Opinion | What Republicans and Democrats Get Wrong About Crime

Americans are understandably concerned about crime. Before the 2024 election, voters consistently ranked it among their top priorities. At least two states rolled back reforms this year, and prison populations in many states are starting to rise again after nearly a decade of declines.

Unfortunately, the politics of crime has become both predictable and partisan. Worse, it is largely disconnected from evidence about what works and what does not. Conservatives and progressives get some things right and some things wrong. As an economist and researcher, I urge both sides to put aside ideology and focus on the evidence to build a new, bipartisan public-safety agenda.

Progressives are largely correct that the “tough on crime” policies still championed by conservatives are overused. The United States has long tried to reduce crime by handing down heavy sentences. Locking up people who are a threat does make communities safer — there will always be an important role for prisons.

But most people quickly age out of crime. There is lots of data documenting that the likelihood of committing crime increases until ages 18 to 20, then decreases. (Crime is largely a young person’s game.) That means we are incarcerating lots of people who are no longer an active threat. It’s a waste of money and does not make us safer.

Long sentences might be useful if they deterred crime — that is, if the threat of a harsh punishment provided a meaningful incentive to obey the law. But research consistently shows that increasing the probability of getting caught is far more effective. Most would-be offenders are probably not thinking very far ahead, which means the chance they’d be arrested weighs far more than the details of any future imprisonment.

But right now, the probability of getting caught across the United States is low and falling. Clearance rates — in simplified terms, the number of arrests per reported offenses — were just 41 percent for violent crimes (including homicide) in 2023. For property crimes such as burglary and theft that same year, clearance rates were a miserable 14 percent. A vast majority of people who commit a crime get away with it.

We need universal and proportional accountability; what we have now is randomized severity. What can we do about this?

First, we need more and better policing. This is where conservatives are correct and progressives have erred. Following the murder of George Floyd in 2020 there was a backlash against policing as an institution and a concept. However, the notion of reducing police budgets and activity runs counter to scientific evidence. One of the most consistent findings in crime research is that hiring more police officers and increasing police presence deters criminal behavior. This is both necessary and often desired in communities hit hard by crime. Police departments across the country are understaffed and, especially in recent years, have faced increased retirements and difficulty recruiting.

Anyone who has seen videos of egregious police misconduct knows that far too many interactions between officers and civilians escalate unnecessarily, with too little accountability for harmful police behavior. We can and must do better, and departments nationwide are working closely with researchers to test innovative approaches that aim to make policing more professional.

The policy goal is to embrace the benefits from policing while minimizing unnecessary arrests and violence. Arnold Ventures, the philanthropic research organization where I lead the criminal justice program, is supporting randomized trials to see which practices work best. One study tests training that helps people feel heard when they interact with the police, even if they don’t like the outcome. Another tests a program based on cognitive behavioral therapy that helps police officers make better decisions in high-stress situations. Both have had promising results.

This past year, bipartisan legislation was introduced in Congress to invest in local police departments’ crime investigations. Should it pass, the VICTIM Act will provide $360 million to departments to hire and train more detectives and further assist crime victims. This would be an excellent step, especially if we can tie increased police funding to requirements that departments provide greater data access to the public and researchers.

Technology such as license plate readers, cameras and DNA databases can deter people from committing crimes. Given their potential impact on privacy and civil liberties, we need to develop clear rules surrounding the use of these tools. But some communities might prefer having a camera on every street corner over more police officers. And using DNA from crime scenes to identify a perpetrator can be far less invasive than standard investigative techniques such as digging into victims’ and suspects’ private lives to look for clues.

For communities struggling with crime and violence right now, it is insulting to suggest only investments that won’t pay off for years. Law enforcement matters. We will always need a way to hold offenders accountable, both to discourage criminal behavior and to take serial offenders off the streets. Crime victims deserve to be taken more seriously.

Because increasing the probability of getting caught has such a strong deterrent effect, it is our ticket out of mass incarceration. As more people turn away from committing crime, the prison populations will fall. We can invest the dollars we save from reduced prison costs back into communities — improving policing further as well as investing in other social initiatives that make us safer, such as summer youth employment programs, increased access to mental health care and efforts to reduce lead exposure.

We all have a role to play in making this conversation more productive. To hold local decision makers accountable, residents and journalists should ask their mayors, city-council members and police chiefs about clearance rates. Push them to reveal this often invisible but crucial statistic, then ask them to explain how they’ll make improvements.

We should ask state lawmakers why they are imposing longer and longer sentences and why they think that this will work to reduce crime when all evidence points to the contrary.

Crime is not a partisan issue, and is too important for us to coast on stale ideas. Both sides need to put ideology aside and follow the evidence.

Jennifer Doleac is the executive vice president of criminal justice at Arnold Ventures, a philanthropic research organization.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.

Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, WhatsApp, X and Threads.