Rosenfeld Et Al-2019-Criminology & Public Policy

DOI: 10.1111/1745-9133.
12414
RESEARCH ARTICLE
D E - P O L I C I NG A N D T H E H O M I C I D E R A I S E
Did de-policing cause the increase in homicide rates?

Richard Rosenfeld1 Joel Wallman2
1 University of Missouri—St. Louis
2 Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation
Correspondence Research Summary: Widespread protests and demands

Richard Rosenfeld, Department of
for accountability in the wake of broadly publicized police
Criminology and Criminal Justice,
University of Missouri—St. Louis, St. Louis, killings of unarmed civilians coincided with the marked
MO 63121. upturn in homicide levels, especially in large U.S. cities, in
Email: richard_rosenfeld@umsl.edu
2015. Many observers, including prominent political fig-
We thank the special editor and reviewers for ures, claimed that de-policing caused the homicide rate
helpful comments on an earlier draft. to rise: Fearing increased legal liability and publicity,
the police employed less proactive enforcement and made
fewer arrests, producing an increase in homicide levels. We
use structural equation modeling to estimate the simultane-
ous relationship between arrest and homicide rates between
2010 and 2015 in 53 large cities. We find no evidence of an
effect of arrest rates on city homicide rates for any offense
category for any year in this period, including 2015, the year
of the spike in homicide levels.
Policy Implications: The results of our analysis reveal that

declining rates of arrest did not produce the rise in homi-
cide levels. But arrests, the chief formal reaction to crime,
can play an important supporting role in crime preven-
tion. Ample research findings have demonstrated the effec-
tiveness of proactive policing practices, such as targeted
patrol, in reducing crime rates. The success of such tactics
depends, in turn, on citizens’ belief that criminal offenders
face an appreciable risk of arrest. It is equally important,
however, that residents of communities that have experi-
enced unwarranted police violence believe that law enforce-
ment is fairly applied. Lack of trust and confidence in the
police militates against crime prevention as a co-production
Criminology & Public Policy. 2019;18:51–75. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/capp © 2019 American Society of Criminology 51
52 ROSENFELD AND WALLMAN
of police and community and may promote violence as a

form of self-help.
KEYWORDS
arrests, de-policing, homicide
1 I N T RO D U C T I O N
After falling almost continuously for more than two decades, U.S. homicide rates rose abruptly
in 2015. A dominant narrative attributed the increase to de-policing. The media catchphrase “the
Ferguson Effect” conveyed the idea that the police had disengaged from proactive enforcement out
of fear of heightened legal liability or of having their identities exposed on social or traditional media,
and that less enforcement led to more crime.
Other than a few case studies and anecdotal media reports, we are aware of no systematic nationwide
studies of the relationship between police disengagement and the rise in homicide levels. To estimate
a possible relationship between police activity and the 2015 spike in homicide rates, we examined the
association between homicide rates and arrest rates in 53 large U.S. cities between 2010 and 2015.
Our analysis is based on structural equation panel models in which the simultaneous relationship1
between homicide and arrest rates is incorporated. We found no association between reduced rates of
arrest and elevated rates of homicide after controlling for their simultaneous relationship. Whatever
sparked the 2015 homicide rise, it was not a reduction in arrest rates in large U.S. city police agencies.
2 BACKGROUND
As reports began to emerge in 2015 that homicide rates were increasing in several big cities, some
observers countered that claims of a new crime wave were overblown and that the longstanding U.S.
crime decline had not ended (Bialik, 2015; Coates, 2015; Davey & Smith, 2015; Pyrooz, Decker,
Wolfe, & Shjarback, 2016). The critics were correct that the crime drop had not ended, but they were
mistaken to downplay the significance of the homicide rise. It was not a media creation. It was real,
large, abrupt, and in need of explanation (Rosenfeld, Gaston, Spivak, & Irazola, 2017).
The nationwide homicide rate increased by 11.4%, to 4.9 homicides per 100,000 population in 2015
from 4.4 in 2014 (ucr.fbi.gov). That was the largest percentage change in homicide levels in a single
year since 1968 (Rosenfeld et al., 2017). During the same period, homicide rates in large cities grew
by 17.2%.2 Not all big cities experienced an increase in homicide rates in 2015. In some, they were
flat or fell. Others had small increases. Rosenfeld et al. (2017) found that homicide rates increased
by more than 25% between 2014 and 2015 in 14 of the 46 large cities examined, and in 9 cities, the
increases exceeded 50%. The heterogeneity in the rise in homicide levels across the big cities requires
explanation. If the de-policing explanation is correct, other things being equal, we should observe
greater homicide rate increases in cities where arrest rates were declining.
2.1 Police violence and community unrest

