police. State cops are often better educated, better trained and better paid than their town and city colleagues.
But while it is true in a number of states that State Police do criminal investigations, by and large our best and our brightest officers are traffic cops.
Is this a wise use of our resources? Issuing more speeding tickets is unlikely to bring the crime rate down. But that’s what State Policemen do for a living. Go figure.
Re: "macrocriminology." If Tip O'Neil was a criminologist, he would stuck to his view that "all crime is local." Recent research on crime control by police strongly supports this, with a conclusion that "small is beautiful" and that carefully tailored tactics tagerting very small local areas are the most effective police response to crime. Scaling this up as a policy-driven strategy to the macro level is very hard! There is no cut-and-paste policy recommendation, just an injunction to do things differently that are hard and have not been done here in the past. I'm conceding that corrections should be amenable to scaling up to macro level (btw, this means states), but prosecution is so hopelessly linked to local politics and voters that it would be difficult to make this fly. The emergence of new data sources like the Real Time Crime initiative, promise (note) we may be able to do better understanding crime patterns at the macro scale, but responding to the findings is a problem. Canada has a better political model here, as does the UK.