We’ve all heard the arguments for defunding the police over the past several years. More importantly, we’ve all seen the real world results of attempts to follow through on these ideas. But there’s an alternative argument which has been put forward by a pair of academics at Harvard. In a paper published in early 2022 Chris Lewis and Adaner Usmani argued that the U.S. is actually under-policed compared to many comparable countries. They recommend a very different approach to the one embraced by BLM activists.
In their piece, “The Injustice of Under-Policing in America,” Lewis and Usmani argue that to reduce violent crime, the U.S. needs to drastically reduce its prison population via shortening sentences — and increase its police force by half a million officers. Their work cited evidence that crime is reduced more by increasing the probability that an offender will be caught…