In August 2014, Michael Brown was shot and killed by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, a suburb
of St. Louis. Michael Brown was Black, and the officer is White. Brown was unarmed, although some
ROSENFELD AND WALLMAN 53
witness reports and the officer's testimony indicated that he was attempting to seize the officer's firearm
during the struggle that led to his death (Department of Justice, 2015; New York Times, 2014). A month
before Michael Brown was killed, Eric Garner died on Staten Island in New York after being placed
in a police chokehold. Garner was Black and unarmed; the officer who choked him is White (Baker,
Goodman, & Mueller, 2015). Other controversial police killings followed. A 12-year-old African
American boy armed with a toy gun was shot and killed by a White police officer in Cleveland
(Williams & Smith, 2015); a Black criminal suspect died while being transported in a police van in
Baltimore (Graham, 2015); and an unarmed 50-year-old Black man was fatally shot while fleeing
from a White police officer in North Charleston, South Carolina (Miller, Bever, & Kaplan, 2015).
These and other widely publicized deaths of Blacks in confrontations with the police or in police
custody sparked protests, viral social media commentary, and community unrest across the nation.
They also galvanized a social movement, Black Lives Matter, that was created, according to the move-
ment's “herstory,” in response to “the acquittal of Trayvon Martin's murderer, George Zimmerman”
(blacklivesmatter.com/about/herstory/).
It was during this period of mounting anger, protest, and unrest that homicide rates began to rise. To
many observers, including prominent public officials and opinion leaders, the timing of clamorous dis-
content with the police and the spike in homicide levels was too close to be coincidental. De-policing
was the first and is still the favored account for why homicide rates were increasing. The animating
theme was that the police disengaged from proactive enforcement activities, including arrests for minor
offenses and stops of pedestrians and motor vehicles, because they feared legal repercussions and hav-
ing their identities publicly disseminated. According to James Comey, FBI Director at the time, “I don't
know whether this explains [the homicide rise] entirely, but I do have a strong sense that some part of the
explanation is a chill wind blowing through American law enforcement over the last year, and that wind
is surely changing behavior… . [Police officers] told me, ‘We feel like we're under siege and we don't
feel much like getting out of our cars’” (Comey, 2015). Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel stated the case
for police disengagement bluntly: “We have allowed our police department to get fetal and it is having a
direct consequence. They have pulled back from the ability to interdict … they don't want to be a news
story themselves, they don't want their career ended early, and it's having an impact” (Davis, 2015).
Perhaps the most influential opinion leader championing the de-policing explanation of the
homicide rate increase is Heather Mac Donald, an essayist and political commentator with the
Manhattan Institute. In a series of newspaper editorials and a book, The War on Cops (2016), Mac
Donald developed the notion of the Ferguson Effect (a phrase coined originally by St. Louis police
chief Sam Dotson [Byers, 2014]). After the police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson and other
controversial police killings of Blacks, according to Mac Donald, the police came under attack by
protesters, the Black Lives Matters movement, the media, President Obama, and the “liberal elites.”
Fearing there could be serious legal repercussions for just doing their jobs, the police drew back. They
stopped engaging in the kinds of proactive enforcement activities, such as stopping and questioning
suspicious persons and making arrests for minor offenses, that Mac Donald and others believe are
mainly responsible for the nation's 25-year crime drop. This was James Comey's “chill wind,” which
Mayor Rahm Emanuel said had caused the police to go “fetal” and crime to go up.3
Neither Mac Donald, Comey, nor Emanuel provided systematic evidence to support their claims
that de-policing led to the rise in the homicide rate. Comey (2015) openly acknowledged that the FBI
had no such evidence. Mac Donald (2016) relied on conversations with police officers for information
about how police behavior had changed since Ferguson. The results of a Pew survey of police officers,
however, revealed similar perceptions of police disengagement and tension between the police and
Blacks. The survey of nearly 8,000 police officers found that large proportions of the officers thought
that recent violent encounters between the police and Blacks had made officers in their departments
more concerned about their safety, less likely to stop and question suspicious persons, and less likely
to use force when appropriate (Morin, Parker, Stepler, & Mercer, 2017; for similar results, see Nix,
Wolfe, & Campbell, 2018; Oliver, 2015).
Evidence from a representative national survey is helpful for learning about the perceptions and
attitudes of police officers, but it is an imperfect measure of their behavior or explanation for it.
The officers in the Pew survey were asked to report on the feelings and actions of other officers in
their department; it is unclear how they would have responded had they been asked about their own
behavior.4 The survey was administered after contentious incidents of police use of deadly force
against Blacks had taken place and the respondents were primed with an account of those events.
Yet tensions between the police and Blacks predate recent controversial incidents of police violence
(Thompson & Lee, 2004), and it is likely that a nontrivial proportion of officers would have responded
similarly had they been interviewed before the events in Ferguson, Cleveland, Baltimore, and North
Charleston. If survey data are to be used to evaluate the role of the Ferguson Effect in the rise in
homicide rates, a pre-Ferguson baseline is needed to measure the change in police perceptions and
beliefs (Rosenfeld et al., 2017). It is noteworthy in this regard that police officers who responded to
the survey after the July 2016 murder of five police officers in Dallas did not differ in their responses
from those who did so before the Dallas incident (Gramlich, 2017).
If we want to explain how police behavior influences homicide levels—or anything else—it is
better to study behavior directly. Very few studies have been conducted to date on the relationship
between the rise in homicide rates and rates of police stops, arrests, or other enforcement activities. An
investigation by journalists found that in Chicago, arrest rates fell and homicide rates increased after
the November 2015 release of a video showing a Chicago police officer shooting a Black teenager
(Arthur & Asher, 2016). A study by the University of Chicago Crime Lab (2017) reported that homi-
cide levels increased as both arrest rates and the number of police stops dropped in Chicago during
2016. Researchers at Johns Hopkins found that arrest rates fell and homicide rates rose in Baltimore
after reports spread that an African American suspect had died while being transported in a police van
(Morgan & Pally, 2016). From a study of traffic stops in Missouri, researchers found that the number
of stops and arrests dropped after the Ferguson incident, but the decrease in enforcement had no effect
on crime rates (Shjarback, Pyrooz, Wolfe, & Decker, 2017). Although suggestive, these studies are
limited in geographic scope, so their possible bearing on the national homicide trend is uncertain.
2.2 Proactive policing

The idea that police in the post-Ferguson period would become less inclined to confront citizens
engaged in prohibited behavior is not implausible. Concern for one's career, fear of public con-
demnation, and resentment at a perceived decline in citizens’ regard for police work, singly or in
combination, might well have engendered such a pulling back, especially from public-order offenses
and other minor crimes, for which officers have greater latitude in enforcement decisions.
Possible support for this view comes from a study of the effects of federal settlements and consent
decrees with police departments on their jurisdictions’ crime rates. Rushin and Edwards (2017) found
that, compared with jurisdictions that were only investigated but not then subject to a mandate, those
undergoing mandated reforms experienced increases in nearly every major crime category, although
the crime rate increases tapered off after a few years. The researchers, however, found no significant
effect of such external regulation on the rate of arrest clearances for major crimes. The crime rate
increases thus could have resulted from de-policing, but not from diminished arrest activity, or they
might have been caused by newly mandated operational requirements, such as increased paperwork,
that impaired crime control.
Those who ascribe the homicide rate increase to reduced willingness of police to curtail minor vio-
lations and question suspicious persons are invoking, whether explicitly or not, Wilson and Kelling's
(1982) “broken windows” account of crime and policing. The strategic prescription many police
departments—most prominently New York City's under William Bratton in the 1990s—derived from
this account was to police minor offending aggressively by ramping up the number of misdemeanor
arrests, summonses, and pedestrian stops for suspicious behavior. In subsequent writing, Kelling has
argued that arrests should not be the default mode of fixing broken windows (Kelling & Coles, 1997).
Whatever the tactic, the crucial element of the approach is proactive rather than reactive policing.
Several analysts have challenged the efficacy of broken-windows enforcement, with its emphasis
on order-maintenance policing, as an approach to controlling serious crime (Eck & Maguire, 2006;
Harcourt, 2001; Skogan & Frydl, 2004). Even the putative causal link between disorder and serious
crime rates has been questioned (Taylor, 2001). But in recent studies of the effect on crime rates
of targeted enforcement actions such as directed patrols, vehicle checks, pedestrian checks, pat
downs, and searches, researchers have found that such police tactics can reduce crime levels (Braga,
Papachristos, & Hureau, 2012; Weisburd, Telep, & Lawton, 2014). This research, however, has not
been focused on the crime-reduction effects of increases in arrests.
2.3 Crime and arrest rates

