To Hire or Not to Hire: Do Increased Police Forces Equate to Drop in Crime?

A new study by University of Cincinnati criminal justice experts suggests that local governments may actually be wasting tax dollars instead of reducing crime when leaders vote to hire more police as a method for boosting safety.

One of the most expensive decisions a city can make is whether to hire more police officers, says professor John Eck, PhD. That decision may be a little easier thanks to a recent study conducted by Eck, along with a student and an associate professor at the University of Cincinnati--published in the September issue of the Journal of Experimental Criminology.

Nick Corsaro, an associate professor in the School of Criminal Justice who studies police operations and effectiveness, YongJei Lee, an advanced doctoral student at the School of Criminal Justice, and Eck, a professor who studies and teaches police effectiveness and crime prevention, first dove into their study about four years ago.

It’s an important question that police and city officials have been asking Eck for decades. Cops are costly, he says. Knowing if crime increases or decreases when more officers are added to the rolls is important, and it’s a question Eck has pondered for nearly four decades.

Their conclusion, he says, is a very important finding.

“Mayors and city councils should think carefully before they spend my tax dollars on more police in the hopes this will reduce crime,” says Eck. “This is more likely to be a waste of taxpayer money than to make me safer. There may be other reasons to hire cops, but driving down crime is not one of them.”

In fact, their study suggests that cities should not hire more police officers as a method to reduce crime, just as small reductions in police agency sizes are unlikely to increase crime. Policing strategies, Eck says, are far more important in reducing crime.

“I have been working on police reform for almost 40 years, so I know this will be important to police chiefs, mayors, city council members and other policymakers across the U.S.”

Darrel Stephens, former police chief in Charlotte, North Carolina, and current executive director of the Major City Chiefs Association, was not surprised by the findings.

“The sizes of police forces are determined by workload — crime is but one piece of the work that police do.  It is the strategies and tactics that have an impact on crime, not numbers,” says Stephens.

UC researchers compared the impact of police force size on crime to the impacts of various policing strategies that had been studied by other researchers. Each of the strategies had a much larger impact on crime than adding more police, says Lee, the UC study’s lead author.

“In short, if a city wants their police to have a major impact on crime, the city would be far better off changing its strategy of policing rather than hiring more police,” he says.

During the study, they ended up with more than 60 specific studies from 1970 through 2014. They accumulated and then analyzed 229 findings, including the varying effects on homicide and burglary, among others.

There are several reasons they are confident of their results, says Lee.

First, they looked at all the research, not a limited number of studies. Second, the overall impact of the number of police on crime is statistically insignificant. And third, that minuscule impact is likely due to chance rather than something the police do.

The study looked at a number of possible explanations for the lack of impact of police hiring on crime, including research methods used in the studies and changes in findings over the 40-plus years of research. The impact of the number of police officers on crime did not change. And that’s due, in part, to the fact that departments cannot make a large enough investment to make a dent, says Corsaro. 

“The principal reason for the ineffectiveness of hiring police on crime is money. Cities cannot afford to hire enough police to make a difference. When we looked at police hiring per capita, we found that this had not changed. Cities simply maintain the relative sizes of their agencies, but almost never surge police numbers.”

Their paper, “Conclusions from the History of Research into the Effects of Police Force Size on Crime — 1968 through 2013: An Historical Systematic Review,” was published in the September issue of the Journal of Experimental Criminology and is currently available online.