Policing has become a catch-all response for issues stemming from inadequate support for and investment in the health and well-being of communities. Police are called every day to respond to mental health crises, quality-of-life issues, unhoused people, and other concerns arising from the failures of our safety net and widespread disinvestment in underserved communities. Due to historic and continuing residential segregation, Black and Brown people disproportionately reside in communities facing the consequences of this disinvestment, which too often include aggressive policing.2 Yet, law enforcement is not equipped to address the underlying issues leading to many 911 calls, resolve the root causes of violence, or implement systemic changes to ensure real and sustained public safety.
Policing, like the overall criminal legal system, is punitive. Its goal of deterrence relies on the threat of punishment.3 Officers’ primary job is to enforce laws and arrest people who have violated them—even when people have called 911 for help. The tools that officers have to force people to obey their orders—detention, arrest, and the threat and use of force—are coercive and violent. Success is often measured by whether officers make an arrest and whether the arrested person is convicted.4 Addressing the underlying causes of violence and conflict within the community is beyond the scope of this punishment-driven approach to public safety.
And because law enforcement, since its inception, has been rooted in racial oppression, those most likely to be punished are Black and Brown. History shows that law enforcement has largely been unsuccessful in reducing violence and promoting safety. In fact, the U.S., by far, has the highest rate of incarceration among independent democracies, with Black and Brown people disproportionately incarcerated due to racial bias at every stage of the criminal legal system.5
All communities deserve and desire safety. Black communities are especially vulnerable to violence. For example, gun violence is a public safety and public health crisis that disproportionately harms Black and Brown communities. Too often, however, local officials respond to concerns about violence by increasing aggressive policing strategies, including specialized units like the SCORPION unit responsible for Tyre Nichols’ death. These aggressive policing strategies wreak devastating harm on the very communities they are sworn to protect. Rather than relying on aggressive policing strategies, like specialized units and increased surveillance, state and local governments should instead invest in social services, educational resources, affordable housing, employment opportunities, and quality healthcare that would enable impacted communities to ensure the safety and prosperity of their own neighborhoods.
This framework, based on LDF’s social science research and its deep, longstanding partnerships with Black communities across the United States, is a starting point towards real safety, enjoyed by everyone. It requires:
Armed law enforcement officers are frequently called to intervene in routine, non-emergency events and crises, which they are not qualified to address. Only a small percentage of calls generally involve serious incidents of violence, while the substantial majority of 911 calls involve much more minor issues, like quality of life concerns.6 Community-based or civilian responders can more effectively address many non-emergency calls, because they are better able to understand a person’s circumstances, connect them with supportive services (such as housing, healthcare, mediation), or otherwise resolve the incident. State and local governments, in partnership with community representatives, should evaluate their 911 call data and conduct a needs assessment to determine instead of the police
Community responders are already successfully serving as alternatives to law enforcement around the country for calls concerning incidents like those listed below. These community responder programs should be expanded.
Connect people with needed services. After an initial response to 911 calls, community responders or case managers should connect callers with services that resolve the incident at issue, as well as any necessary longer-term services to prevent its recurrence. Effective responders seek to resolve the underlying needs of callers through services available in the community, including mediation. To meet these needs, local and state governments must ensure that sufficient services are available, such as long-term housing, facilities for crisis resolution and stabilization, supported employment, and mental and behavioral health resources.
Too often, the criminal legal system fails people who experience harm or violence, as well as the larger impacted community. In many cases, survivors and the accused belong to the same community. Restorative justice centers the specific needs of people who experience harm or violence with an eye towards healing the harmed individuals along with the community that was likewise impacted by the harm or violence. The effort to repair harm builds stronger relationships between individuals, which fortifies their community so it can better address the root causes of threats to public safety.
Examples of restorative justice practices include:
Proactive public safety measures in certain areas, such as traffic safety, can also be accomplished by civilian responders, infrastructure investments in safer road design, and policy reform without police involvement. Currently, traffic enforcement by armed officers contributes to stark racial disparities in the criminal legal system and too often leads to unnecessary police encounters, excessive use of force, and unjustified police killings.
