Chronic underinvestment in poor communities has contributed to high crime rates. Last week, we talked a little bit about the potential for reallocating some of the money in the police budget. This week, I’d like to talk about what that might look like.
Let’s start with how investment flows into communities. Businesses invest to chase money which grows with human capital. Human capital is most easily expanded via education, but education doesn’t work without buy-in. Buy-in, in turn, can only come with some degree of institutional trust. Dizzy yet? It may seem like we’re going in circles, but there’s a point here. If the government wants buy-in from the governed, it must show both good intentions and competence.
It sounds like a simple enough concept, but it turns out that creating trust is incredibly complex. As important as it is, it’s devilishly difficult to measure. As Justice Potter Stewart famously said, “I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description, and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.” Justice Stewart was referring to porn, but it applies about as well to institutional trust as it does to porn. There’s an aphorism that goes “what gets measured gets managed,” and we just cannot seem to measure it. We likely will not be able to collect any quantitative information on institutional trust, either, but that isn’t what we care most about, anyway. We want buy-in from the community, which can be measured in a number of different ways, and that serves as a good enough proxy as-is.
How, then, does this tie in to police budgets? Police are the primary touchpoint between the government and the communities we are talking about. They are effective at reducing some of the symptoms, but they cannot actually treat the disease. The police are hammers, but only a small portion of the community are nails. We need to buy a Phillips-head for the rest. When we show all of the members of a community that we distrust them (and it certainly must feel that way given the frequency with which they are accosted), they are unlikely to trust that the government cares about them. By placing more trust in individuals, we may miss the occasional petty crime, but we strengthen the relationship between the community and the government, which will reduce crime in the long run.
Let me show you what I mean with a couple examples. The first is Norway. A 1980s change in prison policy away from focusing on punishment and towards rehabilitation halved recidivism rates (rates at which released prisoners are convicted of new crimes). They established trust with prisoners, and the prisoners rewarded them. Another example may seem less relevant, but I promise I’ll get to the point. A recent experiment on Swarthmore minority economics students found a 20% rise in course completion for those sent an email showcasing the diversity of ideas and researchers in the field of economics (One email! That’s it!). The result is stunning for such a small treatment. The point? If we show (not tell) people a path to becoming something more than they thought they could be, they are much more likely to believe themselves capable and thus take that path. Seeing success breeds more success, and that, in turn, will lower the number of people that feel they need to turn to crime to gain agency over their lives. The only thing that makes that possible is trust.