TheAgitator.com
A Funny Thing Happened on My Way to a Trend Piece
Tuesday, December 20th, 2011So I was looking at that new study showing that 1 in 3 Americans has been arrested by age 23. There’s another study that came out last month showing a big uptick in the number of police officers assigned to patrol school hallways in recent years. I also found lots of stories and activist sites about the alleged school-to-prison pipeline. I’ve also pointed to several stories on this site about arrests of appallingly young children for appalling minor offenses. So I was ready to take all of those bits of evidence and run with a trend piece about how we’re criminalizing childhood.
But while researching the piece, I looked up juvenile arrest data for the U.S. It turns out, juvenile arrests are down over the last 20 years, and pretty significantly. That didn’t make sense. So I went back and looked at those school-to-prison pipeline articles. Yep. Lots of anecdotes, but most all of them lack hard data about school arrests. National statistics for school-based arrests just don’t exist, though there have been some localized studies that suggest there could be a problem.
In any event, the resulting article is a somewhat middling piece, which is now up at Huffington Post. My thesis? Juvenile arrests are down significantly. There may or may not be an increase in arrests on school campuses, which may or may not be caused by bad policies like zero tolerance and assigning cops to patrol in schools. But there’s just not enough evidence to say. (Of course, both could be bad policies regardless of whether they’re leading to an uptick in student arrests.)
That’s a complicated article with a fairly boring premise. (There’s no evidence this is a problem. But it might be!) But it’s one I think was still worth writing. There seems to be a perception out there that there’s been a big surge in juvenile arrests in recent years. I certainly thought that was the case. It turns out it isn’t true.
The real problem I think is that the government creates these programs and pushes policies to address alleged problems before there’s any hard evidence that the problems actually exist. That’s how we got zero tolerance and cops in schools in the first place. (Both were in response to fact-free hysteria over school shootings and “super predators.”)
And at least in the case of zero tolerance and the School Resource Officer program, after the policies were passed, there was no effort to collect more data to gauge their effectiveness or to see if the policies were having unintended negative effects. Now, the government is forging ahead with yet another program to address the alleged bad effects of those policies, again with little evidence that the bad effects are actually happening. All the while, the government continues to push and fund the same policies it’s now attempting to counteract.
And they say we libertarians are crazy.
I tend to agree with civil libertarians. . . I think it’s the economic anarcho-libertarians that get the whole group painted as crazy.
So the people you agree with are normal. The people you disagree with are crazy.
I feel the same way!
Libertarians are crazy because they are willing to change their minds about things based on EVIDENCE and CRITICAL REASONING, which is utter hypocrisy, because they always talk about how they take stances based on FIRST PRINCIPLES. Crazies. All of them.
One thing I find interesting is that while crime in nearly all categories is down.
Misconduct rates of cops is waaaaaaay up.
I personally think there is a link here, to the slow disintegration of the police profession by hiring criminal cops, and these arrest numbers… 1 out of every 3 young adults.
We are slowing becoming a police state, with yes zero tolerance on everything except police misconduct… go figure.
I’m not so certain, but I’ll defer to your superior research skills.
As for zero tolerance and the School Resource Officer program, I think that’s pretty much a farce, it’s just another place to pidgin hole cops they haven’t anywhere else to put.
Of the two I’m familiar with one was allegedly fond of making suggestive comments about teenage girls while the second …… Well they became the resource officer only after 8 substantiated allegations of abuse towards their own children, the last one involved handcuffing, binding gagging and beating (all but the beating was witnessed by the reporting officer), so they were naturally placed in charge of other peoples children.
Of course if there were any incidents after that they would have been sealed (juvenile privacy don’t ya know), at any rate they later took part in an out of state parental child snatching and were then returned to regular duty.
I guess it was too difficult for the P.D. to hide it when the snatch took place in a state that had already recommended they be prosecuted and noted that previous incidents had been ignored by their department.
Misconduct rates of cops is waaaaaaay up.
I’m not so sure that’s true, either. Most criminologists believe police professionalism is actually is improving. That doesn’t mean, pace Scalia, that it’s anywhere near where it ought to be — only that it’s getting better. (Militarization is a separate issue.)
I think there’s a perception that it’s getting worse because thanks to social media, cell phone cameras, and the multitude of publishing platforms out there, we’re just more aware of it now when it does happen.
Radley, I’m not sure if you intended to or not, but the last few graphs accurately describe our government in general, not just it’s school cop policies.
You may be right that professionalism is getting better, and that social media and cameras amplify the perception, I could accept that.
