Evidence-based policymaking: Moneyball, or GIGO?

A confluence of recent events around the capital city showed many people wish for better information when making public policy. This may seem surprising--the President's budget as well as the recent tax changes rely on supply-side economics, climate change denial is practically an article of faith for the majority party, and Congress may or may not be able to undo the 23-year-old provision that restricts the Center for Disease Control from researching gun violence--but it's fair to say the desire for data is here... co-existing with a lot of other desires.

As a U.S. Senator from Indiana, Dan Quayle sponsored the
Job Training and Partnership Act of 1983,
based on research showing the effectiveness of job training programs

Some years ago, as part of our long research project on policy making by the President and Congress (see note below), Paul J. Quirk and I examined the government's ability to manage complex or changing information. When issues are technically complex, as most have gotten to be in one way or another, we wrote "they must obtain the necessary information from reliable sources, as well as mastering it to the extent required to make good policy." The challenges are many:

Knowledge in a policy area may be limited because there is a large amount of material presented which is undifferentiated, or because there is not a consensus on how to interpret a given sequence of events.  Constituencies may be unaware of relevant information or refuse to accept it.  Alternatively, new information may pose difficulties for assumptions that have become entrenched among political elites. 

Our conclusions were guardedly optimistic: "[G]overnment is often able to make intelligent policy in the face of complex or changing information.... The key seems to be a predisposition to hear the news. [In most cases we examined,] policy initiative was taken by someone who was already committed to the position supported by the new research. Those people then used the new information to convince the rest of the government to go along with them." What's unstated is there were enough uncommitted people willing to be convinced by the policy entrepreneur. Is that still true, or has politics become completely overwhelmed by rigid constituency positions?

Whatever the goal of a policy (e.g. containing health care costs, reducing barriers faced by small businesses, preventing terrorist attacks) we do better when we know what we're doing. There are reasons why we might not choose the most optimal solution--ideological beliefs, constituency group benefits, social norms--but on the whole someone promoting a policy is better off with the best information they can get.

It gets trickier when, as in most cases, we're talking about assessing government programs that are already underway. Again, if I want to, say, contain health care costs, I should want the best data I can get on how well existing programs are doing that, and if they're not doing very well, I can use those data to learn how to improve performance. If I'm worried that the results will be used to fire me, de-fund my agency, and/or repeal the Affordable Care Act, I'm going to see assessment as a threat. If I have to collect and analyze the data in addition to doing my job, I'm going to see it as a hassle at best if not a suicide mission.

Nick Hart (Source: Bipartisan Policy Center)

Nick Hart and Kathryn Newcomer allow as much. They're the co-authors of a new technical paper from the Bipartisan Policy Center, rolled out this week at a forum co-sponsored by the Forum for Youth Investment. They discuss evidence-based evaluation initiatives undertaken by the administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations, noting that both adminstrations tended to use results to guide budgeting decisions. In Newcomer's words, "accountability does tend to trump learning."

(L to R) John Kamensky, Marcus Peacock and Shelley Metzenbaum
at the BPC/Forum for Youth Investment Event

In a follow-up panel, Marcus Peacock, who worked on the Bush efforts, praised President Trump's goal of repealing two regulations for every one promulgated, and called for nurturing "pay-for-success." In response, audience member Christine Heflin (who works in the Commerce Department office of performance, evaluation and risk management) called for finding ways to "reward learning." Panel member Shelley Metzenbaum, who worked on the Obama efforts, agreed, noting that pay-for-success "becomes a signal that we're going to de-fund what's not 'working.'"

I'm with Metzenbaum, particularly in today's fraught political and budgetary environment. It's hard to imagine good-quality evidence emerging when programs are justifiably concerned about ideological opponents who want them to die, not to mention fellow travelers who could use their resources for their own programs. Yet we need good information to achieve public objectives.

(L to R) Tamika Lewis, Andrew Guthrie Ferguson, Cornell William Brooks, Rachel Levinson-Waldman

At a more basic level, we should be suspicious of what Cornell William Brooks calls "the presumed infallibility of data." Brooks is an attorney, pastor, civil rights activist and senior fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice, which hosted a panel this week on how new data collection efforts affect criminal justice. The panel noted that more sophisticated data collection by police departments--and more recently, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement--have resulted in greater attention to poor and minority populations, resulting in more arrests and a longer data trail that makes it harder to get jobs or housing in ensuing years (what panel member Tamika Lewis of the Our Data Bodies Project called "the cycle of injustice").

