Freedomnomics: Why the Free Market Works and Other Half-Baked Theories Don't (19 page)

Louisiana provides a particularly instructive example. There, the Police Department discarded entrance exams in response to a lawsuit
filed by the Department of Justice. The objections were that 66 percent of whites passed the test compared to just 25 percent of African Americans, and that the test did not relate to the abilities required for the job. The lawsuit was weak, failing even to explain what parts of the test were unrelated to the job. Moreover, a federal judge had previously ruled that the test did not discriminate against minority applicants to the police and fire departments in another city. Nevertheless, rather than incur the cost of litigation, the Louisiana State Police dropped the test and agreed to pay $1 million to African Americans who had failed the exam. The department even vowed to hire eighteen new officers from among this group
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In some cities, such changes have resulted in myriad problems caused by a less-educated police force. For example, between 1986 and 1990, 311 of the 938 murder cases that the Washington, D.C. police brought to the U.S. attorney’s office were dismissed. One local prosecutor commented that “many D.C. cases were thrown out because prosecutors couldn’t read or understand the arrest reports [written by the police].” The officers simply lacked the ability to write comprehensible English.

But lower standards do not guarantee the desired pass rates among all races. In Chicago, the city paid $5.1 million for consultants to develop “unbiased” exams, only to have unacceptable numbers of minorities once again fail the tests. The city then moved to a heavily weighted seniority system for promoting police officers and a lottery system for hiring firefighters in order to ensure the correct racial composition of new classes of recruits.
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The second method for implementing affirmative action programs in police departments is “norming.” This assigns different standards to different groups of candidates in order to ensure similar pass rates. Norming is frequently used for female recruits, both to the police and to the military. For example, in the military, women are required to run two miles in eighteen minutes and fifty-four seconds, while men have sixteen minutes to run the same distance. Women have two minutes
to do eighteen push-ups and two minutes for fifty sit-ups, while men must do forty-two push-ups and fifty-two sit-ups within the same time.
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Norming inevitably leads to the hiring of women who are, on average, physically weaker than men. Physical strength testing of public safety employees consistently finds large differences between men and women; women’s upper body strength ranges from 44 to 68 percent of men’s, while their lower body strength is typically 55 to 82 percent of men’s.
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Weaker officers face some obvious disadvantages: it is more difficult for them to chase and catch fleeing suspects or to control a resisting suspect without resorting to a weapon. Furthermore, an influx of weaker officers can affect police procedures. For example, police departments come under pressure to end patrols by single officers, as well as to reduce foot and bicycle patrols in favor of car patrols.

The risk inherent in hiring weaker officers is demonstrated by the case of Brian Nichols, a thirty-three-year-old, 196-pound rape defendant. In an Atlanta courthouse, Nichols overpowered his guard, seized her gun, and used it to kill a judge, a court reporter, a police officer, and a federal agent. Nichols’ guard, a sheriff’s deputy, was a five-foot-two, fifty-one-year-old woman. “Why was a tiny woman, or any woman, given such a job?” asked Mary Ellen Synon, a columnist for the
Mail on Sunday
. “Because the Atlanta police force, like many others in America, has been subjected for years to government demands for ‘gender and minority’ balance; changing hiring rules and lowering standards so more women and people from ethnic minorities can join up.”
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Are such occurrences merely isolated instances, or do they speak to a larger problem created by affirmative action policies? To answer this question, I gathered statistics to analyze how changes in hiring rules and the demographic composition of police departments affect crime, arrest, and conviction rates.
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I included detailed demographic, income, and socio-economic information to help explain changes in crime and arrest rates. I also considered related factors such as illegal drug prices, gun laws, and various policing policies.

The results were dramatic: crime rates jumped in cities using affirmative action policies that lowered testing standards. Interestingly, however, the use of norming had much less harmful results.

The implementation of consent decrees—agreements by local police departments to use affirmative action in hiring and promotions—increases the rate of murder, other violent crimes, and property crimes. Overall, using affirmative action to achieve a one percentage point increase in African American officers on the force is associated with an increase in murders of at least 2 percent, violent crime of almost 5 percent, and property crimes of 4 percent.
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But it is misleading simply to compare increases in African American officers with crime rates. When testing standards are lowered, the increase in the percentage of African American officers is
associated
with more crime, not the
cause
of it. The problem is not the presence of more African American officers per se, but rather the quality of all officers in departments that implement these methods. Most of the increased crime cannot even be attributed to more unqualified African American officers, but rather to the hiring of unqualified officers of all races. This is because the replacement of intelligence exams with psychological tests makes it more difficult to separate out high and low-quality white, Asian, and other recruits just as it does with African American ones.

The reduction in strength standards for female recruits, in contrast, has had only a small detrimental effect.
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This is likely because these standards are typically lowered through norming; in other words, the standards are lowered for women but not for men. Strength standards for men can even be increased when the hiring of more women creates more competition among male recruits for the declining number of jobs available to them.

