Professor John Pfaff was interviewed in an article published by The Crime Report, where he cautions against dismissing progressive reforms to criminal justice in favor of status quo policies.
One of the country’s leading criminologists says there is no evidence linking the rise in violent crime in many U.S. cities to efforts to reform the justice system.
Fordham University law professor John Pfaff argues, in fact, that many of the reforms advocated in policing may actually do a better job at reducing violence than returning to the hardline policies of the past.
‘The defenders of the status quo are mistaken,’ Pfaff wrote in an essay this week in The New Republic. ‘Not only have reforms been less extreme than they often claim, but the rise in homicides has occurred more or less equally in places that adopted reforms and those that rejected them.
‘And given how few places have significantly altered their approach to crime, the homicide spike by and large took place on the status quo’s watch.’
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Pfaff maintained that while numerous studies have failed to find any real connection between a decrease in policing and homicide rates, evidence does show that a decrease in people’s view of the police as ‘legitimate’ may cause more people to carry firearms and use them.
‘This would suggest that at least some of the lethal violence is the product of anger at police forces that kill far too many Black men, as well as the remarkably violent, riotous way the police responded to last summer’s protest,’ he wrote.
But he added: ‘To use this violence to justify doubling down on conventional approaches gets the lesson exactly wrong.’