The heyday of research on the relationship between crime and arrest rates in the United States
occurred during the 1970s and 1980s. That research returned mixed results regarding the effect of
arrest rates on crime levels. In a widely publicized study that influenced law enforcement policy
for decades, scholars found that arresting more batterers reduced subsequent incidents of domestic
violence (Sherman & Berk, 1984). The results of multisite replications confirmed the major findings,
while revealing that the arrest rate effects varied by the employment and marital status of offenders
(Maxwell, Garner, & Fagan, 2001, 2002). An extensive review of research on the effect of arrests,
police expenditures, and police strength on crime yielded inconclusive results, which the author
attributed primarily to measurement error (Cameron, 1988). In a later study, Levitt (1998) discounted
the influence of measurement error and reported crime-reduction effects of arrests, attributing them
mainly to deterrence rather than to incapacitation, especially for property crimes.
A major issue emerged in the research on crime and arrest raes that, for many analysts, undermined
the credibility of causal interpretations of the results, no matter what they showed: the endogeneity of
arrests. It is certainly reasonable to assume, from either a deterrence or an incapacitation perspective,
that increasing arrests will reduce crime rates (e.g., Levitt, 1998; Tittle & Rowe, 1974). It is equally
plausible, however, to assume that crime, in turn, will either increase or decrease the rate of arrests. If
homicide levels rise, for example, the police may redeploy resources from other offenses to homicides,
lowering overall arrest rates. Or the police might redouble their efforts to make arrests in an effort to
curb the homicide rate increase. And if the number of homicides declines, police may reduce arrests
commensurately or shift their attention to less serious offenses. As an example, Greenberg (2014)
found that in New York City the rate of misdemeanor complaints increased as the felony arrest rate
dropped between 1988 and 2001, a pattern that might reflect such a change in police focus from
serious crimes to minor infractions. In short, the arrest rate is almost certainly affected by the crime
rate, even as the rate of arrests may also be influencing the crime rate. Failure to account for the
endogeneity of arrests to crime is likely to bias estimates of the effect of arrest rates on crime levels.
Some researchers cautioned their readers that endogeneity could have played a role in their results.5
In an important paper, Greenberg, Kessler, and Logan (1979) described the endogeneity problem in
studies of the relationship between crime and arrest levels, criticized other researchers for ignoring
it or using faulty methods to address it, and offered a strategy for overcoming endogeneity bias (see
also Fisher & Nagin, 1978). Greenberg et al. proposed that unbiased estimates of the mutual effects
of arrest rates on crime rates could be obtained from a cross-lagged panel model incorporating both
contemporaneous and lagged values of the crime rate and arrest rate. Unlike prior studies in which
researchers assumed the arrest rate to be uncorrelated with the error term of the equation (i.e., exo-
geneity), Greenberg et al. applied cross-lagged values of annual FBI Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR)
offense and arrest rates in their model to a sample of U.S. cities to remove simultaneity and found no
significant effects of arrest clearance rates on UCR crime rates between 1964 and 1970. We apply a
similar approach in the current evaluation of the effect of arrest rates on the 2015 rise in homicide levels.
3 C U R R E N T ST U DY
We evaluate the claims of proponents of the Ferguson Effect that the 2015 rise in homicide rates in
the United States resulted from a cutback in street policing. We use panel models to estimate the effect
of city arrest rates on homicide rates between 2010 and 2015, employing regression models with
lagged arrest rates to control for the simultaneous relationship between arrest rates and homicide rates.
Although the ideal predictor variables for this analysis would include directed patrols, pedestrian
stops, and other measures of police enforcement in addition to arrest activity, these indicators are
not available in standardized form for a large number of cities. City arrest data are available from the
FBI's UCR Program for both Part I and Part II offenses.
There are good reasons for assuming that police disengagement should be reflected in declining
arrest rates, especially for less serious Part II offenses, such as disorderly conduct, public drunkenness,
vagrancy, loitering, suspicion, and vandalism. We might also expect police officers who fear legal
repercussions or media exposure to make fewer arrests for some property crimes or drug possession.
Unlike homicide or other serious violent offenses, these are the kinds of law violations for which the
police have some discretion when deciding whether to make an arrest. If the police have “gone fetal,”
we should expect them to make fewer such discretionary arrests.
In prior studies of crime and arrest rates, scholars typically measured the arrest rate as the
percentage of offenses resulting in an arrest, or the arrest clearance rate. Criticisms arose regarding
the possible confounding between independent and dependent variables because a common term—
offenses—appears on both sides of the equation (e.g., Nagin, 1978; Tittle & Rowe, 1974). We avoid
this issue by using number of arrests per capita ((number of arrests / city population) × 100,000) as
our measure of the arrest rate. This measure also conforms to the de-policing explanation of the rise
in homicide levels. Advocates of the Ferguson Effect do not assert that the police were indexing their
disengagement from proactive enforcement to the crime rate. They argue that the police were simply
making fewer arrests, as well as curtailing other enforcement activities.
Commentators on the 2015 rise in homicide rates devoted specific attention to the impact on
policing of the controversy surrounding police use of deadly force against African Americans. If
de-policing resulted from the protest and social unrest associated with these incidents, it should be
particularly pronounced in Black communities. We therefore perform separate analyses of the effect
of Black and White arrest rates on city homicide rates.
Our models also include measures of racial composition, economic disadvantage, and Hispanic
immigration as controls, as well as city and year fixed effects to control for time- and city-specific
differences in homicide levels. The data span 2010–2015 and include all U.S. cities with populations
greater than 250,000 and 20 or more homicides in 2010 (n = 53).6 We use this homicide threshold
to exclude cities in which random oscillation in number of homicides (e.g., bullets that hit or miss a
vital organ) could have an appreciable effect on their homicide rate. The average homicide rate in our
sample was flat or declined during this period, except for the abrupt rise in 2015, as reported in the
following section.
4 DATA AND ME T H O D
The outcome in our analysis is the yearly UCR homicide rate per 100,000 residents of 53 large
cities between 2010 and 2015 (see the Appendix). The main explanatory variables of interest are
offense-specific arrest rates per 100,000 city residents for the same period. The arrests are partitioned
into indexes of violent offenses (sum of aggravated assault and robbery)7 ; property offenses (sum
of burglary, larceny, motor vehicle theft); drug offenses (sum of manufacture-sale and possession
of illicit drugs); weapon offenses; and minor offenses (sum of vandalism, drunkenness, disorderly
conduct, vagrancy, suspicion, curfew, loitering). We incorporate the total and race-specific city arrest
rates in our analysis. The arrest data are from the Arrests by Age, Sex, and Race UCR files retrieved
from the Inter-University Consortium of Political and Social Research.
As mentioned, we incorporate three control variables commonly used in studies of homicide
levels: city economic disadvantage, racial composition (percent Black), and Hispanic immigration.
Prior research findings have shown socioeconomic disadvantage to be strongly associated with
homicide rates in U.S. cities, metropolitan areas, and states (Land, McCall, & Cohen, 1990; McCall,
Land, & Parker, 2010; Pratt & Cullen, 2005). Ever since Du Bois's (1899) classic statement, race
has figured prominently in studies of homicide rates (e.g., Blau & Blau, 1982; Peterson & Krivo,
2010; Sampson, 1997; Sampson & Wilson, 1995). Assertions by President Trump and others that
Hispanic immigration increases the level of violent crime have received extensive news coverage
(e.g., Davis, 2018; Klein & Smith, 2018), although empirical research findings do not support these
claims (Ousey & Kubrin, 2018). The data used to construct these measures are from the 2011–2015
five-year American Community Survey. The economic disadvantage measure is derived from a factor
analysis with high loadings on the city unemployment rate (.878), median household income (–.812),
poverty rate (.956), vacancy rate (.754), and percentage of the population age 25 and older with a
college degree (–.662). The Hispanic immigration measure is from the same factor analysis, with high
loadings on the percentage of the population foreign born (.824) and percentage Hispanic (.613).8
Because the control variables exhibited little change over the 2010–2015 observation period, they are
based on a single value of the data pooled over the period.
4.1 Method
As mentioned, a major criticism of research conducted on the effects of criminal sanction levels on
crime rates is the failure to account for the fact that sanctions, such as arrests, may be both a cause and
a consequence of crime. If sanctions are dependent on crime, estimates of the effect of sanction levels on
crime rates in which this endogeneity is ignored are likely to be biased (Fisher & Nagin, 1978; Green-
berg et al., 1979). To obtain unbiased estimates of the effect of arrest rates on crime rates, therefore,
empirical methods should be used in which analysts control for the simultaneity of arrests and crime.
Structural or simultaneous equation modeling (SEM) is a method to account for instances of
simulaneity between predictors and outcomes (Wooldridge, 2010: 239–280). We use an SEM appli-
cation for cross-sectional time-series data developed by Allison and colleagues (Allison, Williams,
& Moral-Benito, 2017; Williams, Allison, & Moral-Benito, 2018) to estimate the effect of arrest
rates on homicide rates from 2010 to 2015. The SEM application accommodates both time-varying
and time-fixed predictors and provides analysts the ability to control for simultaneity between the
rate of arrests and the rate of homicides in a given year. The SEM application also includes full
information maximum likelihood (FIML) to handle missing data (Allison, 2012; Enders, 2001). These
flexible features of the ML-SEM panel model favor its use over dynamic panel models, such as the
Arellano–Bond general methods of moments GMM estimator (Arellano, 2003; Moral-Benito, 2013).9
In the current analysis, we use Allison's user-written ML-SEM program implemented as xtdpdml in
Stata 15.1 (StataCorp, College Station, TX).
ML-SEM is typically used by researchers to estimate cross-lagged panel models that contain lagged
values of the outcome (Allison et al., 2017). The results therefore represent the residual change in
the outcome—the variance in its current value that is uncorrelated with its prior value(s)—that is
explained by one or more predictors, which are often lagged values. Such models have trouble con-
verging to a unique solution when the time-varying dependent variable does not vary much between
periods (Williams et al., 2018: 28), which is true for the case of homicide rates. In such instances,
Greenberg et al. (1979) suggested using second or more distant lags of the outcome, which may not be
as strongly correlated with the current value of the outcome. But the 2010–2015 city homicide rates
are highly correlated at all lags.10 It is not surprising that maximum-likelihood estimations will have
difficulty converging to a unique solution under this condition because there is little residual variation
in the outcome left to be explained by the predictors. Our models do not include lagged values of
homicide rates, and the results therefore represent the effect of arrest rates and other predictors on the
level of the annual homicide rate between 2010 and 2015. The essential feature of ML-SEM models
we estimate is to adjust the arrest rate estimates for the year-to-year reciprocal relationship between
homicide and arrest rates.
5 RESULTS
The central empirical question we address in this study is whether de-policing, as reflected in declining
arrest rates, contributed to the 2015 rise in homicide rates. That question can be broken into four
subsidiary questions: (1) Was there a substantively meaningful increase in homicide rates in 2015? (2)
Did arrest rates drop in 2015 as protests and unrest over police violence against Blacks intensified?
(3) Were arrest rates declining before the events in Ferguson and elsewhere? (4) Did decreasing
arrest rates contribute to the increase in the 2015 city homicide rates? These questions frame our
presentation of results.
Descriptive statistics for the variables included in our analysis are presented in Table 1. The sample
of 53 large cities averaged 13.3 homicides per 100,000 residents between 2010 and 2015. Homicide
rates and arrest rates varied widely among the cities as reflected in the sizable standard deviations
around the mean values.11 The table also reveals missing data on the total and race-specific arrest
rates, particularly for property crime arrests. The FIML method adjusts the regression estimates for
missing data. As a robustness check, we also estimated the ML-SEM models on the nonmissing data
through listwise deletion of city-years with missing observations.
5.1 2015 homicide rise