However you also have a lot of little two bit towns and villages around putting badges on untrained officers and turning them loose on the population.
They may not be kicking down doors, but they are creating a backlash by their actions, the last one of these, fine out standing examples of small town law enforcement I dealt with had served for years on “waivers” when I encountered him he impersonated his chief of police.
FOIA is my friend (their enemy), he had written some 370 tickets in a year’s time, which is pretty impressive for a town of 200 people with only one street in and out; particularly considering that he was only a “part time officer”!
Some two thirds of those tickets were dismissed outright, but there were dozens of credible stories around about his on duty antics that paled in comparison, a few months after I started asking questions he was out of a job and last I heard was in prison for multiple offenses.
Silly Balko, this just exposes yet again your corrupt allegiance to accuracy.
“Silly Balko, this just exposes yet again your corrupt allegiance to accuracy.”
For real. Seriously, dude, you’ll never break into the ranks of the mainstream media with THAT kind of attitude.
I won’t claim that this is peer-reviewed, but we collected the data for school police and arrests in schools for a pretty sizable cross-section of school districts in Texas – http://www.texasappleseed.net/images/stories/reports/Ticketing_Booklet_web.pdf
Its difficult, though, because many school police do not have to collect data the way that most municipal departments do – are we sure that your juvenile arrest data includes info from school police departments (which are common, at least in Texas).
There does seem to be a pretty clear correlation that more officers in a school district = more arrests, and in Texas, more Class C misdemeanor tickets.
And we don’t currently have plans to try to collect follow up data for more years, because it is time intensive and costly to do the public information requests and then get the information into a usable format. In a couple of school districts, we’re still embroiled in lawsuits to get access to Use of Force policies, and it would be a pretty big fight to get the information in the first place. FWIW, that’s the state of affairs as far as we can tell.
Also, one of the most comprehensive studies on harsh school discipline came from the Council of State Governments – http://justicecenter.csg.org/resources/juveniles
They looked at juvenile justice records and matched it against suspension and arrests for all kids in Texas in three cohorts for several years, and found very high correlations between suspension and higher rates of juvenile justice involvement. So it doesn’t really get to your arrests and school policing issues (where data is much spottier), but it is real and clear evidence that zero tolerance policies increase likelihood of dropout and juvenile justice involvement.
I didn’t RTFA but we need to clarify the definition of “arrest.” As a criminal defense attorney I perceive anecdotally that kids are being arrested and/or issued citations for behavior (mainly possession of alcohol or small amounts of pot) that in the past would be addressed by just confiscating the contraband and bringing the kids home (“look what I caught Junior doing”). The key is the distinction between arrest (taking the person into custody, booking into jail, fingerprinting, and reporting the arrest to the CIC database) versus citation (writing a ticket without taking into custody, which is not reported to centralized databases). Most such cases I see involve not a full blown arrest but a citation, which is dealt with in a local court and generally results in a dismissal if the kid jumps through some hoops (community service, classes on the evils of alcohol and pot, etc.)
Interesting. I’m not sure what is at play, but I’m reminded of a collection of essays, A Search For The Origins Of Law: Drugs, Death and Madness. The principal author, John F. Galliher, describes (among many other things) how draconian penalties for marijuana possession, in the 1970s, drove down the arrest and incarceration numbers. That was, partially, because law enforcement didn’t think that they could get juries to convict. Part of it was also that law enforcement was becoming increasingly reluctant to be complicit in locking up youngsters for mandatory minimums. Political moves towards decriminalization, increased discretion, and lessening of sentences actually got significant backing from law enforcement so that they could successfully increase the number of citations and arrests.
The introduction of civil forfeiture, equitable sharing, and increased federal block grants seems to have scrambled motives thereafter. But, perhaps the severity of the zero tolerance policy is influencing law enforcement to not report what they otherwise would report?
Just a wild stab… But, certainly an interesting article…
Thanks.
Professionalism may be improving, but all that means is that cops are more likely act in accordance with training and procedures, not that they’re behaving any better than they used to (procedures and training can easily be changed to allow what was once “misconduct”). That said, awareness of police corruption and brutality is increasing much faster than corruption and brutality, if corruption and brutality are increasing at all. I suspect they’re not; people tend to be very romantic about the Good Old Days before the nanny state communists/right wing extremists ruined America, but the pigs have been glorified gangsters from the very beginning (and were seen as such by their critics when they were first organized, before the Cult of Cop and the thin blue whine had had a chance to evolve out of the entitled moral cowardice and dishonesty inherent in all military and paramilitary organizations).