Panel members seemed divided over whether negative impacts of big data on minority populations were intentional or the result of institutional racism. You don't have to believe in conspiracies, in a country where racial differences are baked into the economy and society, to imagine that they're also baked into metrics from credit scores to risk for violence.

This doesn't mean data are inherently bad, or there are no useful metrics. Both panels talked about the need to include everyone involved throughout the assessment process. Lewis said data could be used to identify institutional racism instead of replicating it; Brooks suggested community members should be involved in deciding what would be measured and how; and law professor Andrew Guthrie Ferguson pointed out that even conclusive data don't necessarily point to a single remedy (more law enforcement), suggesting social workers, pastors and community members as alternatives.

People outside of government could use better data, too. Carl Wallace, shown above at a presentation to 1 Million Cups Fairfax in February, has developed C-Score, an algorithm for evaluating small business proposals he is marketing to banks, incubators and universities. It's a sort of "Moneyball" for entrepreneurship, attempting to aggregate what we know about the prerequisites for small business success, and get away from reliance on hunches however well-based. It occurred to several people in attendance that it could also serve as a diagnostic tool for entrepreneurs themselves who wish to improve their pitches. C-Score will operate at the policy formulation stage, serving the common interests of entrepreneurs, financial institutions and cities in developing a strong base of locally-owned small businesses. It's far from clear that government program evaluations have gotten to similarly common interests among the audiences for their evidence-based policy evaluations.

SEE ALSO:

Andrew Guthrie Ferguson, The Rise of Big Data Policing: Surveillance, Race, and the Future of Law Enforcement (NYU Press, 2017)

Nick Hart and Kathryn Newcomer, "Presidential Evidence Initiatives: Lessons from the Bush and Obama Administrations' Efforts to Improve Government Performance," Bipartisan Policy Center, 28 February 2018

"The Promise of Evidence-Based Policymaking: Report of the Commission on Evidence-Based Policymaking," September 2017

OLDER SOURCES ON POLICY LEARNING:

Jane Mansbridge, "Motivating Deliberation in Congress," in Sarah Baumgartner Thurow (ed), Constitutionalism in America (University Press of America, 1988)

William Muir, Legislature (University of California, 1986)

Richard Rose, Lesson-Drawing in Public Policy: A Guide to Learning across Time and Space (Chatham House, 1993)

My research with Paul J. Quirk on policy learning was never completed for publication. We did present a paper, "The President and Congress as Policy Makers: Dealing with Complexity and Change," at the Midwest Political Science Association conference, April 15-17, 1999. Quotations are from a book draft.

Bill Byrnes on law enforcement and the black middle class

Criminal justice policies that result in large-scale incarceration of young black men have spillover effects throughout the black population, middle class as well as poor, according to new research by Bill Byrnes of the Center for Research and Learning presented at one of the Center's Friday morning seminars last month. Byrnes's talk was entitled "Between a Rock and a Hard Place: The Black Middle Class and Mass Incarceration." My fellow middle-aged white men who can't understand what Colin Kapernick and the kneeling NFL players are on about would do well to draw near and give heed.

Byrnes's Ph.D. research is based on focus group interviews with blacks and whites in suburban Cook County, Illinois (the county that includes Chicago) concerning friends and family members who have been incarcerated as well as their own experiences with the police. It builds on existing research that traces dramatic increases in prison populations nationwide after 1978 not only to increases in violent crime from the late 1960s to the early 1990s but also the effects of de-industrialization, public calls for more policing, federal wars on crime and drugs, longer sentences and stricter parole rules. The United States already had imprisoned a greater percentage of its population than other advanced democracies, but now the discrepancy is huge. Moreover, it disproportionately affects people by social class, neighborhood and particularly race: in Cook County, blacks comprise 24.8 percent of the total population but 66.9 percent of the prison population.

