My chat with NPR: “Six Republican governors sending National Guard troops to D.C.”

Recently, I spoke with National Public Radio’s (NPR) Meg Anderson about President Trump’s and various state governors’ move to deploy the National Guard in Washington, D.C.

Our conversation was long and her segment featured a brief comment about how we may see crime decrease in the short-term but likely not over the long-term. How to best address violent crime is a serious issue that needs serious interventions backed by rigorous evidence. There are already several that we know work:

• Improve police staffing and deployment. We need more police being used in the right ways, such as through problem-oriented policing and hot spots policing. This also means we need to identify things that civilian staff can do, especially with staffing difficulties.
• Improve investigations and solving crimes. Too many crimes go unsolved. We hover around 60% nationally for homicides and only go down from there – in the 40%s for violent crime and some property crime down to the low teens. This is about accountability and the evidence that swift and certain punishment is effective for deterring future crime. We can improve investigations through greater resources to investigative units and testing new technologies that can help make the right arrests.
• Focus upstream on preventive measures. We know programs like summer youth employment programs reduce recidivism and violent crime not just for the summer months but for 18 months for those young people involved. Focused programs like cognitive behavioral therapy (Choosing to Change, READI) also help reduce recidivism and homicides for high-risk individuals.

Crime is an emotional topic. It’s also an ideological and political topic. While this is anticipated and understandable, we need to make policy decisions based on what works, and when we try new things we must make sure to evaluate them and learn from them.

Finally, on the issue of the use of the armed forces for law enforcement, in 2012, I co-authored a paper examining the domestic/internal uses of armed forces across 15 western democracies. The paper presents a typography of different uses from both practice and law. As we noted, “since the end of the Cold War armed forces of Western nations have increasingly taken on “non‐ traditional” roles, both internationally in peace support operations and in the form of internal roles and tasks that have typically been assumed to be outside their design, purpose and jurisdiction.” Check the link for more!