Your Mayor’s Party Has Essentially No Impact on Crime in Your City

There are a few “truths” that through decades of repetition and propaganda have cemented themselves in public discourse and the mindset of voters that bear essentially no meaningful relationship to the truth. The most damaging of these is probably “Republicans are good at the economy,” but “Republicans are tougher on crime” isn’t far behind. A new study punches the latest giant hole in the latter idea, finding that the party of a city’s mayor has essentially no impact on policing or on crime rates.

“Republican politicians have often claimed that increases in crime in large cities are a result of the ‘soft-on-crime’ policies of Democratic leaders in those places,” wrote study authors led by Justin de Benedictis-Kessner, of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, in Science Advances. “Much of the national news narrative around elections for prosecutors and mayors has echoed these claims. Yet these arguments from politicians and pundits alike rest upon an empirical assumption that Democratic leadership leads to increases in crime in cities.”

The researchers took one of the largest looks at this question to date: 398 cities with at least 75,000 people and almost three decades of mayoral elections, mixed in with data on police, fiscal policy, and crime rates. They basically found a lot of nothing.

“Electing a Democrat rather than a Republican as mayor leads to no detectable impact on police staffing or expenditures on criminal justice, nor does it lead to changes in crime or arrest rates,” they wrote. Mayoral partisanship did nothing to overall crime rates or to arrest rates, had no effect on disaggregated crime rates on things like property or violent crime, had an impact “statistically indistinguishable from zero” on overall police force size, and so on.

They did find “suggestive evidence” that electing a Democratic mayor could improve racial bias in policing over a Republican mayor, in terms of decreasing the share of individuals arrested who are Black. But the researchers cautioned these results “are not robust across research designs” and generally don’t reach the level of statistical significance.

“These results stand in stark contrast to national political rhetoric on policing, crime, and political partisanship,” the authors wrote. “Overall, our results indicate that politics — and in particular partisan politics — play a limited role in crime and policing.” This won’t, of course, stop Republicans and their preferred media outlets from saying it, over and over, forever.