Freedomnomics: Why the Free Market Works and Other Half-Baked Theories Don't by John Jr. (books that read to you TXT) 📕

on average, physically weaker than men. Physical strength testing of public safety employees consistently finds large differences between men and women; women’s upper body strength ranges from 44 to 68 percent of men’s, while their lower body strength is typically 55 to 82 percent of men’s.48 Weaker officers face some obvious disadvantages: it is more difficult for them to chase and catch fleeing suspects or to control a resisting suspect without resorting to a weapon. Furthermore, an influx of weaker officers can affect police procedures. For example, police departments come under pressure to end patrols by single officers, as well as to reduce foot and bicycle patrols in favor of car patrols.

The risk inherent in hiring weaker officers is demonstrated by the case of Brian Nichols, a thirty-three-year-old, 196-pound rape defendant. In an Atlanta courthouse, Nichols overpowered his guard, seized her gun, and used it to kill a judge, a court reporter, a police officer, and a federal agent. Nichols’ guard, a sheriff’s deputy, was a five-foot-two, fifty-one-year-old woman. “Why was a tiny woman, or any woman, given such a job?” asked Mary Ellen Synon, a columnist for the Mail on Sunday. “Because the Atlanta police force, like many others in America, has been subjected for years to government demands for ‘gender and minority’ balance; changing hiring rules and lowering standards so more women and people from ethnic minorities can join up.”49

Are such occurrences merely isolated instances, or do they speak to a larger problem created by affirmative action policies? To answer this question, I gathered statistics to analyze how changes in hiring rules and the demographic composition of police departments affect crime, arrest, and conviction rates.50 I included detailed demographic, income, and socio-economic information to help explain changes in crime and arrest rates. I also considered related factors such as illegal drug prices, gun laws, and various policing policies.

The results were dramatic: crime rates jumped in cities using affirmative action policies that lowered testing standards. Interestingly, however, the use of norming had much less harmful results.

The implementation of consent decrees—agreements by local police departments to use affirmative action in hiring and promotions—increases the rate of murder, other violent crimes, and property crimes. Overall, using affirmative action to achieve a one percentage point increase in African American officers on the force is associated with an increase in murders of at least 2 percent, violent crime of almost 5 percent, and property crimes of 4 percent.51

But it is misleading simply to compare increases in African American officers with crime rates. When testing standards are lowered, the increase in the percentage of African American officers is associated with more crime, not the cause of it. The problem is not the presence of more African American officers per se, but rather the quality of all officers in departments that implement these methods. Most of the increased crime cannot even be attributed to more unqualified African American officers, but rather to the hiring of unqualified officers of all races. This is because the replacement of intelligence exams with psychological tests makes it more difficult to separate out high and low-quality white, Asian, and other recruits just as it does with African American ones.

The reduction in strength standards for female recruits, in contrast, has had only a small detrimental effect.52 This is likely because these standards are typically lowered through norming; in other words, the standards are lowered for women but not for men. Strength standards for men can even be increased when the hiring of more women creates more competition among male recruits for the declining number of jobs available to them.

However, my study also found that lowered strength standards made female officers more vulnerable to assault and less able to control resisting suspects by themselves. This puts pressure on police departments to shift away from one-officer to two-officer patrol units as well as to reduce the number of walking and bicycle patrols.

To compensate for physical weakness, women may resort to other means of controlling criminals, in particular by using guns.53 Guns are a “great equalizer,” but they don’t completely offset strength differences. Being less able to rely on physical strength to defend themselves from an attack, female officers have less time to decide whether to shoot a threatening suspect. This explains the sharp increase in accidental police shootings that typically follow the lowering of strength standards and the hiring of more female officers.54

Ironically, affirmative action consent decrees cause the biggest spikes in crime in poor African American neighborhoods—places already plagued by terrible crime. Lowering the effectiveness of the police force in such communities, as affirmative action policies do, clearly harms these struggling areas. If we want a more diverse police force, we should seek better ways of achieving it. Simply abandoning intelligence testing is not a beneficial approach.

What Decreased Crime? Part I

The Death Penalty

If abortion and affirmative action policies actually increased crime, then what caused the huge fall in crime in the 1990s? Although it would be nice and neat if we could identify a single element as the solution, the truth is that numerous factors combined to drive down crime. One of the most important of these was the Supreme Court’s 1976 decision to rescind the ban on the death penalty. Three-quarters of the states soon re-imposed the death penalty, though it wasn’t until the early 1990s that significant numbers of executions began occurring again.

Capital punishment clearly increases the risk to criminals of engaging in various crimes, especially murder. Does this increased risk affect criminals’ behavior? Before trying to answer this question, let’s first consider how another group that faces similar dangers reacts to the risk of death.

Academics classify being a police officer as an “extremely dangerous” job.55 In 2005, fifty-five police officers were murdered on the job, while another sixty-seven were accidentally killed.56 With nearly 700,000 full-time, sworn law enforcement officers in the United States, the murder rate of police officers comes to one in 12,500,57 a ratio that jumps to one in 5,600 when we include accidental