The de-policing explanation of the homicide rate rise is premised on the assumption of an abrupt
increase in levels of homicide stemming from the widely publicized protests and unrest surrounding
police violence against Blacks in late 2014 and 2015. Figure 1 displays the national and average
big-city homicide rate and yearly percentage change between 2010 and 2015. During this period, the
TABLE 1 Descriptive statistics

Mean SD Min Max N
Homicide Rate 13.309 11.268 2.094 59.553 313
Total Arrest Rate
Violent 280.190 146.058 28.546 870.888 303
Property 582.597 278.536 85.290 1478.068 288
Drug 655.840 464.897 83.488 3230.304 300
Weapon 90.210 53.561 3.983 273.892 303
Minor 492.298 432.924 4.450 2600.523 303
Black Arrest Rate
Violent 757.935 379.653 104.849 1890.686 295
Property 1285.851 583.061 137.102 3330.813 280
Drug 1465.749 785.544 159.817 4477.224 292
Weapon 231.074 122.598 0.000 923.496 296
Minor 968.160 871.038 11.207 6455.582 296
White Arrest Rate
Violent 196.184 140.206 18.778 739.892 297
Property 524.375 282.755 67.821 1351.444 282
Drug 504.464 336.964 22.076 1563.827 294
Weapon 56.201 45.564 2.236 284.779 297
Minor 434.334 354.907 .304 1923.067 297
Percent Black 24.873 18.652 3.007 83.920 318
Econ. Disadv. 0.000 0.964 −1.724 3.644 318
Hisp. Immigration 0.000 .878 −1.264 2.354 318
Notes. Nmax = n (53 cities) × t (6 years). Variable definitions:
Homicide Rate = homicides per 100,000 population
Violent arrest rate = aggravated assault + robbery arrests per 100,000 population
Property arrest rate = burglary + larceny + motor vehicle arrests per 100,000 population
Drug arrest rate = drug arrests per 100,000 population
Weapon arrest rate = weapon arrests per 100,000
Minor arrest rate = vandalism + drunkenness + disorderly conduct + vagrancy +
suspicion + curfew + loitering arrests per 100,000 population
Percent Black = percentage of population Black or African-American
Econ. Disadv. = factor scores (see text for description)
Hisp. Immigration = factor scores (see text for description).
big-city homicide rate exhibited small fluctuations until 2015, when it increased by 15.6% over the
rate in 2014 and by 12.3% over the sample average of 13 homicides per 100,000 between 2010 and
2014. The national homicide rate exhibited a similar temporal pattern, increasing by 11.4% between
2014 and 2015. Big-city homicide rates did increase sharply in 2015.12 The next question is whether
arrest rates dropped at the same time.
5.2 Declining arrest rates

The average yearly arrest rates between 2010 and 2015 for the 53-city sample are shown in Figure 2.
Figures 3 and 4 display the race-specific arrest rates during the same period. The figures reveal that
in nearly every instance, arrest rates did decrease between 2014 and 2015 when protests of police
16
Ferguson 15.65%
3.99%
14 -3.37%
-7.50% .38%
12
Sample (N=53)
10
National
6
-2.08% 0.00% 11.36%
-4.26% -2.22%
4
2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015
FIGURE 1 Sample and national homicide trends, 2010–2015

