• Police staffing levels in North Carolina have declined significantly, especially in high-crime communities
  • That decline is unfortunate because increased police presence is an effective, efficient, and humane way to deter crime and promote public safety
  • To solve North Carolina’s crime problem, we must reverse the recent decline and increase the number of police officers available for deployment in high-crime communities

Note: This is the third in a series of research briefs about crime in North Carolina.

In part one of this series, I discussed how murder and other crimes spiked in North Carolina after 2018.

In today’s installment, I will discuss police staffing levels during that period and make the case for increased staffing levels in the future.

Police staffing levels fell between 2018 and 2022, even as the rates of murder and other crimes were spiking. At the end of the period, the number of police officers per 100,000 North Carolinians was 5 percent lower than it had been in 2018.

In part two of this series, I noted that crime rates vary significantly from one locality to another. As I pointed out, Cary and Fayetteville are comparably sized cities, but in 2022 there were 34 murders in Fayetteville and no murders at all in Cary. The disparity was even greater in 2021: That year, there were 47 murders in Fayetteville versus 4 in Cary.

Clearly, cities like Fayetteville needed all the police officers they could get during the recent crime spike. Unfortunately, the decline in police staffing levels also varied a lot from one locality to another — and not in a good way as far as Fayetteville was concerned. Despite its high rates of crime, Fayetteville had fewer police officers per capita than the state average in 2018, and by 2022, the ratio of police officers to population had declined by 16 percent, more than three times as much as in the state as a whole.

It is probably not a coincidence that the decline in police staffing levels in Fayetteville and across the state occurred when crime rates were rising. Research has consistently found that police presence deters criminal conduct. Summarizing a variety of studies published over the preceding decade and a half, a 2016 report released by the Obama administration concluded:

This research shows that police reduce crime on average, and estimates of the impact of a 10 percent increase in police hiring lead to a crime decrease of approximately 3 to 10 percent . . . .  [Research also indicates] that larger police forces do not reduce crime through simply arresting more people and increasing incapacitation, instead, investments in police are likely to make communities safer through deterring crime.

Additional studies published since 2016 have corroborated that finding. One of the best and most recent of these appeared in the American Economic Review in 2022. Unlike the previous studies, this one disaggregated its results by race. Summarizing their results, the authors said:

We find that expanding police personnel leads to reductions in serious crime. With respect to homicide, we find that every 10-17 officers hired abate one new homicide per year. In per capita terms the effects are approximately twice as large for Black victims. In short, larger police forces save lives and the lives saved are disproportionately Black lives.

The implication of all this research is clear. Any effective solution to North Carolina’s crime problem is going to require a lot more police officers. Ideally, it will take the form of what we at the John Locke Foundation call intensive community policing, i.e., the strategic deployment of large numbers of well-paid, well-trained, and well-managed police officers to act as peacekeepers in high-crime neighborhoods.

Among its many virtues, intensive community policing protects the lives and property of potential crime victims and improves the quality of life and the economic prospects for everyone who lives in what would otherwise be high-crime communities. It improves the life prospects of young men who would otherwise commit crimes. It reduces the cost of dealing with criminal offenders through the criminal justice and social welfare systems. Finally, by attracting better qualified applicants and reducing the need to retain or rehire bad actors, in the long run, intensive community policing should improve the level of professionalism among police officers and reduce the frequency of police misconduct. Benefits like these explain why intensive community policing has been found to be extremely cost-effective.

Although intensive community policing has the potential to be an effective, efficient, and humane solution to North Carolina’s crime problem, it will probably not be easy to implement. The up-front costs will be substantial, and while the long-term benefits will greatly exceed those costs, finding the money to cover them will present a challenge. Opposition by anti-police activists will almost certainly present another. In the fourth and final installment in this series, I will discuss how such challenges might be overcome.

For more information about this topic, see: