And the way that we process that is we basically say, well, look, this person’s doing something that we all agree is antisocial behavior. And they’re doing it with seemingly no real worry that there are going to be any repercussions.And what that signals to me is that nobody’s in charge in this public space.

The crime, I think, that tends to inform a lot of public fear is the kind of stranger violent crime, things like a random sexual assault on the subway, being held up at gunpoint in a robbery.

The January 6 commission is a really good example because the people so far punished for that crime are the people who committed the low-level violent offenses of trespassing and disorderly conduct and so forth.

not all crimes are created equal and we don’t think about crimes in the same way. So, Alex, when you’re talking about crime, what do you mean?

I mean, they just cut millions of dollars from the school budget in New York and kept the N.Y.P.D. funding basically stable.

She said the eventual goal was to close that gap and create a system where someone like Alicia, who might have been arrested for fighting or shoplifting, could get shelter, cash and an identification card immediately.

One set of watching eyes belongs to Almond, 47, a former gang member who spent more than 13 years in prison for a bank robbery. He returned to Brownsville in 2014 and got a tattoo of a smoking gun behind his right ear to hide a small scar left from a bullet wound. His past, along with his calm, straightforward approach, helps him navigate conflicts. During one Safety Alliance week, he persuaded a man going into a bodega with a gun to give him his weapon and go home. The next day, that same man returned, but this time to volunteer.

But the Safety Alliance has been thriving amid a positive trend in the 73rd Precinct, Gonzalez said. In the first half of this year, homicides fell 50%, shootings fell 25% and the rate of grand larcenies of automobiles also fell even as it rose in other neighborhoods, he said.

The group has estimated that almost 40% of calls to police could be handled by community responders.

The Brownsville initiative is part of a movement called the “community responder model,” which aims to reduce the use of armed officers to handle many calls.

Not everyone is convinced. Lise Perez, owner of Clara’s Beauty Salon on Pitkin Avenue, has 26 cameras around her store and works behind a counter protected by a thick plastic partition. No one can get in or out without her pressing a button. “In this area, nobody feels too safe,” she said. “We’re all here surviving.” The idea of five days in which police refer 911 calls unsettles her. “It’s like they left us without protection,” she said. “It doesn’t give me peace.”

“Members of the community see themselves in Bigga,” said Jeffrey Coots, director of the From Punishment to Public Health initiative at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

Residents had complained that officers had become aggressive, grabbing men off the street to arrest them for minor offenses.

They are meant to modulate the use of officially sanctioned force, using a neighborhood’s innate desire for order as a tool.

agencies offering services such as free child care and addiction recovery sit at folding tables,

They are part of the Brownsville Safety Alliance, a group of neighborhood and city groups, police officers and members of the Kings County District Attorney’s office that is trying to ensure that fewer people are arrested and entangled in the criminal justice system.

Police channel all 911 calls from that area to the civilians. Unless there is a major incident or a victim demands an arrest, officers, always in plainclothes, shadow the workers.

The brief encounter encapsulated a simple yet unorthodox concept that is at the heart of a bold experiment organizers believe could redefine law-enforcement in New York: letting neighbors, not the police, respond to low-level street crime.

Madden, along with Democratic state Sen. John Whitmire, persuaded colleagues it would be a better investment to spend roughly half that amount, or $241 million, on treatment, mental health and rehabilitation instead.55

Tough sentencing laws and efforts to crack down on drug-related crimes caused prison populations to soar and prompted a scramble by states to spend billions to build more correctional facilities. Many, such as the Nebraska State Penitentiary, seen here in 2020, faced orders to reduce overcrowding.

One 1997 study found that Black men faced a 1 in 4 chance of going to prison at some point in their lives, compared with less than 1 in 6 among Hispanics and 1 in 23 among white men. “For certain men — Black men without a high school degree — imprisonment is modal in statistical terms,” wrote Tracey Meares, a Yale University law professor. “In everyday language, it is normal.”51

Many Americans became concerned about the financial and societal costs of mass incarceration. The media frequently reported that the United States had at times the highest incarceration rate in the world — 5 percent of the global population, but 25 percent of the world's prison population.50

The New York Police Department pursued an aggressive “stop and frisk” policy, in which officers stopped pedestrians with minimal pretexts to search them for weapons or illegal possessions. As a result, the number of police encounters rose from 97,296 in 2002 to 685,724 in 2011, with 87 percent of them involving Black and Latino citizens. Of those stops, 12 percent resulted in convictions. The policy was ruled unconstitutional in 2013 by a federal judge

As president, Clinton signed a massive crime bill in 1994 that, among other things, directed funding to localities so they could put 100,000 new cops on the streets and made 60 additional crimes punishable by the death penalty. The bill also stiffened federal sentences and encouraged local police to make more drug arrests. Its lead sponsor in the Senate was Biden, then a senator from Delaware.45