Bill Byrnes (Source: Center for Urban Research and Learning)

Byrnes's focus groups revealed that both blacks and whites suffer emotionally when friends and family members are incarcerated, but whites "seem on the whole better cushioned." Blacks are more likely than whites to know someone who has been incarcerated; to bear financial burdens for family members in jail; and to themselves have had some negative encounters with police. Byrnes's middle class black respondents "have to negotiate their safety in public spaces in ways whites don't have to," relying on extremely proper demeanor and professional clothing to get them through situations (although that doesn't always help, as witness the 2016 killing of Philando Castile in suburban Minneapolis).

Byrnes concludes that "mass incarceration is about resource allocation," redolent of Harold Lasswell's definition of politics as who gets what, when and how. Blacks and whites start from different social places, and their interactions with the state "are not equivalent." This not only puts an "unjust" burden on the poor--greater police presence means more incarceration and afterwards higher unemployment, persistent poverty, and lack of access to education and housing--but extends those burdens to the nascent black middle class, whose economic position does not insulate them from incarceration of friends and family, or from their own awkward interactions with police.

Why should this matter to people who aren't black? Byrnes cites three reasons:

1. The economic costs of mass incarceration diverts state resources from other programs. "Million dollar block" is an expression for a neighborhood where the state is spending over a million dollars incarcerating its residents. "Do you want to know why it costs $40,000 to go to U[niversity] of I[llinois] now?" Byrnes asked rhetorically. He could have added: Or why we struggle to maintain transportation infrastructure or fund schools or treat the mentally ill? 
2. Mass incarceration may endanger public safety as much or more as it protects it. Where areas of concentrated poverty are also areas of concentrated ex-inmates, the lack of economic opportunity as well as ongoing encounters with law enforcement breed desperation, which actually increases the likelihood of crime.
3. Democracy itself is compromised by a policy approach layered on top of existing social and economic inequalities that creates "two-track citizenship" defined to a large extent by race. To this I would add that the era of economic mobility in America ended about 1973, just as black civil rights were beginning to be protected. The subsequent economic arrangements have frozen in place a wealth and opportunity gap that for historical reasons favored whites. The current House and Senate tax reform efforts, most egregiously the proposed end of the inheritance tax but going beyond that in many ways, can only add to the problem.

I will add a fourth reason. It has been a core assumption since the beginning of this blog project that we will not in the coming century be able to live as separately as we have been doing for the last 75 years. Whites are going to figure out how to live with blacks, and vice versa, and policy approaches that reinforce and extend racial inequalities are making that very very difficult.

SEE ALSO:
'The Latest Bad News and Our Common Life," 17 December 2014. For more from Holy Mountain, please choose "race" from the list of labels in the right-hand column.


Ta-Nahesi Coates's essay, "The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration," which appeared in The Atlantic Monthly in 2015, is reprinted along with his own commentary/update as chapter 7 of his We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy (New World, 2017). It is particularly useful for his copious citation of sources. Coates was interviewed by Krista Tippett at the Chicago Humanities Festival, and that is here.

Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New Press, 2012)
Charles Marohn, "It's Time to End the Routine Traffic Stop," Strong Towns, 31 October 2017

What the hell, Chicago?

Source: Chicago Tribune

Eleven people were shot to death in Chicago over Christmas weekend, bringing the total number of murders in the city in 2016 to over 750 (Bosman and Smith). It has been a distressing year, to say the least, in the Midwest's largest city, and it casts doubt on the whole urbanist project.

The murder epidemic comes after a 25 year decline in violent crime in the United States, including in the State of Illinois, where the rate per 100,000 population dropped from 1039 in 1991 to 370 in 2014. Nationally, violent crime in 2014 was 51.3 percent of the 1990 rate (Source: FBI Uniform Crime Reports, aggregated at disastercenter.com). As I wrote in August, there are at least 11 explanations for this decline, which is too many to be encouraging, particularly when crime comes roaring back as it has in Chicago this year. And if that's not enough to worry about, consider this: the number of people shot in Chicago in 2016 exceeds 3,500 (Bosman and Smith again). Were it not for advances in medical science the number of deaths by murder would be much higher, wouldn't it?