Research consistently finds that investments in social welfare programs—including cash aid, healthcare, and housing support—advance public safety.7 To address the root causes of violence and instability, federal, state, and local governments must invest in the social safety net and infuse resources in the most vulnerable and underserved communities.
Federal, state, and local governments investments include:
Further, strategic investments in programs that specifically target common community safety concerns can be effective. Select examples of this strategy:
Traffic safety is a critical public health problem as vehicle crashes continue to increase.8 Black people are particularly vulnerable to unsafe roads, facing higher rates of traffic-related fatalities than white people. Traffic enforcement by armed officers is the primary approach to traffic safety, but police traffic enforcement does not reduce traffic fatalities and has serious adverse consequences, including police violence against Black drivers. Research by LDF’s Thurgood Marshall Institute indicates that investments in design and infrastructure can improve road safety without the adverse consequences of law enforcement encounters. Having unarmed staff conduct routine traffic enforcement and decriminalizing minor traffic offenses are also necessary to reduce the harms of contact with the criminal legal system.
Domestic violence is often seen as a public safety problem that categorically requires an aggressive police response. Nearly half of U.S. states have a mandatory arrest law, which requires police to make an arrest anytime they are called for a domestic violence incident, regardless of the survivor’s wishes. Many states also require survivors to file a police report to access victim compensation. However, after three decades of research, there is no consistent evidence that these strategies prevent or reduce domestic violence9 In fact, domestic violence arrests are often associated with long-term consequences for survivors, including increased death among Black survivors. Mandatory arrest laws have also led to increased arrests of survivors, especially Black survivors.10 The available evidence strongly suggests that survivor-centered solutions, which increase their decision-making power, can be far more effective. Examples of such solutions include investments in a Housing First model for survivors and access to survivor grants and victim compensation without filing a police report.
1. How Local Governments Are Building Alternative Public Safety Models – National League of Cities (“Between 2020 and 2022, 62% of the largest 50 cities formed at least one appropriate response program. This requires cities to build a more inclusive public safety program, in which police may not always be the primary first responder to someone in crisis.”); Reimagining Public Safety A Toolkit for Cities and Towns, YEF-RPS-Toolkit_FINAL.pdf; Expanding First Response: A Toolkit for Community Responder Programs – CSG Justice Center; see also Redefining the Role of Local Police and Public Safety – United States Conference of Mayors
2. Persistent Residential Segregation: America’s Urban Challenge (“Generations of economic and demographic shifts—facilitated by public policy—have produced a hyper-segregated metropolitan landscape. . . . Nationwide, over 80% of low-income Black people and three-quarters of low-income Latino or Hispanic people live in communities that meet the federal statutory definition for “low-income” communities. This is in contrast to just under half of low-income white people.”)
3. Nat’l Inst. of Just., Five Things About Deterrence (June 5, 2016), https://nij.ojp.gov/topics/articles/five-things-about-deterrence (“Deterrence — the crime prevention effects of the threat of punishment — is a theory of choice in which individuals balance the benefits and costs of crime.”).
4. Nat’l Inst. of Just., Arrest Convictability as a Measure of Police Performance 1, Office of Justice Programs (Apr. 23, 1982), https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/arrest-convictability-measure-police-performance-summary-report (“The arrest has long been used to measure police performance, in terms of both arrest frequency and the rate at which offenses are cleared by arrest.”).