Acting in accordance with policy, thus being more professional, is a crock of shit. Acting in accordance with generally accepted moral behaviors is being more professional, and acting otherwise is quite simply evil. Most policies are antithetical to liberty and common decency. Just because someone treated you nice and in accordance with policy while they beat you, trump up charges, lie, deceive, threaten, and murder does NOT warrant praise but rather the harshest scorn and derision that one can muster, along with some private justice.
A couple concepts from epidemiology might be helpful here: the prevalence of a condition (say, type 2 diabetes) is the number of people per 100,000 (though other bases are sometimes used) who have the condition. The incidence of the condition is the number of people per 100,000 who are diagnosed with it in some interval of time (usually a year). Thus if we treat “being arrested” as a chronic condition, the percentage of people under 23 who have ever been arrested is a measure of prevalence, whereas the annual arrest rate for youth is a measure of incidence.
So in this case, we’re talking about the prevalence of arrest going up at the same time as the incidence of arrest is going down. That’s not inherently paradoxical. Several years ago, it was noted that the prevalence of type 2 diabetes in Denmark had increased dramatically, leading to the usual hand-wringing, but also to a proper follow-up study which showed that the incidence of type 2 diabetes was actually dropping (which was actually a somewhat unusual result, but it was verified). The “paradox” turned out to have a pretty happy explanation: the increase in prevalence was the result of diabetics living substantially longer after being diagnosed than they had in the past [1].
So a number of things can cause prevalence and incidence to go in different directions. In this case, it’s possible though probably not very likely, that the cause is similar to the Danish situation: the increasing prevalence of arrested youth is because kids who are involved in crime (note that I’m not saying that most kids who are arrested were in fact involved in crime serious enough to increase their risk of dying) are less likely to be killed during adolescence. Certainly the juvenile murder rate is down considerably, but I have a hard time believing it was ever high enough to explain the effect. Discrepant time periods, as some of the people you cited in your PuffHo piece, could explain some of it, as could changes in reporting levels (it’s almost impossible, for example, to determine trends in hate crimes because the reporting requirements are anything but uniform).
I don’t really have a good guess at what’s going on. My first thought was that it was in fact a tendency to arrest kids for stuff that wouldn’t have warranted an arrest in the past, but you convinced me that the evidence isn’t really in when it comes to that. Just speculating, but I’m wondering if it’s a side effect of well-intentioned efforts to combat race/class bias by trying to reduce the availability of “station adjustments” and the like, which were usually only available to fairly advantaged kids (long ago, a friend of mine had no contact whatsoever with the criminal justice system after doing what unquestionably fell under the legal definition of Grand Theft Auto (not the game); he was white, lived in a community where the average household income was $170K, and his father wrote “MD” after his name. About 10 years later, my ex-boyfriend’s low-income Latino cousin spent at least a week in Chicago’s Cook County jail for a minor vandalism incident involving a park bench; if a white kid in the community where I grew up had done it, the consequences would have been getting up early several Saturday mornings to wash police cars by hand.
[1] To be pedantic, it wasn’t possible to rule out “lead-time bias”, e.g. “diabetics aren’t living any longer than they used to, but they’re getting diagnosed earlier in life than they used to be so they just look like they’re living longer.” That didn’t seem to be the case there, though, and it’s really unlikely to be the case here.
My perception has been that while the school shootings scare(and similar hobgoblins) may have been the excuse for both “Zero Tolerance” idiocies and the presence of police in the schools, the actual reasons have more to do with the breakdown in trust between parents and teachers/administrators. With more and more parents prepared to challenge almost any decision to discipline their child, the schools have taken refuge in “policy” and sought to shove the entire problem onto the cops (as if the cops didn’t have enough trouble).
What does anyone else think?
Brennan and Pablo are on the right track. In Texas the number of school district police departments has mushroomed, resulting in thousands and thousands of tickets being written to children for petty behavioral infractions. This wouldn’t show up in “arrest” data as schools may not even be reporting the correct and full data. But it criminalizes things that were never handled that way twenty years ago.
You guys are crazy, but I admire that you actually research your stories, and generally don’t try to force the facts to fit your thesis.
I think part of the problem with your premise is that you assume schools are not prisons.
Generally speaking, all crime in the US has been on a downward trend. The problem is the number of arrests that are unjustified. I don’t think that law enforcement has a check box for bullshit/nonbullshit arrests, so creating statistics for this will be much more time consuming.
