“Violent Crime and Public Prosecution: A Review of Recent Data on Homicide, Robbery, and Progressive Prosecution in the United States”

The title of this post is the title of this notable new study looking at relationships between prosecutorial policies and crime. The full study is apparently not yet available, but this executive summary provides lots of details and also has this extended abstract:

What caused the sharp increase in homicide in dozens of major cities in the United States in 2020 is the source of acrid debate.  Most academic researchers have attributed the sudden increase in homicide to changes in the availability of guns, shifts in policing, and the pandemic’s aggravation of chronic strains in civil society such as homelessness, ill mental health, and drug abuse.  Others have hypothesized that the increase in homicide is the result of the election of prosecutors whose pledges to reform the system of criminal justice have discouraged the police from stopping and arresting emboldened lawbreakers.

We examined the most timely, reliable, and comprehensive set of data on homicide and robbery that was publicly available in the summer of 2022.  We took three different approaches to the analysis of these data: we pooled data from 65 major cities, conducted a statistical regression analysis of trends in violent crime as well as larceny in two dozen cities, and compared the incidence of homicide before and after the election of progressive prosecutors in Philadelphia, Chicago, and Los Angeles, cities where we are conducting on-going research on changes in criminal justice.  We have also compared trends in recorded crime across all counties in Florida and California since 2015.

We find no evidence to support the claim that progressive prosecutors were responsible for the increase in homicide during the pandemic or before it.  We also find weak evidence to support the claim that prosecutors of any broad approach to crime and justice are causally associated with changes in homicide during the pandemic.  We conclude that progressive prosecutors did not cause the rise in homicide in the United States, neither as a cohort nor in individual cities.  This conclusion echoes the findings of most of the research to date in this field.

This new piece in The Atlantic, headlined “What’s Really Going On With the Crime Rate?: Cities with progressive prosecutors may not exactly resemble the dystopian landscapes you’ve heard so much about,” discusses this new study at some lengthy.