5. See e.g. Elizabeth Hinton & DeAnza Cook, The Mass Criminalization of Black Americans: A Historical Overview, 4 Ann. Rev. Criminology 261 (2021) (“The history of law enforcement in the United States is inextricably linked to the history of slavery and settler colonialism in early America.”), https://www.annualreviews.org/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-criminol-060520-033306 ; U.S. Dep’t of Just. Bureau of Just. Stat., Special Report: Contacts Between Police and the Public, 2015 (2018), https://www.bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/cpp15.pdf;
6. A study by Vera Institute examined 911 call data from 5 cities and found that “[i[n four of the five, the most frequent incident type was some variation of complaint or request for an officer to perform a welfare check.” https://www.vera.org/downloads/publications/understanding-police-enforcement-911-analysis.pdf. This confirmed the hypothesis that “most calls for service consist of trivial non-crime related complaints and not crimes in progress. Across all sites, the most common priority types were nonemergency, which further supports this hypothesis.” Id. A Center for American Progress report similarly evaluated 911 data from 8 cities “estimates that between 33 and 68 percent of police calls for service could be handled without sending an armed officer to the scene; between 21 and 38 percent could be addressed by Community Responders; and an additional 13 to 33 percent could be dealt with administratively without sending an armed officer to the scene.” report by the Center for American Progress. A New York Times study revealed similar results; calls involving violence accounted for only 4% of 911 calls. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/19/upshot/unrest-police-time-violent-crime.html.
7. Andrew Barr & Alexander A. Smith, Fighting Crime in the Cradle The Effects of Early Childhood Access to Nutritional Assistance, 58 Journal of Human Resources 43 (2023); Jacob Vogler, Access to Healthcare and Criminal Behavior: Evidence from the ACA Medicaid Expansions, 39 Journal of Policy Analysis and Management 1166 (2020); Manasi Deshpande & Michael Mueller-Smith, Does Welfare Prevent Crime? The Criminal Justice Outcomes of Youth Removed from SSI, 137 The Quarterly Journal of Economics 2263 (2022); Caroline Palmer, David C. Phillips & James X. Sullivan, Does Emergency Financial Assistance Reduce Crime?, 169 Journal of Public Economics 34 (2019).222; Spending on social and public health services and its association with homicide in the USA: an ecological study. Sipsma HL, Canavan ME, Rogan E, et al. BMJ Open. 2017;7:e016379. doi:10.1136/bmjopen-2017-016379, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29025831/.
8. David Leonhardt, The Rise in U.S. Traffic Deaths, N.Y. Times (Dec. 11, 2023), https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/11/briefing/us-traffic-deaths.html; Nat’l Highway Traffic Safety Admin., U.S. Dep’t of Transp., Motor Vehicle Traffic Crashes as a Leading Cause of Death in the United States, 2016 and 2017 (July 2020), https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/812927.
9. The most recent meta-analysis, published in 2020, evaluated the results of 11 randomized trials that tested the effect of arrest vs. no arrest on subsequent IPV victimization. The summary estimate from the existing 11 trials was null, demonstrating that arrest has no effect on subsequent IPV victimization. Hoppe SJ, Zhang Y, Hayes BE, et al. Mandatory arrest for domestic violence and repeat offending: A meta-analysis. Aggress. Violent Behav. 2020;53:101430. In addition to randomized trials testing the effect of arrest, there have been at least 10 large-scale, longitudinal studies testing the effect of the enactment of domestic violence mandatory arrest laws on rates of IPV victimization. Mandatory arrest laws require police to make arrests in domestic violence cases, regardless of survivor wishes. Together, these studies suggest there is no effect of mandatory arrest laws on IPV homicide rates or IPV victimization rates.
10. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1359178924000375
Through litigation, policy advocacy, and community organizing, LDF works to ensure protestors can fight for change without police violence. LDF has supported the use of peaceful protest to advance civil rights and racial justice for Black communities. Defending the right to protest is a central piece of LDF’s history.
New research from LDF’s Thurgood Marshall Institute (TMI) shows that the recent elimination of gang databases in Portland, Oregon, and Chicago, Illinois, did not result in an increase in reported crime. The findings support the elimination of the gang database in New York City,
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We Are Not Lesser examines racial disparities in the Tulsa Police Department’s arrests and uses of force and offers transformative public safety policies city leaders can implement to ensure all Tulsans are safe in their communities.
In this Brief, the Thurgood Marshall Institute reviews the existing evidence on the effectiveness and consequences of police traffic enforcement and presents an affirmative vision for equitable traffic safety that does not rely on police.
This report examines three false narratives about the 2020 nationwide increase in homicides: the expansion of bail reform, practices of progressive prosecutors, and attempts to defund the police. Our analysis reveals that the empirical data contradicts these narratives.
