Hannah E. Meyers on the Truth About Crime and Race

CLAY: We bring in now — she wrote a fantastic op-ed piece — Hannah E. Meyers, director of policing and public safety at the Manhattan Institute, and she recently wrote an op-ed in the New York Times that said these policies were supposed to help black people; they’re backfiring. It is up right now at ClayAndBuck.com. You can also go read that at the New York Times. Hannah, we appreciate you taking the time to join us here. A fascinating piece, and it’s one that is hardly being analyzed at all. What are the impacts as you found them and saw them of the Black Lives Matter movement and what has happened in their wake?

MEYERS: Thank you, Clay. And this is more broad than Black Lives Matter but certainly a lot of overlap with what their policy goals were. We look at criminal justice reforms over the past few years, and we’re here in New York so we focus on our 2019 statewide bail reform and discovery reform. They look at the Less is More Act that passed just this last September that has fewer parole violators in jail, and also we look at policies since around 2016 in New York City that have gradually and intentionally decreased the number of people held in jail on a variety of crimes.

And what we find is these reforms were put in place very explicitly to improve black lives, to reduce the amount of interaction between black New Yorkers and the criminal justice system. And what we find is looking at the data any which way you see that these policies have actually contributed to making black lives much harder and actually increasing the amount of interaction between blacks and the criminal justice system, the extent to which they’re touched by the criminal justice system.

And this is both by contributing to an enormous increase in violent crime that impacts black New Yorkers more than anything else. If you look at 2020, murders went up citywide a horrific 41%, shootings about doubled. But if you look at a neighborhood like Brownsville, Brooklyn, that is predominantly black, you see that murders went up over 127%, and shootings went up 191%, which is unthinkable. But violent crime, very disproportionately victimizes black New Yorkers who make up only about 24% of the city.

And similarly, the goal of decreasing the extent to which blacks are arrested, convicted, incarcerated, it’s had the opposite effect. If you look at, for instance, the inmate possibility at New York City’s Rikers Island jail, about five years ago it was about 50% black. Now it’s 60% black. All of this pointing to the reality that criminal justice policies, for everyone’s sake but even to a greater extent for the sake of black New Yorkers should be based upon the goals of public safety, law and order, and not around trying to engineer a particular racial outcome.

BUCK: Hannah, it’s Buck, and I want to dig into that a bit some more. This piece was I think so well written and brought together so many important pieces of data. You wrote in it, “[T]his strategy is harming black New Yorkers. By aiming for racial equity in criminal justice rather than focusing solely on deterring and responding to crime, policymakers seem to have neglected the foundational purpose of law and order.

“What has followed — a sharp rise in victims of crime, who remain disproportionately black, and a slight increase in the percentage of Rikers Island inmates,” you just mentioned that, “who are black — is a racial imbalance of a more troubling kind,” end quote there. So the social justice movement, which we often hear of in the context of criminal justice as criminal justice “reform,” they explicitly claim — and this is part of your research, what you find, that because there are disproportionate numbers of the black community in prison the system is racist and therefore we have to change the system. Is that a fair assessment of what they’re pushing for?

MEYERS: Correct. And what we argue instead that this is not a criminal justice… This is not something you can correct with criminal justice policy. This is a much broader issue. In New York City, pretty consistently shooting victims are about 71% black — again, city residents are about 24% black — murder victims are about 65% black, and crime is very intraracial, especially violent crime. So shooting suspects are black — about 71% black. Murder suspects and arrestees are about 65% black.

This isn’t something… You can’t dismantle the criminal justice system to try to correct for why this is happening. And, in fact, when you do, you only hurt the same communities that are the main victims of these crimes — and that when you stop incarcerating people and prosecuting them for crimes, these are the communities that they are returning to and victimizing people and you are in fact hurting the population you’re trying to help by creating streets that aren’t safe for kids to go to school, businesses that suffer by having a greater degree of disorder and crime.

And so even if you don’t foundationally believe, as I think you and I do, that criminal justice policy in all fairness and rightness should just be based on who is committing crime. Even if you are setting out very explicitly to improve the lot of blacks relative on others in New York, it’s just the wrong way to go to do that. You’re much better off by just trying to ensure public safety for everybody and letting the chips fall and who that ends up arresting and convicting and incarcerating, as long as those are the people whose actions have landed them there, for whom those are the consequences.

