Crime continues to be a problem in North Carolina, and the burden of crime isn’t evenly distributed. Instead, it falls most heavily on poor and black communities. The best way to reduce that burden would be to implement an approach to crime control that the John Locke Foundation has advocated for many years. We call it intensive community policing, and it consists of four elements:
- Hiring more police officers
- Paying them higher salaries
- Providing them with state-of-the-art training and support
- Deploying them to act as peacekeepers in high-crime, high-disorder neighborhoods
Unfortunately, the communities that need intensive community policing the most are generally the ones that can least afford it. For that reason, solving North Carolina’s crime problem will probably require supplemental police funding from the state.
