What's Driving the Philadelphia Homicide Wave?
Rav Arora responds to Nathan J. Robinson
Rav Arora’s recent piece for this newsletter about the homicide spike in Philadelphia got a big reaction in the comments section. Some were quite supportive and some quite critical. One of the most incisive instances of the latter was from Current Affairs editor Nathan J. Robinson. Last month, Nathan and I had a rich exchange on his podcast and via email, and he now pops in here from time to time. Rav and I both thought that Nathan offered a serious and substantive critique, so I’m posting both Nathan’s comment and Rav’s response below.
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From Nathan J. Robinson
Rav Arora's post is not a serious examination of the issue and is clearly partisan and ideological. Let us do social science, not propaganda please.
If the empirical contention here is that “efforts to defund the police and abolish prisons are contributing to record increases in violent crime across the country,” and the evidence adduced is based on Philadelphia, a city that elected “progressive prosecutor” Larry Krasner, then we absolutely must know what happened in cities that did not elect progressive prosecutors like Larry Krasner. Now, from what I can tell, murder has risen in cities around the country. I am certainly open to the position that the rise has been worsened by Krasner's actions. But telling me horrible stories about gruesome murders that have occurred in Philadelphia is not persuasive evidence. We have to have a comparative study and I want to know why I should be convinced that the de-prosecution efforts of Krasner are specifically what made the difference.
Here's a quote from the linked ABC News article:
“I wish there was one good solid reason that I could give you for the increases, but the reality is there is none,” [Christopher] Herrmann, a former crime analyst supervisor for the New York City Police Department, told ABC News... “I think, unfortunately, police departments are just losing a lot of their best and experienced officers and then because of the economic crisis, because of COVID, are having difficulties in hiring or just delays in hirings,” Herrmann said. Herrmann said he suspects that a confluence of other factors has also contributed to the spike in lethal violence over the last two years. He said the COVID-19 pandemic not only prompted a shutdown of courts and reduction in jail population to slow the spread of the virus but also derailed after-school programs and violence disruption programs.
The question for the serious social scientist is what the relative roles of different factors are. How much is the result of the pandemic? How much is police officers retiring? How much is decisions not to charge suspects? (Another question that comes from that, though, is: are the decisions not to charge justified based on the evidence? We have to show that the de-prosecution efforts are not justified, because it's conceivable that there was previously “overprosecution” with cases being brought that were not sound.)
I believe these are complicated questions. I am an open-minded leftist. I do not want to support counterproductive left policies that contribute to a rise in violence. But I also object to sloppy social science that selects on the dependent variable by looking at a progressive prosecutor city but not looking at non-progressive prosecutors in order to determine the effect of progressive prosecutors. That has all the hallmarks of searching for the evidence that supports your preexisting narrative.
Rav Arora’s Response
Dear Nathan,
I appreciate your passionate reply to my article, but you have fundamentally misconstrued my argument.
You write, “I want to know why I should be convinced that the de-prosecution efforts of Krasner are specifically what made the difference [in Philadelphia's homicide rise].”
You later write, “I also object to sloppy social science that selects on the dependent variable by looking at a progressive prosecutor city but not looking at non-progressive prosecutors in order to determine the effect of progressive prosecutors.”
I never claimed that the sole or even predominant cause of Philadelphia's record-breaking homicide wave is the D.A's de-prosecution efforts. Rather, it is an increasingly concerning part of a confluence of factors that have contributed to the violence epidemic.
In my view, the key determinant behind Philadelphia's violence epidemic is de-policing in the wake of cascading anti-police protests in 2020. Conservatives often just as much oversimplify this issue as progressives do, but the causal mechanism for diminished policing across the country (not Philadelphia exclusively) was not mass “defunding” (several cities that didn't defund their departments also saw an upsurge of homicides), but rather, sociocultural, legal, and political disincentivization of police officers to do their jobs.
George Floyd's tragic death inflamed our already-fraught culture surrounding viralized police killings of black suspects. From Congress to CNN panels to the opinion page in the New York Times, attacking American law enforcement as a bastion of racist brutality became the norm in 2020. More importantly, after George Floyd, political leaders and media figures routinely pilloried officers for using justified deadly force in hostile interactions with black suspects. I covered the Jacob Blake case in great detail when the video first went viral on social media and when the investigation, which found the officer was not at fault, was concluded. Yet political leaders like Joe Biden claimed Blake was shot because of his skin color from the start.
