Charles Fain Lehman writes for the Washington Free Beacon about an interesting new analysis of American crime.
A few months ago, my work took me to Chattanooga, Tennessee. Chattanooga is a small city, population about 180,000, in the southeast of the state. Like the rest of the state, Chattanooga is by no means progressive. It didn’t have a “defund the police” movement or a progressive prosecutor. But even there (I learned, and some Manhattan Institute polling confirmed) there’s a widespread perception that crime is on the rise. …
… [T]he top line is that while Chattanooga—like many cities—had a violent crime problem, it’s mostly been brought under control. Facing a shrinking police staff, they focused their limited resources on bringing down violence using evidence-based strategies, and succeeded in doing so. But, I argue, they’ve done so at the expense of controlling disorder in the city—public homelessness, trash, drug-related violations, etc. This is what has prompted persistent unease even as crime has come down.
A similar pattern emerged in my recent report on crime in Washington, D.C. There, too, there are signs that disorder has risen, relative to both the pandemic and pre-pandemic, as the police have attended to it less. Unsheltered homelessness, unsanitary conditions, shoplifting, farebeating—all seem to have become more common in D.C. And those problems have come as a smaller police force has deprioritized order enforcement. … [A]rrests for minor crimes were down as much as 99% in 2023 relative to 2019.
I increasingly think this is a more general phenomenon. Disorder is not measured like crime—there is no system for aggregating measures of disorder across cities. But if you look for the signs, they are there. Retail theft, though hard to measure, has grown bad enough that major retailers now lock up their wares in many cities. The unsheltered homeless population has risen sharply.