CLAY: Hannah, so much of media attention — I’m glad you brought that up — is focused on one race perpetrating a crime against another race. That is a very substantially minority act. As you said, most racial crime — or most crime, I should say — is within the same race, right?

MEYERS: Mmm-hmm.

CLAY: So a black person is likely to victim use a black person, white and white, Asian and Asian, Hispanic and Hispanic, that goes across the board.

MEYERS: Correct.

CLAY: Why do you think…? This is a couple-part question here: Why do you think the media overwhelmingly focuses on crimes that involve a minority of overall crimes and are external in nature, right, outside of the race? And a second part of that, even to write this piece and/or discuss it, I’m assuming that you are in some sense terrified that you’re going to be called racist for sharing actual facts and data — even though, again, they’re actual facts and data. How much does the fear of racism keep legitimate conversations like this from taking place?

MEYERS: I think there’s a lot of nuance there. I think in the past few years many people have been very genuinely concerned about the extent to which blacks are arrested and incarcerated, involved in crime. The relationship between police and the black communities which is inherently fraught because police respond to crimes in the neighborhoods that it happens, and, as we just discussed, violent crime very disproportionately happens in black neighborhoods, which is why it’s so important to build trust and partnership and a sense of community between police and black communities.

I think the narrative has gotten incredibly polarized, and I think it’s very easy to simply say, “Well, look, these numbers are so skewed. Obviously, it’s a racist system. This is all about the criminal justice system itself.” I think also people have… We’ve had such a reduction in crime in New York City over the past few decades and nationwide, but if you look at New York where it’s particularly stark — where we went from 2,200 murders in around 1990 to 230 murders, something like that, a couple years ago.

People become very lax about the reality of violent crime. They think you can dismantle it. “Why should we be prosecuting anyone or arresting anyone? Crime doesn’t really happen,” and I think the problem has been worse because there is a population of people like we were talking about these skewed numbers in New York City. About 1% of shooting victims are white and 1% of shooting arrestees are white, same for Asian. It’s very easy to not grapple with the reality of what it feels like to live in, to be a potential victim of a shooting, to live in a neighborhood where you’re scared to let your kids go out.

And I think it’s actually made the narrative worse if you look at, for instance, a Gallup poll at the height… In August 2020, when things were really very volatile around this issue, a nationwide Gallup poll found that 81% of black Americans wanted the same or more amount of police in their neighborhood. And I think the media narrative, politicians, they have not wanted to accept the reality of people on the ground and their lived experience of crime and victimization and disorder.

My own institute did a poll this past fall in the 20 fastest growing cities nationwide that found a majority of black residents wanted more policing of quality-of-life issues like public you’re gonna be and littering and graffiti. And I think it’s very easy to paint this big image of, you know, cops versus blacks and not accept the reality that blacks, like everyone else, need police to reduce — you know, to maintain order and peace and allow individuals to thrive. And even if that relationship can be fraught because these numbers are skewed, that has to be something that’s built on and upheld and looked at as a partnership and you can’t just dismantle policing and call it racist, and I think —

BUCK: Hannah, we’ve got about a minute. I just want to ask, Hannah, are you seeing the beginnings, at least, of what buildings like the turning of the ship in the other direction? Are you seeing not just New York, but Chicago, Houston having a really rough year and had a very bad 18 months or so with shootings? San Francisco. Los Angeles. Do they realize that bail reform, not enforcing smaller crimes, not arresting people for shoplifting, not punishing people severely for shootings…? Are they changing the tune, or not so much?

MEYERS: I think there has certainly been more attention to the correlation between cities that have these so-called aggressive prosecutors wand ho focus on nonprosecution of crimes, reducing sentencing, reducing charges and record homicide increases and record shoplifting increases. And whereas prosecution, I think, gets less attention than policing ’cause it feels a little bit more obscure and less and people see when their eyes on the street. I think there is a gaining of attention to it but we need to have a lot more of that such that policymakers actually feel like they might not be reelected if they don’t change some of the policies that are undermining public safety, prosecution policies.

BUCK: Hannah Meyers, director of policing and public safety at the Manhattan Institute. Go to ClayAndBuck.com to read her latest op-ed from the New York Times. Hannah, my friend, good to have you on. Thanks for being with us.

MEYERS: Thanks so much. Take care.