Police Stops Go Up, Citizen Complaints Go Down — What Gives?

The Milwaukee Police Department has just released some new data on traffic and subject stops. There is a fascinating story here on policing strategy. Since 2007, Milwaukee has experiened a dramatic increase in the number of stops: both traffic and subject stops are up close to 250%. This has been part of a deliberate strategy to increase the number of police-citizen contacts, especially in high-crime neighborhoods. (The MPD has also been very active over the past four years in promoting uncoerced police-citizen contacts, too.) The objectives are to gather intelligence, disrupt criminal activity, and enhance community perceptions of safety in public spaces.

As hoped, crime has indeed gone down considerably since 2007: violent crime is down 24%, and property crime is down 21%. Whether and to what extent the increased-stops strategy has caused the crime drop is uncertain — the MPD has also made some other significant changes in the past four years, and, in any event, crime has been dropping nationwide — but the causal claim strikes me as at least facially plausible. Providing some additional support is a month-by-month breakdown of auto theft and robbery data: in general, in months when stops have lagged, auto thefts and robberies have gone up; in months when stops have increased, auto thefts and robberies have dropped.

But safety has a cost.

Continue ReadingPolice Stops Go Up, Citizen Complaints Go Down — What Gives?

No Harm, No Foul — But How Do You Know If There Was Harm?

Yesterday, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear a case that gives the Court an opportunity to clarify a longstanding ambiguity in harmless error law.  Even if a defendant’s procedural rights have been violated at trial, a conviction will not be reversed on appeal if the error was harmless.  However, the Court has at different times articulated the harmless error standard in two different ways, without ever clearly indicating whether the two formulations are substantively different and, if so, which one is preferred.

In the new case, Vasquez v. United States (No. 11-199), the defendant’s cert. petition focused squarely on this ambiguity, arguing that the majority opinion below (635 F.3d 889 (7th Cir. 2011)) rested on one formulation, while the dissenting opinion rested on the other.  In Vasquez’s view, the choice of harmless error standard is more-or-less dispositive in his case, thus making the case an appropriate platform for deciding which standard is the right one.  In its response, however, the government disputes that there is any substantive difference between the standards.

Here are the (allegedly) competing standards.

Continue ReadingNo Harm, No Foul — But How Do You Know If There Was Harm?

U.S. Probation Population Continues to Drop: Who’s Leading the Way and Why

The Bureau of Justice Statistics released a new report yesterday showing that the number of adults under community supervision declined by 1.3 percent in 2010.  Entitled Probation and Parole in the United States, 2010, the report summarizes the most recent national data on community supervision.  The decline in 2010 built on a smaller drop in 2009, and may point toward a long-term retreat from the massive increase in the American supervised population that occurred in the 1980′s and 1990′s.

Yet, even following a two-year drop, the supervised population stood at 4,887,900 at the end of 2010, or about one in every 48 adults.  This compares to a supervised population of less than 1.4 million in 1980.

The supervised population includes both probationers and those released from prison to community supervision.  (BJS refers to the latter population as “parolees,” although many jurisdictions no longer use the term “parole.”)  The overall drop in the supervised population was driven entirely by a 1.7 percent decline in probationers; the number of parolees actually increased slightly in 2010.  Like the overall drop, the probation decline in 2010 built on a smaller drop in 2009.

Why are fewer Americans on probation?  The report provides no definitive answers, but some clues are apparent.

Continue ReadingU.S. Probation Population Continues to Drop: Who’s Leading the Way and Why
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