Source. Uniform Crime Reports.
900
Ferguson
800
Drug
700
Property
600
500 Minor
400
Violent
300
200
Weapon
100
0
2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015
FIGURE 2 Average arrest rates per 100,000 population in large U.S. cities, 2010–2015
violence against Blacks were escalating. The trends do not offer strong support for a Ferguson Effect
on police enforcement activities, however, because arrest rates had been dropping for several years
before the controversial police killings in Ferguson and elsewhere across the nation.
There is also no evidence of a sharper drop in arrest rates in 2015 than in earlier years, as would
be expected if de-policing accelerated after Ferguson, with the possible exception of the rate of drug
arrests, particularly among Whites (see Figure 4). Finally, if de-policing spurred the homicide rate
increase, we might expect to observe a greater falloff in Black than in White arrest rates in 2015,
resulting from heightened tensions and police disengagement in Black communities. But no such
pattern is evident from the race-specific arrest trends presented in Figures 3 and 4.
The data displayed in Figures 2–4 show a reduction in arrest rates coinciding with the 2015 homi-
cide rate rise. The decrease in arrest rates in 2015, however, seems to be an extension of preexisting
2000
Ferguson
1800
1600 Drug
Property
1400
1200 Minor
1000
Violent
800
600
400
Weapon
200
0
2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015
FIGURE 3 Average black arrests per 100,000 black population in large U.S. cities, 2010–2015
700
Ferguson
600 Property Drug
500
Minor
400
300
Violent
200
100 Weapon
0
2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015
FIGURE 4 Average white arrests per 100,000 white population in large U.S. cities, 2010–2015
downward trends rather than a Ferguson Effect. Nevertheless, the average arrest trends could mask
sharper arrest rate declines in cities with larger homicide rate increases and obscure possible effects
of arrest rates on homicide levels. As a preliminary assessment of that possibility, Figure 5 displays a
scatterplot of the percentage change in homicide rates by the percentage change in arrest rates in each
city between 2014 and 2015. The arrest rates in the figure are the sum of the offense-specific arrest
rates shown earlier. The homicide rates are scaled on the vertical axis of the scatterplot, and the arrest
rates are scaled on the horizontal axis.
At first glance, the results in Figure 5 appear to offer some support for the de-policing explanation
of the 2015 homicide rate rise. The regression line in the figure slopes downward from the top-left to
the bottom-right quadrant of the scatterplot, indicating that cities with decreases (or smaller increases)
in arrest rates experienced larger increases in homicide rates between 2014 and 2015. The negative
association between the changes in homicide and arrest rates is statistically significant (p = .033,
100%
Cleveland
80%
Homicide Rate Percentage Change

Baltimore
60%
Sacramento
40%
r=-.312
20%
0%
-60% -40% -20% 0% 20% 40% 60%
-20%
-40%
-60%
Arrest Rate Percentage Change
FIGURE 5 Scatter plot of percentage change in homicide rate by percentage change in arrest rate, 2014–2015
two-tailed), although it is modest in size (r = –.312). The significant association between the change in
homicide and arrest rates, however, is driven by a few outliers (Cleveland, Baltimore, and Sacramento)
that had very large increases in homicide levels and sizable declines in arrest levels between 2014
and 2015. If any one of those cities is omitted from the sample, the association between the change
in homicide and arrest rates is no longer significant at the 5% level. Finally, the bivariate association
depicted in the scatterplot does not take into account the possible reciprocal relationship between
homicide and arrest rates or the effects of other conditions, such as economic disadvantage, racial
composition, and immigration, on city homicide rates. The SEM panel models adjust the estimated
effects of arrest rates on homicide levels for both of those potential influences.
5.3 Effect of de-policing on the rise in homicide levels

The results of the ML-SEM panel models are presented in Tables 2–4. Table 2 displays the estimated
effects of the arrest rates on the city homicide rates for the years 2011 through 2015. The first year
in the series (2010) is omitted because the estimates are conditioned on the prior year's correla-
tion between the arrest and homicide rates.13 Tables 3 and 4 present comparable results from the
race-specific arrest models.
Given the substantive interest in the possibility of a time-varying effect of arrest rates on the city
homicide rates and the specific focus on the effect of arrest rates on the 2015 rise in homicide levels,
we estimated models permitting the within-city arrest rates and controls to vary freely over time. With
a single exception (the effect of White weapon arrest rates on homicide rates), this model specification
converged to a unique solution.
If declining arrest rates spurred the 2015 homicide rate rise, we should observe significant and
negative coefficients on the arrest measures in 2015, particularly for those offenses permitting more
police discretion, such as minor crimes and perhaps also drug and some property crimes. Table 2
shows that the total (all race) arrest rates were not negatively associated with city homicide rates,
regardless of the year, for any offense type other than minor offenses. In some instances, a significant
positive association exists between arrest rates and homicide rates. Those results suggest that the
police make more arrests in years when homicide rates are high and fewer when homicide rates are
TABLE 2 Homicide rates regressed on total (Black, White, and other race) arrest rates in large U.S. cities,
2011–2015a
Arrest Rate Violent Property Drug Weapon Minor
Homicide Rate
2011 .0348* .0044 .0067 .0689** −.0042
(.0171) (.0089) (.0054) (.0255) (.0074)
2012 .0364* .0054 .0077 .0774** −.0041
(.0165) (.0090) (.0063) (.0277) (.0075)
2013 .0341* .0133 .0106 .0783** −.0032
(.0170) (.0093) (.0059) (.0256) (.0097)
2014 .0442* .0160 .0147 .1093* −.0020
(.0192) (.0118) (.0076) (.0470) (.0131)
2015 .0535* .0294 .0331 .1558** −.0017
(.0251) (.0302) (.0194) (.0485) (.0165)
Wald Chi2 245.96** 329.10** 210.49** 877.62** 851.00**
BIC 5592.99 6002.85 6370.68 5080.58 6369.46
AIC 5488.57 5900.39 6268.23 4978.13 6267.01
a
ML-SEM panel models. Models include measures of racial composition, economic disadvantage, Hispanic immigration, and fixed
effects (alpha), not shown. Robust standard errors in parentheses.
* p < .05. ** p < .01.
lower. We do observe a negative effect of the rate of arrests for minor offenses on the city homicide
rates, but the effect is not statistically significant. These results offer little evidence to support the
claim that a Ferguson Effect caused the 2015 rise in homicide rates.
The results for the effect of race-specific arrest rates on the city homicide rate, shown in Tables 2
and 3, comport with those for the total arrest rates. Again, we observe no significant negative effects
of the arrest rates on the homicide rate, and in a few instances, a significant positive effect is found.
The arrest rates for minor and property offenses are negatively associated with the homicide rate
but only for Whites, which is a puzzling result if de-policing amid community tensions surrounding
police violence against Blacks led to the increase in homicide rates. In any event, the effects are not
statistically significant, and overall the race-specific results do not support the de-policing explanation
of the rise in homicide rates.
5.4 Predicted homicide rates and model fit

