Study Shows Throwing Money At Law Enforcement Doesn’t Result In Lower Crime Rates

Pretty much every law enforcement agency gets exactly what it wants during budget discussions. The spending on policing always seems to increase, despite years of diminishing returns. The money flows in, but very little flows back out in terms of community relations, accountability, or transparency.

In recent years, there have been discussions about “defunding” law enforcement agencies. Very little of this talk meant much of anything. Only a few legislators seriously considered dismantling police departments. In most cases, “defunding” just meant moving some cop money to other areas where people might be better served by other social services, like mental health professionals or medical personnel.

In an era of historically low crime rates, it might seem intuitive to keep spending more and more on law enforcement. But looking at clearance rates for major crimes shows that while budgets continue to increase, the quality and quantity of investigations isn’t.

On top of the money spent on just keeping police boots on the ground, so to speak, is the money cities and states shell out to settle civil lawsuits involving officers, ranging from rights violations to wrongful deaths. That money is never considered to be part of the budget, but it’s a real expense that should always be added to whatever’s being spent to keep cop shops operational.

This is how it works in the United States. But, as the Toronto Star’s Emily Fagan reports, this is also how it works just across the border.

There is “no consistent correlation” between police spending and crime rates in Canada, a new study has found.

The paper, published in the journal Canadian Public Policy, examined a decade of data from Canada’s 20 largest municipalities, finding no clear relationship between higher police budgets and crime, and no association between increasing spending and reducing crime rates. This, even as spending on policing increased steadily over the study period.

“We didn’t find a consistent association between police spending and crime rates,” lead author Mélanie Seabrook told the Star, noting that the finding can help decision-makers figure out spending priorities, knowing “there are other factors at play.”

The report [PDF] from Canadian Public Policy only runs 16 pages. It may be short, but it’s detailed. And it opens with a few paragraphs showing that law enforcement’s ongoing transparency problem may actually be worse in Canada.

Data on police budgets are notoriously difficult to access in Canada, thwarting research into even the most rudimentary questions about how governments spend money in the pursuit of public safety. Compared with countries such as the United States, what data on police budgets and expenditures can be accessed in Canada tend be incomplete and insufficiently disaggregated, greatly limiting the insight they can offer. Because of barriers to accessing quality data on police budgets, systematic analysis of the economics of policing in Canada is exceptionally rare. Given that increases in police budgets have long been rationalized as an investment in fighting crime, it is surprising that so little is known about the relationship between police budgets and public safety in Canada.

To quote every elementary school math class: show your work. If you want the public to trust that their money is being well-spent, you need to open the books. And if that data shows the money is being misspent, then it’s time to start tightening belts, rather than seek more opacity.

Crime rates in Canada have mirrored those in the United States. Rates peaked in the 1990s before beginning a long, precipitous two-decade decline. Meanwhile, budgets continue to expand, with law enforcement officials claiming additional funds are needed to fight crime, even when there’s less crime to go around.

Sure, correlation does not equal causation. But, in this study, there’s not even correlation. What’s reported here shows there’s no reason to believe spending more on policing will have any effect on crime rates. And if that’s still open to debate, municipalities should be a bit more skeptical of law enforcement officials’ claims during budget discussions. This study makes it clear that throwing more money at this particular problem is extremely unlikely to solve it.