When I was in high school 20 years ago, we had a police officer on campus – he was a city cop, but his job was to be at our high school. Everyone knew him by name (and this was a 5A high school, my graduating class was several hundred).
I really thought that was a good idea – he was around, and he could deal authoritatively with certain situations… BUT that was, in part, because he was a good fit for the job. He got along well with the students (from everything I saw, and I saw several ugly incidents), but didn’t really arrest anybody for anything but the most extreme stuff (fights with weapons would get you put in handcuffs, but other than that, I never saw him use them, and I assume that would result in arrest, as assault with a weapon is pretty serious).
Put a different person in the same spot, and it probably wouldn’t have worked so well.
And they say we libertarians are crazy.
In the land of the blind the one-eyed man is not king – he is an incomprehensible alien.
@Deoxy #23
I suspect the reason “school cops” tend to work out is because it’s a self-selecting population of people who actually want to be around adolescents and don’t regard them as criminals-in-waiting.
As an undergrad, my experience with Campus PD was actually pretty great, because:
1. Only campus PD had jurisdiction on campus, no city PD allowed.
2. The cops made an effort to be friendly and helpful with students
3. They understood that kids will be kids (and will underage drink, etc.) and gave us a lot of leeway if we weren’t making life hard for anyone else.
“My perception has been that while the school shootings scare(and similar hobgoblins) may have been the excuse for both “Zero Tolerance” idiocies and the presence of police in the schools”
Zero tolerance yes (partly, a society willing to sue everyone on a moments notice is the other part), Police in schools, no.
http://teachersites.schoolworld.com/webpages/KBales/resources.cfm?subpage=1142537
http://www.bedfordcountyso.net/SRO/history.htm
http://voiceofdetroit.net/2010/12/12/the-crime-of-reporting-crime/
With more and more parents prepared to challenge almost any decision to discipline their child, the schools have taken refuge in “policy” and sought to shove the entire problem onto the cops
I agree with this diagnosis, and it’s a very bad solution for everyone. You will occasionally see outrage that, for instance, an autistic 8-year-old was seized and handcuffed by cops during some kind of violent episode. On the one hand, handcuffing an autistic kid seems like what you might call a sub-optimal response. On the other hand, call a cop, and you get a cop.
Do cops carry magic fairy dust that can make kids on a rampage calm down? Are cops better at relating to children than teachers? Are cops social workers and psychologists with extensive training in pediatric mental health?
What separates a cop from a teacher when it comes to an autistic child (or even a neurologically normal, but violent, child)? The cop has cuffs and the teacher doesn’t.
I’m not saying there aren’t some wonderful school resource officers out there; I’m sure there are. I’m saying that there’s a heck of a lot going on in school that shouldn’t involve law enforcement at all, but everybody is trying to put the turd in someone else’s pocket.
More on schools and discipline;
There used to be an unwritten understanding between schools and parents. The schools would indoctrinate the little heathens, but would also teach them to read, write, and do basic math. The parents would let a certain amount of indoctrination slide, and would back up the schools on matters of discipline, unless the school was perpetrating an unusually smelly injustice.
Somewhere in the early to mid 20th Century the schools lost the capability to keep up their side of the bargain, and at the same time the indoctrination began really getting out of hand. Over time, Parents came to distrust the schools, and stopped backing them up.
From then on you get a spiral of declining discipline feeding declining learning, leading to less parental cooperation, and so on, and on.
Private schools don’t have this problem as badly, because they can require parents to sign agreements about discipline that limit the amount of damage that they can do. The private schools don’t have to accept anybody they don’t want to.
Vouchers are the only solution being put forward that has any chance of helping this situation, so far as I can see. They would eliminate from the purely public schools all the parents who care enough to make trouble because some teacher objects to Johnny picking his teeth with a switchblade. The parents who DO care will be faced with a choice; find a school where the regimen of discipline is something they can tolerate, or leave their budding little savage in the public school zoo to take his chances with all the other animals.
It won’t be perfect (no school system in Human history has been, after all), and like the present system it will eventually calcify along the fault lines of its problems and fail. Then our grandchildren will have to institute something else, which will calcify and fail in turn.
Or am I completely off base? Anybody?
If you’ve read the book Freakonomics, you might conclude that this could be another side effect of the Roe v. Wade decision… because women who could not take care of kids had abortions available to them, and these were predominantly poor women whose male children were statistically more likely to end up in trouble with the law, the net result was a reduction in societal crime over the following generation(s).