“Crime” Is Meaningless
By: Davin Hall
Tags: Crime, Defundthepolice, Police, Policing

“Crime” Is Meaningless

Photo by Emiliano Bar on Unsplash

There is still a lot of noise about whether it’s okay to use the phrase “defund the police.” Polling on the issue seems to depend on how the question is phrased. Only 26% support defunding the police. But 47% support reducing police funding and shifting the money to social programs. (These functionally mean the same thing.)

This is an ongoing and controversial idea, so support will also vary based on when the question is asked. A few years ago, I imagine defunding would have had a great deal less support than it does today. Public perception does shift, and so it is important to keep pressing the message.

The reason this is important is because defunding police departments can have a lasting and positive impact on the country.

Why in the world is that the case? Why is it a good idea to take money away from the people who fight crime? Won’t that lead to more crime?

From a public that has been told over and over again that the police are the only thing that stands between them and being raped and murdered, these are perfectly reasonable questions. It makes sense that people would think that reducing police power would mean an increase in crime. The main problem is that the public has been grossly misinformed about what the police do, and about what crime really means.

We need to dramatically rethink our conceptions of crime and the police.

Let’s start with crime. And we’re already in trouble, because the word itself is functionally pointless on its own.

There is no tangible “crime” that exists anywhere in the universe. A crime isn’t a thing you can run into. Instead, the word “crime” is an umbrella term we use to describe a vast (VAST) array of human behavior that we have determined is against a set of laws (perhaps formally, perhaps not).

Criminal behavior is also a very rare type of human behavior. It’s unusual for people to engage in it. “High crime” areas are relative. In “high crime” neighborhoods, almost all of the human behavior that takes place is not criminal. Almost all the people in “high crime” neighborhoods are not victims of crime.

Paradoxically, although criminal behavior is extremely rare, almost everybody is a criminal. The range of behaviors that can be labelled criminal is so broad that it’s almost impossible to avoid committing a crime at some point in your life. (I myself am a chronic jay-walker.)

There are a whole lot of weeds here, and it is easy to get lost in them. A crime in one jurisdiction isn’t a crime somewhere else. An infraction is not a criminal offense, so is it really a crime? Can there be a crime without laws? And so on.

Getting away from that for a moment, the main takeaway here is that the word “crime” is applied to so many different kinds of behaviors and depends on so many externalities (e.g. interpretations, legal codes) that it is basically useless in terms of setting policy.

You want to reduce crime? Great. That really doesn’t mean anything.

Even if you break the word “crime” down into very specific categories (e.g. homicide), you’re still dealing with an unthinkable number of variables. A single instance of crime is filled with chaotic outcomes to situations that were days, months, years, and decades in the making, and that policing can only barely touch on.

It is absurd to expect the police to be able to effectively control these kinds of behaviors. It’s not a knock against them. They are simply not equipped for it.

Policing CAN have an impact. There are policing strategies that are more effective at controlling certain types of crime than other strategies. The police don’t do nothing. But their effectiveness will always be severely limited, and it often comes at great cost, both in terms of dollars and unintended consequences.

Apart from the effects of police on “crime,” is the problem of what we have defined as crime in the first place. At some point fairly soon, marijuana will probably be legalized throughout the whole USA. I hope that decriminalization of other drugs will follow. My hope isn’t because I’m an avid substance user (I have literally never been high or even drunk). It’s because a lot of the behavior of drug use doesn’t cause significant harm, and because there are much better approaches to addressing the harm that drugs do cause.

Sometimes we label behavior as criminal even when it does little harm, and sometimes we ignore (or treat with much less severity) behaviors that cause untold amounts of harm. You’re more likely to have your employer pick your pocket than get robbed on the street. You’re more likely to be physically harmed by a company than a passerby. But your legal recourse is drastically more difficult in both of those situations.

Why have we decided what types of behavior are crimes that police need to respond to? It’s a blend of reasons, but the outcome is that today we have police focus on a very narrow subset of human behavior that is only loosely related to public safety (and just so happens to disproportionately involve minority communities).

When you start to consider just how vague the term “crime” is, and how much it really covers, it becomes ridiculous to think that the police are the only ones who can do anything about it.

But that’s what we’ve done. We have told ourselves (and the police) that the police are responsible for crime (or, rather, a very specific subset of crimes that we have irrationally determined to be the most important). When crime (however we define it) goes up, we say that they aren’t doing enough to keep us safe. When crime goes down, we praise them for implementing whatever the last policy they happened to implement was.

This is wrong. It is unsafe and it is unfair. It’s unfair to the police, who are getting blamed for things that they honestly have very little to do with. It’s unfair to the public, because we’re not putting resources into programs that could effectively increase public safety.

Most crime isn’t even reported to the police. Forget about property crime, the majority of violent crime isn’t reported to the police. The solutions to “crime,” that is to say, the solutions to public safety and reducing harm do not lie primarily with the police.

We have to stop thinking of police as the answer to crime. We have to be more aware of what crime really is, and what we want to define as criminal. We have to ask ourselves how we want public safety to look, and how do we get there.

Defunding the police is not the answer by itself. But it’s how we can move toward the goal of reducing harm in communities.