Progressive Policies Won t Stop the Crime Wave | City Journal
The evidence supports traditional approaches, even if Levitz pretends it doesn t. Numerous studies have causally linked policing with significant crime declines, including a study of municipal expenditures on policing that found reduced victim costs of $1.63 for each additional dollar spent on police in 2010, implying that U.S. cities are under-policed. Levitz tells readers that such analyses don t actually militate against his argument about how proper cost-benefit analyses shake out, because they fail to account for less visible social costs associated with law enforcement; but the same can be said about assessments of the toll that violence takes on communities which goes far beyond the property damage and costs associated with injuries sustained by the victims. Indeed, studies have documented that violence affects everything from mental health to academic performance.