Many Republican political candidates and leaders accused their Democratic counterparts of being soft on crime during the run-up to the 2024 elections. Concerns over the safety of the nation’s cities has been a longstanding — and potent — political issue.
But how much influence do elected officials actually have over crime rates? Are localities with Democratic mayors less safe than those run by Republicans? Are they less generous with funding for police or more prescriptive on enforcement or diversity in hiring? New research examined data from 400 U.S. cities over nearly three decades and found the political affiliation of mayors made little difference when it comes to crime rates and policing.
The Gazette spoke with one of the researchers, Justin de Benedictis-Kessner, associate professor of public policy at Harvard Kennedy School, about what they learned. Interview has been edited for clarity and length.
What compelled your team to look into whether there was any data to back up partisan claims of whether one side was better on crime?
I don’t think those are just made-up claims coming from one side of the partisan aisle. One of the really interesting things about crime, specifically in cities, is that people on both sides of the partisan aisle have made claims that Democratic cities are not well-run, especially on crime and public safety. That includes everyone from President Trump, making claims that Democrats have driven cities into the ground and made them more dangerous, to post-2024 election, people on the Democratic side of the aisle saying that Democratic city leaders are not approaching crime well, and they’re not satisfying voters.
So, we wanted to get at the claim: Relative to Republican city leaders, are Democratic politicians making cities more dangerous for people in any way? Are they changing the way police are funded or staffed over the last three decades? And if they are funding the police at lower levels, is that leading to higher levels of crime?
Your research looked at the effect mayors had on police spending and staffing, and how their political leaning influenced the racial and gender composition of police forces and police chiefs. What did you find?
A lot of the post-2020 rhetoric around policing is about how Democrats are rethinking the role and enormous budgets of police departments in cities across the country. A lot of Democrats claim they’re changing the way policing happens — diversifying the police force, reducing racial disparities in arrests, changing the way it’s funded. We wanted to address that claim as well. Are Democratic and Republican mayors decreasing funding of the police, the way they’re staffed, and the way they make arrests, especially with relation to race? And it turns out, that claim is not true either.
Democratic politicians aren’t cutting the budgets of police, and they aren’t making the police force vastly less white relative to Republicans. They’re not increasing the number of women police officers. These are characteristics that might make a huge difference in how the police are perceived by the community and how they go about their jobs. If we saw changes in the people hired to be police officers, other research suggests we’re going to change racial disparities in people’s interactions with the police and police officers’ use of force against civilians. But we just don’t see those demographic effects.
And we don’t see those downstream differences in terms of how racialized the contact between people in cities and the police is. Some of our results are suggestive that Democrats might reduce the Black share of arrests, but these results are definitely not conclusive.
If there was a true effect, say, on the racial composition of arrests, we would expect all of our analyses to come back with the same answer, or at least in the ballpark of the same answer. We instead find what looks like maybe a negative effect on the Black share of drug crime arrests, and maybe the Black share of total arrests, but they’re not a large enough effect and not consistent across the many research designs we use.
So, we can’t say with a large degree of confidence that these aren’t the same results we would see if there were just chance differences across cities. And so I wouldn’t interpret these results to say, “Democrats are reducing racial disparities in arrests.” If Democratic leaders are doing that, they’re not doing it to a degree that is statistically detectable from how Republicans are changing the racial composition of arrests.
Politicians often point to a city’s overall crime rate or a reduction in certain types of crimes as evidence of their success. What influence do a mayor’s politics have on crime rates or the types of crimes committed?
I think anyone in the field of criminology would know that it’s not just local policies, at least in the short term, that are going to lead to big crime or arrest differences. Arrests are a discretionary policy choice by a police force, but crime is the result of a lot of different things. It’s not just the result of how many police you have and how well they’re doing their job. It’s the result of everything from economic conditions to youth job training programs to diversionary post-prosecution programs that reduce recidivism — all of these play a role. The national economic outlook could play a large role in reducing crime relative to a specific policy made by a mayor.
Often, these policies are having some marginal impact, but they’re rarely going to make huge shifts in crime, and they’re definitely not going to do it immediately.
Crime is a really hard problem to solve. You can’t just make one policy and crime disappears. So, blaming one party or the other for increases in crime is counterproductive to the goal of increasing public safety in cities.
Over the last 30 years, nearly every city in the United States has seen a big decrease in crime, both violent crime and property crime. But within cities, it fluctuates quite a great deal. Individual cities are going to see some fluctuations in crime and arrest rates.
It’s easy to try to point the finger at a specific mayor or other local politicians like prosecutors, but often it has to do with a systematic trend. Maybe they can make changes at the margin, which many of them do, but it’s often going to be hard to attribute those changes to a specific policy made by a specific politician.
So, neither party deserves credit when crime is down and shouldn’t be blamed when crime is up?
Exactly. There are a lot of policies that might make a difference in crime, but neither party is doing a better job than the other party at implementing those.
What were some things you weren’t able to measure or detect in this study that merit further investigation?
I think a lot of future research, and something that I know a lot of other researchers are working on right now, is looking at a single city or a handful of cities in the last five years and gathering really in-depth data on policy changes, police behavior, and crime or interactions between citizens and the police.
A lot of those researchers are doing a great job at informing policy in terms of how we can change how the police are perceived by the community, how we can improve citizen interactions with the police, and how we can decrease crime in a way that’s going to help public safety for everyone and reduce racial biases.
Our study shows that these things have very little, it turns out, to do with partisanship and who the political leaders are in a partisan sense. They likely have much more to do with our police forces being trained differently or hiring different people. That’s where a lot of the really promising research is. I’d love to see claims from politicians about some of that evidence on what actually works, and pointing to their efforts to implement those policies in cities.
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