Figures 6 and 7 illustrate the improvement our full panel model provides in predicting homicide rates
when compared with a model that includes only arrest rates and no covariates. In other words, how
does the arrest–homicide rate relationship change after controlling for other factors affecting big-city
homicide rates? Comparing the observed and predicted homicide rates is also a way to assess how
well the regression models fit the data used to estimate them.
Figures 6 and 7 are based on the arrest rates for minor crimes, the type of arrest most likely to be
affected by a pullback in police enforcement. The arrest rates are for persons of all races. Figure 6
shows the relationship between the observed homicide rates and the predicted homicide rates from a
model that does not contain the racial composition, economic disadvantage, and Hispanic immigration
covariates. The observed homicide rates for each city in 2015 are scaled on the vertical axis of the
scatterplot, and the predicted rates are scaled on the horizontal axis. Figure 7 displays comparable
TABLE 3 Homicide rates regressed on Black arrest rates in large U.S. cities, 2011–2015a
Arrest Rate Violent Property Drug Weapon Minor
Homicide Rate
2011 .0107* .0042* .0038* .0211 .0032
(.0052) (.0020) (.0015) (.0241) (.0024)
2012 .0117* .0049* .0048* .0199 .0028
(.0052) (.0022) (.0019) (.0191) (.0020)
2013 .0100 .0083** .0053** .0244 .0047
(.0052) (.0029) (.0016) (.0220) (.0031)
2014 .0131* .0094 .0080* .0318 .0068
(.0059) (.0056) (.0036) (.0248) (.0045)
2015 .0197 .0157 .0170 .0578 .0090
(.0103) (.0120) (.0093) (.0425) (.0069)
Wald Chi2 301.08** 831.03** 514.08** 349.01** 339.44**
BIC 6205.86 6387.83 6746.73 5685.20 6767.90
AIC 6103.40 6285.38 6644.27 5582.74 6665.44
a SEM panel models. Models include measures of racial composition, economic disadvantage, Hispanic immigration, and fixed effects
(alpha), not shown. Robust standard errors in parentheses.
*
p < .05. ** p < .01.
TABLE 4 Homicide rates regressed on White arrest rates in large U.S. cities, 2011–2015a
Arrest Rate Violent Propertyb Drug Weaponb Minor
Homicide Rate
2011 .0434 −.0007 .0099 .0069 −.0053
(.0484) (.0028) (.0062) (.0634) (.0063)
2012 .0506 −.0007 .0104 .0069 −.0052
(.0520) (.0028) (.0060) (.0634) (.0065)
2013 .0441 −.0007 .0124* .0069 −.0046
(.0522) (.0028) (.0050) (.0634) (.0064)
2014 .0471 −.0007 .0152* .0069 −.0032
(.0514) (.0028) (.0059) (.0634) (.0076)
2015 .0525 −.0007 .0359* .0359* .0069
(.0592) (.0028) (.0177) (.0069) (−.0050)
Wald Chi2 377.08** 188.36** 367.37** 164.43** 1253.31**
BIC 5431.82 5989.26 6230.11 4974.50 6223.67
AIC 5329.37 5886.80 6127.65 4872.05 6121.21
a
SEM panel models. Models include measures of racial composition, economic disadvantage, Hispanic immigration, and fixed effects
(alpha), not shown. Robust standard errors in parentheses.
b Model would not converge to a solution when these right-hand side variables were free to vary over time.
*
p < .05. ** p < .01.
results from the model containing the covariates. In all other respects, including controls for the
simultaneous relationship between homicide and arrest rates, the two models are identical.
The results in Figure 6 depict a negligible relationship between the observed and predicted homicide
rates. By contrast, we observe a strong association between the observed and predicted homicide rates
70
60
Observed Rates 50
40
30
R² = .025
20
10
0
0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45
Predicted Rates
FIGURE 6 Observed and predicted homicide rates, 2015 (trimmed model)

Source. Uniform Crime Reports; ML-SEM results.
70
60
R² = .674
50
Observed Rates
40
30
20
10
0
-10 0 10 20 30 40 50 60
-10
Predicted Rates
FIGURE 7 Observed and predicted homicide rates, 2015 (full model)

Source. Uniform Crime Reports; ML-SEM results.
when estimated from the model that includes the covariates, as shown in Figure 7. Taken together,
the results indicate that the panel regression model fits the homicide data rather well but only because
the 2015 big-city homicide rates are associated with demographic and structural conditions over
which the police obviously have no control. The results shown in Figure 7 indicate, however, that
approximately 33% of the variance in big-city homicide rates is not explained by the full model.
The model omits other factors that influenced the 2015 rise in big-city homicide rates. We offer
suggestions for future research on those factors after evaluating the robustness of the current results.
5.5 Robustness tests

We tested the robustness of the results against alternative model specifications, the treatment of
missing data, and linearity in the relationship between homicide and arrest rates (results not shown).
5.5.1 Model specification

The estimated effects of arrest rates on city homicide rates shown in Tables 2–4 are conditioned on
city racial composition, economic disadvantage, and Hispanic immigration and on fixed effects for
unmeasured variables. In most estimations, the effect of racial composition on the yearly homicide
rates is positive and significant: Homicide rates are higher in cities with a larger proportion of Black
residents. Less consistent results were found for the effect of a city's level of economic disadvantage
on its homicide rate. The effect of economic disadvantage on the homicide rate is uniformly positive
(i.e., higher homicide rates in more disadvantaged cities) but often not statistically significant. The
nonsignificant results for the economic disadvantage measure are attributable in large part to its strong
correlation with city racial composition (r = .720). The positive effect of economic disadvantage on
homicide is generally significant with the measure of racial composition omitted from the models.
The effect of the Hispanic immigration measure on the city homicide rate is uniformly negative
(i.e., lower homicide rates in cities with more immigrants and Hispanics) but rarely statistically
significant.
The arrest rates are also modestly correlated with the control variables in many instances, and so we
re-estimated the city homicide models with all possible combinations of the control variables included
in the model, including omission of all of the controls. The results of these estimations differ somewhat
from those of our main models including all controls, but in no case do they disclose a negative and
significant effect of the arrest rates on the city homicide rate in 2015 or in any other year after 2010.
5.5.2 Missing data

We used FIML to adjust the estimates in our main models for missing data. To check the robustness of
the results, we re-estimated the models on the nonmissing data through listwise deletion of city-years
with missing observations. The results reveal no instances in which the arrest rates had a negative and
significant effect on the city homicide rates.
5.5.3 Linearity
The ML-SEM models assume a linear relationship between the outcome and predictors (Allison et al.,
2017). It is possible, however, that the relationship between city homicide and arrest rates is nonlinear.
For example, a declining rate of arrests could produce an increase in the rate of homicides only after
reaching a certain minimum threshold. To assess nonlinearity, we included a squared term for the
arrest rate in each homicide model. This procedure produced no evidence of a quadratic relationship
between the homicide and city arrests rates.14
In summary, the results of our main ML-SEM estimations seem to be robust against reasonable
departures from underlying assumptions regarding model specification, the treatment of missing data,
and linearity in the relationship between the city homicide and arrest rates. We conclude that arrest
rates for violent, property, drug, weapon, and minor offenses are either unrelated or positively related
to homicide rates in our sample of 53 large cities between 2010 and 2015. Whether other aspects
of de-policing, such as a possible drop in police stops or targeted patrols in high-crime urban areas,
contributed to the homicide rate increase remains to be determined in future research.
6 DIS CUSSION
The abrupt rise in U.S. homicide rates in 2015 took most observers, including most criminologists,
by surprise. Homicide and other serious crime rates had been falling for more than two decades.
The 2015 turnabout in homicide levels evidently resulted from an “exogenous shock” not captured in
standard explanatory models of crime trends (Rosenfeld, 2018). Several prominent public officials and
opinion leaders attributed the rise in homicide rates to de-policing: a police pullback from proactive
enforcement amid protest and community unrest over police violence against Blacks.
We investigated the de-policing explanation of the increase in homicide levels in panel regression
models of homicide rates, arrest rates, and control variables in 53 large U.S. cities between 2010
and 2015. The models allow for the simultaneity (mutual influence) of the arrest and homicide rates
in each year after 2010. We reasoned that if the de-policing claim were correct, the arrest rates,
especially for minor offenses, should have a significant negative effect on the homicide rate in 2015.
The results of our analysis provide little support for the de-policing explanation of the rise in homicide
levels.
6.1 Limitations
There are several limitations to our analysis. We measured de-policing with arrest rates, but making
arrests is only one way the police can influence crime levels. In fact, some analysts have proposed that
arrests represent the failure of the police to prevent crime; if crimes are averted by enhanced police
presence at crime hot spots, for example, no arrests are necessary (Lum & Nagin, 2017; Nagin, Solow,
& Lum, 2015). We are sympathetic to this view, but we would also point out that some minimum
level of arrests is needed to maintain the credibility of proactive enforcement actions such as targeted
patrols. Nonetheless, future research should be aimed at examining the effect on the rise of homicide
levels of possible declines in forms of proactive policing other than arrests.
The outcome measure in our analyses is the total homicide rate, which consists of homicides
committed under all circumstances. We might not expect the rate of arrests or other police enforce-
ment activities to have the same effect on, say, domestic homicide levels as on the rate of killings
resulting from street crimes such as robbery. In future research, analysts should investigate the effects
of de-policing on homicide trends partitioned by the circumstance of the event.
Our results are also limited to the spatial and temporal units of analysis used in the study. Cities,
especially the large cities in the current research, are composed of neighborhoods that vary substan-
tially in both homicide and arrest rates (Peterson & Krivo, 2010). The use of cities as the spatial unit
of analysis could mask de-policing effects on neighborhood homicide rates. The same logic applies to
the use of years as the temporal unit of analysis. De-policing effects on homicide levels conceivably
could occur rapidly, over just a few months, and therefore may not be captured in models of annual
homicide rates. But our results suggest that such monthly effects, if they exist, dissipate over the
course of a year. Although data sparseness would be an issue, future research based on subcity areas
and monthly homicide rates could be used to detect these localized and rapid fluctuations in homicide
levels.
A final limitation of the current analysis of the 2015 homicide rate increase is that it is focused
only on homicides rather than on the full spectrum of street crimes. To the extent that de-policing,
especially decreased efforts to suppress minor law-breaking, results in more crime, we should have
seen an increase in rates of street crime of every level of seriousness. The crime rate increase of
2015, however, does not comport with this prediction (Donohue, 2017; Pyrooz et al., 2016) and thus
presents a challenge not only to the de-policing hypothesis but also to other explanations that would
predict a generalized increase in crime levels. The 11.4% spike in the 2015 national homicide rate was
accompanied by a rise in the rate of other violent crime of only 3.0%. The property crime rate fell by
3.4%.15 One reason for this divergence in crime growth could be a decreased willingness of citizens,
including victims, to report crimes to the police.
6.2 Future research