Confoundingly, but happily for the rest of America, Chicago's year has not been replicated across the country, and indeed most of the homicides have occurred on the South and West sides. The Times article notes that neither Los Angeles nor New York has had anything like Chicago's experience; in fact Chicago's 2016 total exceeds those of the two larger cities combined. Smaller cities, too, have had widely varying experiences. So, what is going on? And what can be done?

Arthur Lurigio of Loyola University, cited in the Times article, suggests Chicago's suffers from a combination of easily available guns, persistent poverty, and escalating gang violence exacerbated by social media. One of my students who grew up on the South Side has written feelingly of how his neighborhood became increasingly unsafe beginning around 2006, when he would have been eight; his conversations with law enforcement suggest that a mid-decade scrambling of public housing residents put members of rival gangs in close and dangerous proximity to each other. Meanwhile, the police feel hamstrung by politicians critical of police shootings of black youth.

Chicago's experience is of national interest, because when a lot of people hear "urban" the image they get is not walkable, sociable neighborhoods with opportunity for all--or the commercial meccas of Michigan Avenue and New Bohemia--but the image of crime-infested, dirty streets filled with drug addicts. Whether the issue is sidewalks or affordable housing, design form or corner stores, at the root of pushback is: Don't bring the city to my neighborhood. Because we know what cities are like! (See above.) I can relate to this, having spent an embarrassing proportion of my suburban youth scared to death of Chicago. And, frankly, if there are going to be 750 murders somewhere, I'd rather it not be in my neighborhood.

But the deadly ghettos of Chicago are not examples of urbanism; their people are suffering from the lack of it. The poor areas of America's inner cities and first-ring suburbs are the flip side of the suburban development pattern that created well-off areas on the metropolitan edge. Those left behind need urbanism as much or more than anyone else.

People struggle, and on top of that, in many instances, people have lost hope in their government. They've lost hope that something is going to change for them. And if we can't keep hope alive, then you don't have to wonder whether things are going to get better or worse: They'll get worse. --ALD. DANNY DAVIS, quoted in Bosman and Smith

Everyone needs access to economic opportunity--a difficulty even for the middle-class in these times, much less for the poor who have been cut off for decades by the suburban development pattern. That means redesigning, or undoing a lot of the design of the last several decades, in order to make our cities more inclusive. That means, in part, breaking down barriers and encouraging more spontaneous interaction. There are dangerous people out there, and they should be in jail, but even justifiable fear does not justify cutting off huge chunks of the population. And then blaming them when they don't prosper.

Investment in our cities is fine, but must be aimed at ensuring opportunity for all. Which brings us to the the interesting case of City Center DC...

Source: citycenterdc.com 

...a development in downtown Washington with high-end shopping, fancy restaurants and super-luxury condominiums. Backers of the project point to the flow of tax revenue to the city from sales and rents; apparently at these prices it doesn't take many of either to generate some nice cash flow. But, as a discussion last week on WAMU's "Kojo Nnamdi Show" pointed up, the area has not seen the foot traffic you'd expect from a successful retail area. But more popular stores would not be "driving value upstairs," because condo buyers would rather live above Louis Vuitton than above McDonald's or Wal-Mart. All this proves, I guess, is that a lot of people don't want to live around a lot of other people, and some are able to pay handsomely for the privilege. I hope they're paying very handsomely, enough for Washington to upgrade its education, transportation, small business resources and social services.

But CityCenterDC is not a model for urban development. It's another example of what Michael Mehaffy (cited below) calls the "trickle-down" approach to development--"concentrating attention at the top and in the core, in the hopes that it will 'trickle down' to all"--albeit CityCenterDC was financed by a Qatari sovereign wealth fund rather than the local government itself. He calls, in the spirit of Jane Jacobs, for cities to shun quick fixes and instead

to diversify geographically and in other ways--to move into a system of polycentric complete neighborhoods, and find ways to catalyze more beneficial growth there... In addition, diversity in types, ages and conditions of buildings is also important to maintain diversity in populations and incomes.... Furthermore, while public investment is still important under this approach, it is not used as a way to "socially engineer" problems like affordability through direct expenditures, but rather, it is a catalyst for an alternative kind of pervasive growth that is more beneficial. This is an approach that treats the city as an organic whole, rather than a top-down money-making machine that can be tinkered with at will. (non-italics mine)

I'll admit to being often the pessimistic voice in the crowd, but I think, in spite of such Chicago-specific factors in this year's upsurge in homicides, that Chicago is probably just the first sign of fraying in our national fabric. President-elect Trump's bluster notwithstanding, we can't shoot our way out of this mess. Nor, the urbanists argue, can we blast our way out through big civic projects, no matter how many jobs they allegedly create. The only way out is by making great places by solving the puzzles of economic opportunity and inclusion. Maybe we could start with ice cream?