Other media-distorted, justified police shootings include Ma'Khia Bryant and Rayshard Brooks (L.A Times: "Atlanta police killed a Black man for being drunk at Wendy’s"). The signals from politicians and media figures have been clear: initiating potentially hostile contact with black suspects can come at a high career cost if the interaction escalates into deadly force.
As I already noted, Paul Cassell's paper on “The Minneapolis Effect” empirically documents this nationwide cultural shift: officers across the country radically reduced efforts in proactive policing, leading to an explosion in homicides. In Philadelphia particularly, the police shooting of Walter Wallace jr. last October—a knife-wielding, non-compliant suspect with a long criminal history—kicked off mass riots, looting, and arson, further demoralizing Philadelphia police officers.
Apart from the widely under-recognized seismic shift in police behavior, a record number of police officers retired or went on leave in 2020. As I wrote in my original post, Philadelphia lost close to 300 officers. This set of reinforcing factors explain much of the homicide spike nationally and in Philadelphia.
Frankly, I don't quite understand the basis of your critique, as I agree the cause of Philadelphia's violence epidemic is multivariate and not strictly localized.
On the specific topic of prosecutorial leadership in the city, it is clear Krasner is contributing to this problem by releasing mass numbers of drug dealers on the basis of loosely defined “treatment” parameters, as I already mentioned.
The reality is that Krasner has radically reduced the number of convictions of drug dealers who possess weapons, which means that more future murderers may be roaming the streets. In 2017, Baltimore Police Department statistics revealed that 70 percent of 2017 homicide suspects had a prior drug arrest in their criminal history. A similar pattern has been found in Chicago, where the average homicide or shooting suspect had an average of 12 prior arrests in 2015 and 2016.
The dangers of Krasner's approach have been highlighted by the inverse relationship between annual criminal prosecutions and annual homicides in the city:
Source: former federal prosecutor Thomas Hogan.
Moreover, several cases involving released offenders who go on to commit violent crimes reveal the deleterious impact of the de-prosecution. I highlighted some of these cases, though you refused to address them. Here are a couple more such cases, compiled by renowned Philadelphia journalist Ralph Cipariano:
—Taray Herring, a convicted sex offender with a dozen arrests on his rap sheet, allegedly killed and dismembered Peter Gerold, 70, a licensed masseur. Krasner released Herring with no bail as part of an effort to stop the spread of Covid in jails.
—Michael Banks got involved in a neighborhood shootout and killed Zamar Jones, a 7-year-old boy who was sitting on his front porch, playing with his toy race car and scooter. The D.A.'s office gave Banks a plea-bargain that reduced a felony gun charge to a misdemeanor.
Rav Arora has started a new Substack, Noble Truths, exploring religion, psychedelics, and new psychotherapy interventions. He is actively seeking paid subscribers to help fund original, investigative work into the growing industry of psychedelic assisted therapy.
Demonizing or defunding police or police pulling back from their usual jobs and a general lack of respect for enforcing the law contributes to a climate in which more and more people push the boundaries of what they can get away with. And the more some people get away with crime, the more others are incentivized to give it a try themselves. Leading to a significant increase in crime because the inhibitions that most people have to committing a crime become reduced. If everybody is benefiting by grabbing stuff from stores without consequence, why shouldn't I participate also? I would be a fool not to. If you don't think anyone will bother trying to catch or prosecute you for shooting someone or if you perceive no one will stop someone else from shooting you, you are far more likely to pick up a gun yourself and do something you would not necessarily otherwise do. They call it the Thin Blue Line for a reason. Policing can be the difference between order and chaos. And a bunch of cities are seeing that now
Given the scope of what Rav has written, I think Nathan has gone well beyond "a serious and substantive critique". Rav isn't writing a PhD thesis here. He's writing a relatively short substack post that Glenn has supportively published. This is the kind of article that could appear in City Journal, the NY Post, the WSJ..................or The NY Times if one of their editors screw up and publish something non-lefty.