Citation

Neyroud P. Criminol. Public Policy 2019; 18(1): 81-88.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2019, American Society of Criminology, Publisher John Wiley and Sons)

DOI

10.1111/1745-9133.12425

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Whether and to what extent the police can affect homicide rates is obviously a key debate about the effectiveness of public policing. In their article, Richard Rosenfeld and Joel Wallman (2019, this issue) seek to explore this issue by examining the relationship between a phenomenon they describe as "de‐policing" and the homicide rate. Their measure for the extent of policing activity or its converse, "de‐policing," is the global arrest rate across a selected group of North American cities. They raise many questions and seem to find few clear answers. Indeed, Rosenfeld and Wallman find little support for the relationship between arrest and homicide rates. Instead, they devote their conclusions to a series of wider implications about targeted patrol and legitimacy.

It is usual to write a response to such an academic article as that of Rosenfeld and Wallman (2019) in the third person, adopting the standard distanced response of an academic. For me to respond to this article, however, I need to draw on both my identities--first as a police officer and former police chief and second as an academic, teaching and researching in policing. One reason for the first is that, in a 30+ year career in four police departments, at the last two of which, Thames Valley Police1 and the National Policing Improvement Agency (NPIA),2 I was the chief constable, I never measured effectiveness in my department or the departments that I supported nationally in the NPIA by the simplistic yardstick of arrest rates.

From a police practitioner's perspective, arrest is a process, not an outcome. Rosenfeld and Wallman (2019) assert that arrests "constitute the punitive bulwark that maintains the credibility and effectiveness of proactive policing." The extent to which that statement is credible must surely depend on the proportion of arrests that lead to charges...

Language: en