SOURCES

Julie Bosman and Mitch Smith, "Chicago Tallies Grim Accounts of Violent Year," New York Times, 29 December 2016, A1, A13

Michael Mehaffy, "A Tale of Two Futures," Public Square: A CNU Journal, 15 December 2016

Jonathan O'Connell, "D.C. Got Everything It Wanted Out of CityCenterDC--Except the Crowds," Washington Post Magazine, 8 December 2016

Pete Saunders, "Something Amiss in Chicago," Corner Side Yard, 1 April 2016

City Center DC is located on H Street NW between 9th and 11th Streets.

Crime and our common life

Don't you know the crime rate's going up! up! up! up! up!

--"SHATTERED," The Rolling Stones (1978)

Republican presidential candidate Donald J. Trump is asserting a dark, dystopian portrayal of America in 2016 as overwhelmed by predatory criminals and terrorists, in spite of data that show the national violent crime rate has steadily fallen for 25 years. This sharp and sustained turn in the crime rate has created space for the rejuvenation of American central cities, many of which have seen population increases above the national average for a decade or more. For those of us who lived through the three decades before 1990, during which the violent crime rate had steadily risen, the new era has come as something of a miracle, one scarcely-to-be-believed (which may be why many people don't believe it).

Trend in U.S. violent crime, from newgeography.com

According to the Uniform Crime Reports produced by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, the national violent crime rate in 1970 was 363.5 per 100,000 population. In 1990, it was 731.8, slightly more than double the 1970 rate. Ten years later, it had fallen nearly a third, to 506.5, at the time the lowest since 1978; and in 2014, the last year for which a report has been produced, it was back to 375.7, roughly back to the 1970 level. A preliminary report for the first half of 2015 shows a 1.7 percent increase in violent crime over the same period in 2014--probably statistically significant, but hardly a reversal of the post-1991 trend (Comey 2016). Criminologist James Alan Fox told PolitiFact: "There are some spikes in homicide and shootings in certain cities, yet other cities continue to experience low rates. As a nation, we are far better off than anytime for the past several decades. Crime rates are low, and there is no consistent and reliable indication that things are getting worse" (Jacobson 2016a).

While this scenario played out over much of the country, it has not been playing out uniformly in all areas. Nearly all states experienced the rough doubling of violent crime (2.013x) from 1970-1990. However, Michigan (1.37 times their 1970 rate), Virginia (1.16x) and West Virginia (1.37x) had much lower increases, while the District of Columbia saw its already sky-high rate hold nearly steady (1.10x). On the other hand, a number of states saw much higher rates of increase during this period, including Iowa (3.77x), Massachusetts (3.63x), South Carolina (3.41x), Connecticut (3.25x) and Wisconsin (3.09x).

There is more divergence among states' experiences after 1990. In the chart below, Iowa's violent crime is always lower than that of Illinois, but increased faster before 1990 and its decline thereafter was slight. Iowa never exceeded half of Illinois' rate before 2003, after which it always did. (Source: F.B.I. Uniform Crime Reports, aggregated at disastercenter.com)

STATE  1970 1971 1972 1973 1974 1975 1976 1977 1978 1979 1980 1981 1982 1983 1984
Illinois    468    477   508   556   627   670   626   631   677   744   808   793   774   728   725
Iowa         79      99     87   102   121   141   133   144   161   181   200   204   173   181   199

STATE 1985 1986 1987 1988 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999
Illinois   715   800   796   810   846   967   1039  977   960   961   996   886   861   808   690
Iowa      212   235   231   257   266   300     303  278   326   315   354   273   310   312   280