However, my study also found that lowered strength standards made female officers more vulnerable to assault and less able to control resisting suspects by themselves. This puts pressure on police departments to shift away from one-officer to two-officer patrol units as well as to reduce the number of walking and bicycle patrols.

To compensate for physical weakness, women may resort to other means of controlling criminals, in particular by using guns.
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Guns are a “great equalizer,” but they don’t completely offset strength differences. Being less able to rely on physical strength to defend themselves from an attack, female officers have less time to decide whether to shoot a threatening suspect. This explains the sharp increase in accidental police shootings that typically follow the lowering of strength standards and the hiring of more female officers.
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Ironically, affirmative action consent decrees cause the biggest spikes in crime in poor African American neighborhoods—places already plagued by terrible crime. Lowering the effectiveness of the police force in such communities, as affirmative action policies do, clearly harms these struggling areas. If we want a more diverse police force, we should seek better ways of achieving it. Simply abandoning intelligence testing is not a beneficial approach.

If abortion and affirmative action policies actually increased crime, then what caused the huge fall in crime in the 1990s? Although it would be nice and neat if we could identify a single element as
the
solution, the truth is that numerous factors combined to drive down crime. One of the most important of these was the Supreme Court’s 1976 decision to rescind the ban on the death penalty. Three-quarters of the states soon re-imposed the death penalty, though it wasn’t until the early 1990s that significant numbers of executions began occurring again.

Capital punishment clearly increases the risk to criminals of engaging in various crimes, especially murder. Does this increased risk affect criminals’ behavior? Before trying to answer this question, let’s first consider how another group that faces similar dangers reacts to the risk of death.

Academics classify being a police officer as an “extremely dangerous” job.
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In 2005, fifty-five police officers were murdered on the job, while another sixty-seven were accidentally killed.
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With nearly 700,000 full-time, sworn law enforcement officers in the United States, the murder rate of police officers comes to one in 12,500,
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a ratio that jumps to one in 5,600 when we include accidental deaths.

Although the risks of policing cannot be eliminated, police officers undertake a variety of measures to reduce the dangers: they wear bullet-proof vests, develop special procedures for approaching stopped cars, and in some situations officers wait for backup even when this increases the probability that a suspect will escape.

Officers undertake all these measures as a natural human reaction to the risk of death—the riskier an activity, the more a person will usually avoid it or take steps to make the activity safer. This rule applies to violent criminals just like anyone else. And the risk that a violent criminal faces from execution is much greater than the risk of a police officer being killed. In 2005, there were almost 16,700 murders in the United States and sixty executions.
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That translates to one execution for every 278 murders. In other words, a murderer is twenty times more likely to be executed than a police officer is to be deliberately or accidentally killed on duty.
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Those who argue that the death penalty has no effect on violent crime assume that the risk of execution in no way deters criminals from committing capital crimes. “It is hard to believe that fear of execution would be a driving force in a rational criminal’s calculus in modern America,” writes Steven Levitt.
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While criminals, just like police officers, are naturally less adverse to danger than, say, school teachers or accountants, the notion that it is irrational for them to take into account such an enormous additional risk runs contrary to human nature.
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There is widespread public debate over the effectiveness of the death penalty. Sadly, this has included some misleading reporting in the popular press. Take a widely publicized
New York Times
study that compared
murder rates in 1998 in states with and without the death penalty.
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The
Times
concluded that capital punishment was ineffective in reducing crime, noting that “10 of the 12 states without capital punishment have homicide rates below the national average . . . while half the states with the death penalty have homicide rates above the national average.”

This simple comparison really doesn’t prove anything. The twelve states without the death penalty have long enjoyed relatively low murder rates due to factors unrelated to capital punishment.
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When the death penalty was suspended nationwide from 1968 to 1976, the murder rate in these twelve states was still lower than in most other states. What is much more important is that the states that reinstituted the death penalty had about a 38 percent larger drop in murder rates by 1998.
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There were no executions in the United States between 1968 and 1976, a time when murder rates skyrocketed.
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Various theories were put forward in the 1970s to explain the jump in violent crime. Some claimed that the Supreme Court’s Miranda decision—mandating that suspects be read their rights during arrest—reduced criminal confessions and otherwise hindered convictions. Others blamed softer criminal penalties or lower arrest rates.
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Back in the 1970s these studies were generally inconclusive, however, due to the lack of data available at the time.
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Economists began to study the death penalty intently after its re-imposition in 1976. Isaac Ehrlich, then a young assistant professor at the University of Chicago, conducted path-breaking research showing that each execution deterred as many as twenty to twenty-four murders.
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His findings, however, were anathema in liberal academia. His conclusions were roundly condemned, and Ehrlich was denied tenure at the University of Chicago. He even became too controversial to find work at most universities. However, his contentious findings sparked a good deal of new research into the effectiveness of capital punishment, including a special panel convened by the National Academy of Sciences. The panel came to the curious conclusion that greater penalties generally fail to deter criminals.
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