Why Criminal Justice Reform Needs to Think Big

There are too many police officers in the US doing the wrong things. We need patient, tolerant, unbiased, hardheaded, softhearted cops. But we only need a few focused on disorder.

In the last several weeks, justice policy reform has rocketed onto the nation’s policy docket. This is a very welcome development, as anyone who has studied crime and justice can tell you that the first principle of justice reform is that the juvenile and criminal justice systems are rife with racial disparities. There is no need to reinvent that research here. At the Washington Post, Radley Balko has detailed the racial disparities that exist at every juncture of the criminal justice system. Mike Shor, an economics professor at the University of Connecticut, has a twitter thread that currently has over 700 academic papers detailing the various aspects of racial disparities in the system.  The evidence for racial disparities in the system is, I think, incontrovertible.

But though welcome, I have two worries about the current calls for policing reform, especially the legislative fixes that are tickling Congress and emerging in state capitols. First, the window for big reforms is short a…