Desmond, Papachristos, and Kirk (2016) found that calls for police service dropped temporarily
in Milwaukee after a highly controversial local incident of police violence. Fewer reports of crime
to the police could result in a lower overall rate of (reported) crime, but this would not affect the
homicide rate because it is unlikely that the number of reported homicides would have declined
appreciably. De-policing could conceivably reduce the amount of calls for police service if citizens
did not believe the police would be responsive. Even if the police did not pull back from proactive
enforcement, however, citizens might be increasingly disinclined to contact them, even to report a
crime, because of reduced confidence that the police would respond effectively or fairly. Mounting
distrust and diminished police legitimacy, especially in Black communities in the wake of widespread
protests against police brutality, could reduce reliance on the police for assistance and protection, as
documented by Desmond et al. (2016), and increase the number of homicides as a form of “self-help”
(Black, 1983; Rosenfeld et al., 2017; Tyler & Jackson, 2014). Either in tandem with or as a substitute
for the de-policing hypothesis, a police legitimacy crisis sparked by racially charged police violence
should be pursued in future research as an alternative explanation of the 2015 rise in homicide levels.
In addition to the limitations of the current analysis mentioned, researchers examining recent
homicide trends must also contend with a demographic dimension of the recent rise in homicide
rates that has garnered little attention or research: the increase in homicide levels among Whites.
Non-Hispanic White homicide victimization and offending rates also rose sharply in 2015 (Rosenfeld
et al., 2017). The upsurge in the rate of White homicides of ∼9%, although coinciding with the larger
homicide rate increase among Blacks, does not fit as easily into the narratives that attribute the rise
in number of homicides to de-policing or compromised police legitimacy. Those explanations were
intended to apply to the nexus of Black anger, police withdrawal, and Black violence. It seems wise
to look elsewhere to explain the rise in White homicide levels.
One plausible hypothesis directs attention to the illicit drug markets associated with the opioid
epidemic, which has been disproportionately concentrated in the White population. Increasing demand
for illicit drugs attracts more sellers into street drug markets, and violence is a potent enforcement
mechanism for settling disputes among sellers and between buyers and sellers over sales locations,
suppliers, price, purity, and other terms of trade. Whites are not immune to drug market violence;
the number of drug-related homicides among Whites rose by 19% between 2014 and 2015 (see
also Rosenfeld, 2017).16 Although the growth in the number of drug-related homicides accounted
for a small share of the overall increase in homicide levels (see Rosenfeld and Fox, in press), the
hypothesis linking a portion of the White homicide rate rise to the opioid epidemic and expanding drug
markets should be pursued. Future research should be aimed at evaluating the possible contribution
of expanding drug markets to the rise in homicide levels.
6.3 Policy implications