“We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war [in Vietnam] or Black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and Blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities,” Ehrlichman said. “Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

“Negro socio-economic revolution syndrome,”

African Americans were frequently imprisoned for newly minted offenses such as breaking curfew or loitering in the Jim Crow South.34

Incarceration, meanwhile, was reserved for white citizens, while the white majority in turn viewed enslaved Black people as lacking souls that could be improved through such punishment. Instead, enslaved people accused of criminal violations were tortured, mutilated or killed, with few escaping the whip.33

Del Pozo adds that police have facilities and communications capabilities spread throughout every city — something social service agencies lack. Having those agencies collaborate closely with police would be beneficial, he says, but too often their work is framed politically as a corrective to police abuses.

“There's selection bias in a lot of these analyses,” he says. “You assiduously pick calls for service that have no indication for violence and say we never needed the police for those. You're leaving out the calls where there's a threat of violence or uncertainty.”

Critics of the alternative safety approach also note that most of the local efforts are new and generally small-scale. There is not yet evidence that these programs have prevented situations from turning violent if police had been involved, says del Pozo, a former Burlington police chief.

Police chiefs generally do not object to assistance from professionals in other fields, but they warn against cutting officers out of the equation entirely. When an emergency call comes in, it is often difficult to determine over the phone whether a situation has the potential to turn violent. “If you talk to officers, some of the most dangerous situations involve mental health and domestic disputes,” says Heritage's Smith. “In some instances, it can be very dangerous, not only for community members, but the professionals on the street.”

In 2020, for example, Walter Wallace Jr., a Black man armed with a knife, was fatally shot by two Philadelphia police officers. Wallace had a history of mental illness and received mental health treatment days earlier. Last year, the city paid his family $2.5 million to settle a wrongful death suit.27

The other purported advantage is that limiting interactions with uniformed personnel reduces the chances for encounters to turn deadly.

“We're not asking police officers to become psychiatrists, psychologists and therapists — we can get those who are experts in those areas to address those issues. When mental and behavioral health is needed, we now have another vehicle that we can use.”

One is that police, as generalists, are not trained to respond to every type of domestic or mental health crisis. Having others carry part of the load should free officers up to respond when and where they are really needed, such as violent situations, Travis says.

“If you look at what's coming out of the White House, Joe Biden is saying fund the police, but he's also saying fund community-based violence prevention programs,” Turner says. “New York, Los Angeles, Minneapolis and Washington have all used [federal] funds to invest in community violence prevention programs.”

More than 30 years ago, Eugene, Ore., created a crisis intervention program, known as Crisis Assistance Helping Out On The Streets (CAHOOTS), to have mental health professionals respond instead of police to some emergency calls. Many cities have launched similar programs over the past couple of years, including Albuquerque, N.M., Austin, Texas, Indianapolis, Oakland and St. Louis.

“It's a significant change to the way we think about emergency response,”

“STAR is an example of a program that has worked for those it has had contact with,” said Denver City Council member Robin Kniech. “It is minimizing unnecessary arrests and unnecessary costs — whether that be jail costs or emergency room costs. It has done so for less than 1 percent of the calls coming into the city that it might be eligible for.”25

What began as a $200,000 pilot program now has a nearly $4 million budget, with a planned expansion to six vans

The program, known as Support Team Assisted Response, or STAR, began with a two-person team traveling the city in a white van. They have responded to 2,700 calls without once requiring police backup.

“I use the examples of Lubbock, Texas, and Anchorage, Alaska, as two places where crime has gone up, and there's no progressive prosecutor and there's no bail reform,” says Vera's Turner. “It's really an attempt by opponents of reform to leverage the increase in crime and the fear that has generated and to blame the wrong thing.”

Crime has also shot up in cities that are home to prosecutors who take a more traditional tough-on-crime approach,

Murders are actually more prevalent in states where the majority voted for Donald Trump than in those that supported Joe Biden in 2020. A report from the center-left think tank Third Way found that Trump states had a 40 percent higher per capita murder rate in 2020 than Biden states.21

Counties that include Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Denver and Philadelphia, among others, have elected prosecutors who have pledged new policies, such as not pursuing the death penalty or not prosecuting low-level drug offenses.

Like other cities, San Francisco has seen crime rates go up. The number of murders has increased over the past couple of years, although not as dramatically as some other major U.S. cities. San Francisco has also suffered from large numbers of auto thefts and high-profile incidents of vandalism and retail theft.16

“Communities became less trusting, and there was less cooperation with police, while the police who feared being the next person caught on video doing something wrong pulled back from communities,”

The pandemic not only increased isolation and stress but led to the closure of numerous support systems — everything from social services and drug treatment programs to churches and schools. “The guardrails there have been on behavior have somehow started to fall away,” he says.

