Despite Calls from Dean Preston for Slashing Police Budget, Officers Actually Reduce Crime
In an interview with Unherd, city Supervisor of the Tenderloin, Dean Preston, further calls for cutting $100 million from the police budget, describing ongoing issues with wasted funds. However, San Francisco’s largest police district, by size and population, only has three to four officers on duty every night. In February, the city’s Deputy Police Chief told Public the city was 540 officers short, but the Department only had funding to hire 267 officers.
A specific shortage of officers is important to note, as the Board of Supervisors opposed a measure that would have required the police department to be fully staffed within five years in the fall. Evidence suggests that fewer cops may mean more police misconduct because the remaining officers must work longer and more stressful hours. Research has found that fatigue predicts a rise in public complaints against cops: a 13-hour rather than 10-hour shift significantly boosts their prevalence, while back-to-back shifts quadruple their odds.
In 2009, President Obama’s stimulus package funded nearly a billion dollars in police hiring grants to struggling American cities. A Princeton professor used statistical methods to find that cities that qualified for the grant had increased policing by 3.2% and saw a 3.5% decline in crime. The effect of more police was statistically significant for “robbery, larceny, and auto theft,” he noted, “with suggestive evidence that police reduce murders as well.” And the investments were cost-effective, with every $95,000 spent on police salary preventing $350,000 in crime.
A study of federal grants made to local police departments in the 1990s found that they reduced crime rates for assault, robbery, burglary, and auto theft cost-effectively. Researchers found that $1 invested in policing results in $1.63 in crime reduction benefits. In a 2019 paper a scholar concluded that crime rose by 7 percent when police patrols in Houston declined by 10 percent.
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