It is difficult to recommend policy reforms when the practice or condition under consideration, in this
case a reduction in arrest rates, does not seem to be responsible for the problem the practice is supposed
to have caused. We have found little evidence that the 2015 rise in big-city homicide rates resulted
from declining arrest rates for violent, property, drug, weapon, and minor crimes. We acknowledge
that arrest rates do not represent the full array of police enforcement strategies. Nonetheless, they do
play an important role in the arsenal of police crime-control activities. In developing this argument
and associated policy recommendations, we necessarily must move, with due caution, beyond the
limits of the results of the current study.
In principle, arrest activity can have a main effect on crime levels and it can also bolster the effect
of proactive policing. The main effect is to remove offenders from the streets, at least for a time,
and to deter them and others from committing crimes in the future. The knock-on role of arrests is
to strengthen the crime-reduction effects of other proactive activities. If would-be offenders believe
their chances of being arrested for engaging in crime are slim to none, the effects of hot-spots patrols,
vehicle and pedestrian stops, and other proactive strategies on crime will likely diminish rapidly.
Arrests constitute the punitive bulwark that maintains the credibility and effectiveness of proactive
policing.
Proactive policing has been shown to be highly effective in reducing crime rates when targeted
to geographic areas where crime is heavily concentrated (Braga et al., 2014). Targeted enforcement
does not seem to displace crimes to other areas, nor does it necessarily aggravate tensions between
the police and community residents (Kochel & Weisburd, 2017; Telep, Weisburd, Gill, Vitter, &
Teichman, 2014; Weisburd, 2016). We conclude that effective responses to crime spikes, whenever
they occur, must include a strong dose of hot-spots policing.
For the reasons noted earlier, arrest levels will play an indispensible supporting role in hot-spots
strategies. The volume of arrests for specific offenses needed to maximize the crime impacts of tar-
geted patrols and other proactive policing strategies then becomes a key empirical question that should
be addressed by crime analysts or research partners who work with local crime and enforcement data.
But hot-spots policing cannot be the only response to the recent rise in homicide rates or other
crime rate increases, especially those that might be causally related in some way to controversial
police violence and community protest. The hot-spots strategy should be nested in a broader policy
designed by a coalition of stakeholders, including community groups, policy makers, and the police,
whose chief objective should be to reduce avoidable police violence against citizens and address
community concerns about the incidents that do occur. The primary task as far as crime is concerned
is to keep lines of communication between the police and affected communities as open as possible,
make certain that all instances of police use of deadly force are investigated thoroughly and without
prejudice, and ensure that illegal conduct by officers is brought to light and dealt with justly. In some
jurisdictions, existing departmental procedures command sufficient community trust and support to
achieve these ends without supervision by external authorities. In others, police legitimacy may have
deteriorated to the point that independent investigations and findings will be required.
We have no illusions about the ease with which these recommendations can be implemented or
about their effects, at least in the short run, on crime control. In all cases, they will require widespread
and ongoing contact between the police and community residents that extends well beyond the
periodic meetings between police officials and neighborhood organizations that nearly all police
departments now hold.
All police officers, not just those in a department's community policing unit, should be expected
to devote part of their time on the job to engaging with residents about community problems, their
expectations of the police, and their satisfaction with police performance. The immediate objective is
to prepare the way for and elicit community input and response to proposed changes in enforcement
strategy and broader policy reforms. The ultimate goal of extensive police–community engagement
is to enhance police legitimacy, especially where or when it has been tarnished by controversial
use-of-force incidents, on the assumption that heightened legitimacy will increase calls for police
service, strengthen citizen cooperation in criminal investigations, and reduce the likelihood that
citizens will settle disputes through preemptive and retaliatory violence (Tyler & Jackson, 2014).
Positioning hot-spots enforcement strategies in supportive coalitions of community partners
devoted to preventing unwarranted police violence against citizens—that rest in turn on widespread
police–community engagement—is a promising way to address the spikes in crime, such as the
2015 rise in homicide rates, that accompany and possibly result from contentious incidents of police
use of force. De-policing, at least as measured by declining arrest rates, did not have a significant
effect on city homicide rates in recent years, but arrests will play an important supportive role in this
multipronged effort to stem future crime rate increases associated with controversial police violence.
END NOTES
1 We use the terms “simultaneous” and “reciprocal” interchangeably in this article to refer to mutual or two-way causal
relationships between variables.
2
In cities with populations greater than 250,000 and 30 or more homicides in 2014 (Rosenfeld et al., 2017).
3
The de-policing argument did not originate with the increase in homicide rates in 2015 nor with these proponents
of it. Claims that reductions in aggressive policing eventuate in crime rate spikes have a long history. In 1968, for
example, presidential candidate Richard Nixon argued that the increase in U.S. crime rates in the 1960s was a result of
court-mandated policing reforms that strengthened the rights of criminal suspects, such as the Miranda and Escobedo
decisions, and had the effect, he said, of “hamstringing” police and empowering criminals (Nixon, 1968).
4
A frequently observed example of such a potential divergence is that when asked about socially disapproved behaviors,
survey respondents typically estimate that others engage in them more than they do themselves (Hoorens & Harris,
1995).
5 For example, Levitt (1998: 365) noted that “the results of the paper must be interpreted with the caveat that
endogeneity may be present.” Tittle and Rowe (1974: 460) cautioned that “the problem of causal order is one which
remains problematic.”
6 The Uniform Crime Reports notes that 74 cities had populations greater than 250,000 in 2010 (ucr.fbi.gov/
crime-in-the-u.s/2010/crime-in-the-u.s.-2010).
7 Rapes are omitted because of well-known measurement issues in the reporting and recording of rapes and because
the UCR was transitioning to a revised definition of rape from its “legacy” definition during the period under
investigation.
8 The two factors were retained from a rotated orthogonal solution and had eigenvalues > 1.0. The unrotated results are
substantively similar.
9 For applications of the Arellano–Bond panel model to the relationship between crime rates and rates of police stops,
see Rosenfeld and Fornango (2014, 2017).
10 The Pearson's correlation between the current and past values of the homicide rate in our data varies from a minimum
of .884 to a maximum of .972.
11 Despite the variance around the homicide and arrest rate means, inspection of skewness and kurtosis statistics (not
shown) did not necessitate transformation of the variables to induce univariate normality. All results not shown are
available from the authors by request.
12
Pyrooz et al. (2016) compared homicide trends for the 12 months before and 12 months after the Ferguson incident in
81 of the 105 U.S. cities greater than 200,000 in population. They did not find a statistically significant increase in the
rates of property, violent, or total crime. This is perhaps not surprising as their time frame did not capture all of 2015's
large-city homicide rate spike. Robbery was the single crime in which a significant increase occurred. They did find,
however, marked upturns in homicide rates in cities with perennially high crime rates, large Black populations, and
low socioeconomic status.
13
Inspection of our models revealed that in most instances the model errors are heteroskedastic. We therefore
specified our models with Huber–White robust standard errors (see Kaufman, 2013). The models include controls
for the time-invariant predictors (racial composition, economic disadvantage, Hispanic immigration) and the city
fixed-effects parameters, which are not shown.
14
The squared arrest rates are not included in the main models presented in Tables 2–4.
15 See ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2015/crime-in-the-u.s.-2015/tables/table-1.
16 Based on Supplementary Homicide Reports data made available to the authors by James A. Fox and Emma E. Fridel.
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AU T H O R S' BIOG RA PH I E S
Richard Rosenfeld is an emeritus professor of criminology and criminal justice at the University
of Missouri—St. Louis. His research interests include the study of crime trends and crime control
policy.
Joel Wallman is director of research at The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation. He oversees
HFG-sponsored research, with special interests in violent crime in the U.S. and Latin America and
political violence worldwide.
How to cite this article: Rosenfeld R, Wallman J. Did de-policing cause the increase
in homicide rates? Criminology & Public Policy. 2019;18:51–75. https://doi.org/10.1111/
1745-9133.12414
APPENDIX: City Sample (N = 53)
ALBUQUERQUE LOUISVILLE
ATLANTA MEMPHIS
AUSTIN MILWAUKEE
BALTIMORE MINNEAPOLIS
BOSTON NASHVILLE
BUFFALO NEW ORLEANS
CHARLOTTE NEWARK
CHICAGO NEW YORK
CLEVELAND OAKLAND
COLORADO SPRINGS OKLAHOMA CITY
COLUMBUS PHILADELPHIA
CORPUS CHRISTI PHOENIX
DALLAS PITTSBURGH
DENVER PORTLAND
DETROIT SACRAMENTO
DURHAM SAN DIEGO
FORT WORTH SAN ANTONIO
FRESNO SAN FRANCISCO
GREENSBORO SAN JOSE
HOUSTON SEATTLE
INDIANAPOLIS ST. LOUIS
JERSEY CITY STOCKTON
KANSAS CITY TUCSON
LAS VEGAS TULSA
LEXINGTON WASHINGTON
LONG BEACH WICHITA
LOS ANGELES

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DOI: 10.1111/1745-9133.

Did de-policing cause the increase in homicide rates?

Correspondence Research Summary: Widespread protests and demands

Policy Implications: The results of our analysis reveal that

of police and community and may promote violence as a

2.1 Police violence and community unrest

2.2 Proactive policing

2.3 Crime and arrest rates

5.1 2015 homicide rise

TABLE 1 Descriptive statistics

5.2 Declining arrest rates

FIGURE 1 Sample and national homicide trends, 2010–2015

Homicide Rate Percentage Change

5.3 Effect of de-policing on the rise in homicide levels

5.4 Predicted homicide rates and model fit

FIGURE 6 Observed and predicted homicide rates, 2015 (trimmed model)

FIGURE 7 Observed and predicted homicide rates, 2015 (full model)

5.5 Robustness tests

5.5.1 Model specification

5.5.2 Missing data

6.2 Future research

6.3 Policy implications

APPENDIX: City Sample (N = 53)

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