Bill Bratton in London: Time for a Reality Check

Bernard E. Harcourt

Great news from the LAPD: Violent crime in Los Angeles fell almost 10% for the first six months of 2011, with an 8% drop in homicides. Crimes tied to gangs fell by an astounding 16%. Serious crimes—including robberies, rapes, burglaries, and thefts—were down by about 8%. LAPD’s Bill Bratton must be doing a fabulous job. Oops! Bill Bratton’s not chief anymore! Not since October 2009. Well then, how can we explain those sharp drops in crime? And who is taking credit?

As you've heard, there’s been a lot of talk about Bill Bratton in London these days. Based on several statistical studies, I’ve written somewhat critically in the past about Bratton taking credit for crime drops both in the Los Angeles Times and in the New York Times, and elsewhere. So naturally I’ve been curious about the recent developments abroad. I decided to take a quick look at Bratton’s most recent record to see if there is anything new.

On Bratton’s LAPD experience, there is no serious statistical study regarding his effect on crime—with the exception of Ian Ayres’ thorough study documenting racial profiling by the LAPD under Bratton’s tenure in 2003 and 2004. (Some people think racial profiling should be a crime, in which case the only reliable statistical study suggests the Bratton effect was, sadly, positive).

All that is left in LA, then, are bald assertions based on raw crime rates. The raw crime data from LA are themselves inconclusive—and, as I will get to in a minute, cannot be relied on anyway.

On the raw data. Under Bratton’s tenure, from 2003 to 2009, homicides fell 36.2% from 10.5 to 6.7 per 100,000, and all violent crimes fell 37.6% from 842.7 to 526.0 per 100,000. That’s impressive, but hold on. A decade earlier, when the LAPD was essentially defunct, during the same six-year period, from 1993 to 1999, homicides fell 56.9% from 21.1 to 9.1 per 100,000, and all violent crime fell 47.4% from 1,673.6 to 880.9 per 100,000. That’s a lot higher rate! In other words, when the LAPD was staggering without any leadership and headed toward federal court receivership—navigating between the Rodney King beating in 1991 and the Rampart scandal in the late 1990s—crime was dropping at a faster rate than when Bratton was in charge ten years later!

Not only that, but it was dropping even faster in LA in certain respects than in New York City, where Bratton was in charge (at least from 1993 to 1996). As I showed here, a straight comparison of homicide and robbery rates between 1991 and 1998 reveals that, although New York City was a strong performer, with declines in homicide and robbery rates of 70.6 percent and 60.1 percent respectively, Los Angeles experienced a greater decline in its robbery rate (60.9 percent); in addition, San Diego experienced larger declines in homicide and robbery rates (76.4 percent and 62.6 percent respectively), Boston experienced a comparable decline in its homicide rate (69.3 percent), and San Antonio experienced a comparable decline in its robbery rate (59.1 percent). Other major cities also experienced impressive declines in their homicide and robbery rates, including Houston (61.3 percent and 48.5 percent respectively) and Dallas (52.4 percent and 50.7 percent respectively).

What does all this tell us?

First, there are independent reasons why big cities—our former "homicide capitals"—saw some of the sharper drops in crime. Jens Ludwig and I explain it in our article in 2006. We call it Newton’s Law of Crime: What goes up must come down (and what goes up the most tends to come down the most). Statisticians call this “reversion to the mean”—a slightly more technical term. But essentially, when you take into account the sharp rise in crime in particular neighborhoods (primarily due to the crack trade homicides and violence of the mid-1980s to early 1990s), the correlations between NYPD policing under Bratton (or probably LAPD policing without Bratton) and the sharp crime drops in the 1990s vanish.

In other words, second, it makes no sense to use raw crime data and draw inferences. Comparing raw rates of crime is a shell game.

Third, it’s preposterous for police officials to take credit for these kinds of massive crime drops when there have been larger national forces radically changing the penal landscape of the USA over the past two plus decades. Policing strategies are going to have marginal effects compared to the national level forces such as mass incarceration, drug-use trends, police force numbers, demographics, and societal and ideational changes—many of these are discussed elegantly by my colleague Steve Levit in this paper.

In the end, I’ve never truly understood how we came to believe that the Bratton years were a period of order-maintenance in the Big Apple. To be sure, crime decreased sharply, as it would to the present day two decades after Bratton’s departure. But complaints of police misconduct also rose sharply, as I document here. From 1993 to 1996, under Chief Bratton, allegations of police misconduct rose steadily by 68% and the number of complaints of police misconduct rose by 55%. Court filings against the police in civil rights claims for abusive conduct rose 75% from 1994 to 1998. And those rising allegation and complaint rates stick even when we hold constant a sharply increasing police force and increasing total adult arrest rates. Similarly, racial profiling was going strong under Chief Bratton in LA. So were those periods of order or disorderliness? I suppose the answer depends on which end of the stick you found yourself.

Posted 10:57 PM by Bernard E. Harcourt [link]