Crime in the US is once again falling. Can we rethink policing?

Reports on 2023 in the United States are in, and a banner one is this: crime plummeted last year.

According to the New York Times, citing FBI data, Detroit recorded its lowest murder figures in roughly half a century; homicides and shootings in Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and most other major cities dropped precipitously; and car thefts were the only “serious” criminal category that didn’t see notable drop-offs over the course of the calendar year. In Minneapolis – which, after the police murder of George Floyd, became the epicenter in 2020 of the largest wave against racial injustice since the civil rights movement – homicides reportedly fell by 9% last year, gun violence by roughly a quarter, and carjackings by half.

This is, of course, good news.

To be frank, I’m skeptical (all of us should be) about the utility of crime statistics. They over-rely on police activity (what police reacted to) rather than victimization (what actually happened to people), meaning that those statistics often don’t reflect harms people experienced that they didn’t report to police (which is the majority of harms).

And, for decades, scholars have convincingly questioned the legitimacy of police-reported crime statistics, for many reasons. I’ve seen this in my own research: as I wrote about in my first book, changes to how police in Chicago catalogued crime in the early 1960s provoked an illusory but powerful panic about supposedly spiking crime.

Nevertheless, while crime statistics often lie, body counts usually do not, and at the minimum it’s pretty clear that fewer people were murdered in 2023 than in preceding years. Again, that’s a good thing.

The question is: why? In a nation overrun with weapons that for years has been lurching evermore