STATE 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014
Illinois   657   886   602   556   546   552   542   533   528   497   445   424   416   403   370
Iowa      266   268   286   278   288   293   284   295   289   282   269   257   266   273   274

Nationally, violent crime in 2014 was 51.3 percent of the 1990 rate. New York and California, notably, had 2014 rates less than 40 percent of 1990 crime. Seven states, however, saw crime rates actually increase in this period: Montana (203.2%), South Dakota (200.6%), West Virginia (178.4%), New Hampshire (149.1%), Alaska (121.2%), Wisconsin (109.7%), and Nevada (105.8%). Another seven, including my home state of Iowa, had crime rates between 80 and 100 percent of the 1990 level, declines that are unlikely to be perceptible at the level of personal experience. Incidentally...

• the largest metro area in these fourteen states is Las Vegas, Nevada (pop. 2,114,801, rank 29th); most of these states had no metros close to this size. I wonder if the surge and decline in violent crime since 1960 was largely an urban phenomenon?
• The 14 states' 2012 presidential votes were roughly split, but more Republican than the nation as a whole: Mitt Romney won eight of the 14 for an electoral vote advantage of 40-34. This offers mild-at-best support to the thought that the Republican Party's 2016 theme might resonate with their core voters' experiences.

Even at the national level where data are joyous, explanations vary widely, which is hardly going to give people confidence that we know how we got here or how to sustain the decline. Washington Post reporter Max Ehrenfreund (2015) lists five common explanations for the decline in homicides, all of which can be extended to violent crime in general:

1. Larger police forces, funded by the federal Violent Crime and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 as well as state and local initiatives. The ratio of police officers to the general population increased in the mid-1990s, though it had declined to its previous level by 2010. Some analysts credit this with reducing the incidence of crime (Levitt 2004), while others do not (Kleck and Barnes 2010).
2. Use of big data by law enforcement agencies enables better targeting of resources. Specifically identifying certain "hot spots" means police officers can be where the action is, or is likely to be, and their being there can prevent some of it (Roeder, Eisen and Bowling 2015: 67-73).
3. Alcohol consumption per capita, as estimated by the National Institutes of Health, shows a remarkably similar surge and decline with violent crime, rising from around 2 gallons per person through 1958 to a peak of 2.76 (1980-81), and then declining to 2.15 in the late 1990s (Haughwout et al. 2016, Table 1). Since 1999 it has risen back to around 2.3. Should we be alarmed yet? It makes sense that alcohol consumption beyond a certain level is associated with violence, but who knows why national alcohol consumption rises and falls? 
4. The banning of leaded gasoline under the Clean Air Act of 1970 removed a significant hazard to developing young brains, which may have made people less likely to turn violent. However, criminologist Phil Cook notes that the decline in violent crime occurred among all age cohorts, not just those benefiting from the lead ban, so he is skeptical (Kleiman 2014). Meanwhile, many children in older homes--including, in the 1990s, the unfortunate Freddie Gray--still face the hazard of lead paint (Bendix 2016).
5. Sustained economic growth beginning in 1982 preceded the sharp bend in the violent crime curve, and could have accounted for increased confidence and greater actual economic opportunity as well as more money to spend on security. However, it doesn't explain why the declining crime rate has continued past 2000, which years have seen two recessions including one of epic proportions, and when even periods of economic growth have been paradoxically unhelpful to poverty rates and median incomes. And if people in power knew how to fix that paradox, they'd do it, instead of rounding up the same old partisan policy proposals.

Other explanations include (6) the zero-tolerance approach by police to nuisance behavior known as "broken windows" (Wilson and Kelling 1982); (7) "community policing," which is more direct interaction by police with citizens, emphasizing a cooperative approach to problem solving; (8) increased incarceration, thought to decrease crime by incapacitating the most likely offenders; (9) declining proportion of the population in the most crime-prone age group i.e. those between 15 and 24 years of age; (10) widespread repeal of gun regulations and adoption of "right-to-carry" measures; and (11) the end of the surge in use of crack cocaine by the mid-1990s. The Brennan Center for Justice produced in 2015 a comprehensive review of the various theories including results of their own empirical analyses, What Caused the Crime Decline?, which is available online. They find support for theories 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 (broken out various ways) and 9 (for the 1990s only). Needless to say, the other theories have their advocates, too. The point is that the degree of uncertainty about what caused the positive outcomes of the last 25 years can lead to anxiety about whether they can or will be sustained. Or that an equally unexplainable short-term uptick isn't the first sign of Armageddon (Ehrenfreund and Lu 2016), especially if opportunistic political candidates are pushing that story (Jacobson 2016b, "Fact Checker" 2016).

