Justice Reformers Need to Update Their Priors

For most of this century, America’s debate about policing took place against a backdrop of falling murder rates. But in 2020, the U.S. murder rate rose 30 percent from 2019. Now the earliest figures from 2021 are in––and in many cities murders are still rising.

These are uncomfortable facts for those of us who argue against the “tough on crime” excesses of the 1980s and ’90s. We neither anticipated nor can confidently explain the recent explosion of murders, and the changing facts on the ground may force us to change our priorities.

For two decades, year-over-year declines in murders, and crime more generally, created political space for necessary reforms to police practices—and also for radical and politically damaging talk of abolishing the police. Last summer, as crime statistics worsened, I proposed a.” If you are opposed, as I am, to mass incarceration and stop-and-frisk policing, you need to embrace some kind of strategy to improve crime-fighting in the short term. Proponents of draconian law enforcement will happily fill any vacuum, and voters will sideline any faction that doesn’t offer a plausible remedy for a growing problem.