In addition, numerous states released thousands of prisoners early, in hopes of relieving prison overcrowding and the spread of COVID-19.15

Having officers out sick and isolated, lessening the number of officers on duty, and trying to maintain social distancing obviously reduced their effectiveness,

“Not only have the police been defunded in some places, they've been demonized and face a more difficult environment to do their jobs,” Smith says. “There's a problem of recruiting and retention right now. I think it's a cop-out, no pun intended, to blame COVID for the problems we've seen.”

Although Rosenfeld agrees that the pandemic contributed to the spike in homicides, he says the number of killings really began to rise not at the start of the pandemic in March 2020, but just after Floyd's murder on May 25, 2020, which triggered the nationwide protests. “There's at least a relationship in time between the abrupt rise in violence and the police protests that we saw throughout the summer,” he says.

“This is not to take away from anyone's constitutional rights, but when you have an increase in guns in society, we're just going to have greater chances for gun-related violence to take place.”

The explosion of gun ownership during the pandemic has not helped matters. Americans bought 4.3 million more guns than usual during the first five months of the pandemic alone, according to a study from the University of California, Davis. The American Medical Association found that there was a 28.4 percent increase in firearm-related deaths, and a 34.3 percent increase in nonfatal gunshot injuries during the first year of the pandemic.14

“It led to the closing of services and the support systems that are often a bulwark against criminal activity, whether it's after-school programs or violence prevention programs.”

“It's not that the whole society fell apart,” he says, “It's just that there are enough people who were already living on the edge, and this pushed them off of it.”

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, numerous social indicators have moved in the wrong direction. Suicides, drug overdoses and traffic fatalities have all increased, while school enrollment has plummeted. Many criminologists also believe the pandemic drove up some categories of crime.

other community programs such as having civilians do some of the work now handled by police.

persuading his colleagues on the city's Common Council to accept federal funding to hire 26 more police officers — money that had initially been rejected in the aftermath of Floyd's murder

While Republicans sense a great advantage in returning to tough-on-crime messages that have worked in the past, the country is not in the same place that it was during the 1980s and 1990s, Gelb says.

But many Democratic leaders are convinced that the slogan hurt the party in 2020 and could do worse damage this year. “We should all agree: The answer is not to defund the police,” Biden said during his State of the Union address in March. “The answer is to fund the police … with the resources and training they need to protect our communities.”9

Democrats this year are worried about being seen as soft on crime. Following Floyd's murder, a number of Democrats responded by pushing policies such as eliminating cash bail and limiting the use of force by police.

Although many experts point to the COVID-19 pandemic as a major driver of the recent crime hike, many Republicans blame changes in policing and prosecution that have been pushed by Democrats in response to the Black Lives Matter protests that swept the country following Floyd's death.

“For the first time ever, gun violence was the top cause of death for children in 2020,”

At the same time, distrust between police and these communities has grown, due in part to high-profile events such as the 2020 killings of African Americans George Floyd and Breonna Taylor by police officers in Minneapolis and Louisville, Ky.

Low-income communities of color in cities, however, are experiencing disproportionate numbers of killings

The U.S. homicide rate increased by 30 percent in 2020 — the biggest single-year increase in more than a century — and continued to rise in 2021. In fact, 12 major U.S. cities hit their all-time highest number of homicides in 2021, including Rochester, N.Y., Baton Rouge, La., and Tucson, Ariz.3

There were 197 homicides in Milwaukee last year, and the city is already on track to surpass that number this year.

People demonstrate in Los Angeles in 2020 after a Kentucky grand jury decided not to charge a Louisville police officer in the shooting death of African American Breonna Taylor. Her death and that of George Floyd in Minneapolis sparked nationwide protests and calls to cut police funding, although most police budgets have remained stable or even increased.

In the United States in 2022, mass shootings — generally defined as four or more people being shot or killed — are a more than daily occurrence

Crime rates have spiked since 2020, with some blaming the pandemic and others calling out city prosecutors for not being tough enough.

slogans such as “defund the police” have become politically toxic, many major cities continue to explore ways of having some police functions be handled by others — even as they increase police funding.

rates of homicide and other violent crimes in the United States have increased to levels not seen in many years. The causes of the increase are unclear; some argue that COVID-19 exacerbated long-standing societal problems and hampered police, while others say the advent of progressive prosecutors in several cities has allowed crime to rise. Whatever the causes, the increase in crime has led many politicians once again to take a tough-on-crime approach. This, in turn, has led some observers to worry that policies adopted in recent years to reduce prison populations and help formerly incarcerated people avoid reoffending could be in jeopardy.