Whatever the reason(s) for the long-term decline in violent crime, public reaction has often been muted-to-disbelieving. In most of the 25 years that the incidence of crime has been reduced, large majorities of the American population have told polls crime is actually on the increase.

Most years since 1990 vast majorities think crime is on the increase. Source: Gallup

Policy analyst Wesley K. Skogan of Northwestern University points out that, of course, beliefs about the nationwide incidence of violent crime is not the same as personal fear of being victimized. In a 2011 paper he reported ten years of survey data from Chicago that showed declining fear of crime, which he attributed to declining incidence of both crime and disorderly behavior, improvement in the physical appearance of neighborhoods and increased confidence in the police. And there's all that movement back to cities to back him up. However, it seems to me that if most people believe overall crime to be on the increase, feelings of personal safety are more vulnerable to change. And confidence in the police has been shaken by a number of widely-publicized police shootings of black men and in some cases their own ham-handed responses (See also Ruud 2014).

A sudden increase in incidents involving firearms--shootings in Chicago in the first half of 2016 were half again as many as the same period in 2015 (Sweeney and Gorner 2016), and on a much smaller scale Cedar Rapids saw a spate of shootings (KCRG 2016)--focus attention on crime, although it's hard to account for the consistency of public perception as depicted above. A small number of spectacular, widely-publicized terror attacks in America and elsewhere in the West can also fuel the impression that danger is increasing. And, as I've shown earlier, the nationwide improvement in violent crime rates has been experienced to varying degrees in particular areas.

Many people blame news media for this misimpression by pushing sensational "if it bleeds, it leads" reporting (See about a zillion sources, such as Matthew Robinson, Media Coverage of Crime and Criminal Justice, Carolina Academic, 2010).  David Rothenberg of the Fortune Society wrote The New York Times after the 2016 Republican convention: "Perception is everything at election time. Any casual surfing of the television channels tonight will show murder after murder. Sadly, some of the most dramatic 'crime stories' never make prime time — the stories of men and women being released from prison, facing barriers that limit housing and jobs, fighting personal demons while navigating societal restrictions, struggling just to get through the day. Such stories are the ones that should be surfacing at political conventions. The fiction lives while the truth remains in the shadows." For this reason, violent crime gets far more attention per incident than do fatal auto crashes (Shultis 2016).

Both the reality and perception of crime are important to the future of cities. Urban criminals most frequently victimize the most vulnerable of our citizens; as Dreier et al. point out (Place Matters: Metropolitics for the Twenty-First Century, Kansas University Press, 2001, 202-203) most residents of high-crime urban neighborhoods are hard-working and law-abiding, but suffer from predation by a few of their neighbors. To compete successfully with suburbs for residents and businesses, cities need at minimum to be clean and safe (Duany et al., Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream, North Point, 2000, 157-158). The dangerous reputation of cities makes many people fearful of the population density we need to be environmentally and fiscally sustainable (Hester, Design for Ecological Democracy, MIT Press, 2006, 205).

Crime and the fear of it threaten to undermine our efforts to build a common life. A common life in the 21st century depends on the success of cities: It's where a large percentage of our citizens live and more are moving, urban design is the most ecologically and fiscally resilient, and diversity and the potential for inclusion are greatest. To the extent Trump's dystopian rhetoric resonates with a significant part of the American population, cities and the people who care about them must strive to improve their reputation.

ON THE SAME TOPIC: Josh Stephens, "Trump to Cities: You're Dead to Me," Planetizen, 26 July 2016, http://www.planetizen.com/node/87620/trump-cities-youre-dead-me

NOTE: The Department of Justice compiles data from the FBI and other agencies at the Bureau of Justice statistics page. However, I find other aggregators easier to use; for this piece I used the same data as found at Disaster Center.