After months of workshopping in speeches around the country, Attorney General Jeff Sessions seems to have settled on a final version of his newest inflammatory stiff-arm to all criticism of law enforcement.

Black Lives Matter, the ACLU, and other critics of police are the reason that murder rates have ticked upward in a handful of major cities over the past few years, Sessions said Wednesday just north of Chicago.

“If you want more shootings and death, then listen to the ACLU, Black Lives Matter, or Antifa,” he told an audience of police in Waukegan, IL. “If you want public safety, then listen to the police professionals who have been studying this for 35 years.”

It’s a carefully crafted line that lures police critics to snap back at him, instead of leaning on the hardy anecdotal and quantitative evidence that cities wishing to reduce their crime rates should consider shifting funds from policework to community organizations and other soft-power public service forums. The wholesale rejection of input from outsiders, coupled with the absolutist notion that listening to anyone other than police themselves will automatically drive crime up, is directly contradicted by the details of the now three-decade-long drop in crime rates around the country that Sessions is so fond of ignoring.


Sessions’ logic is akin to that invoked by a losing team’s coach losing his temper with a sports reporter and demanding to know if the guy criticizing his work ever actually played football himself. Such credential-checking rejections of credible input from people who study your work closely serve the same purpose. The nation’s top cop is sending a clear signal to beat cops in the locker room: I’ll protect you from these idiots.

Though the comments provoked a shower of headlines Wednesday, this isn’t a new line for Sessions. He’s been accusing police accountability and reform advocates of peddling deadly medicine in speeches to law enforcement groups for several months, including in a speech two weeks ago to the Chicago Police Department’s annual event memorializing officers who died in the line of duty and another in July at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Georgia. Wednesday’s version of the claim is sharper and starker than earlier iterations, but it’s easy to see the man workshopping the idea into its current form over several stump speeches to police audiences.

The attorney general first tried the “if you want crime to go up” line out back in May, again while speaking to an audience of law enforcement professionals. He’s refined it repeatedly since.

“You know as well as I do that if you want crime to go up, it’s easy: Just let special interests like the ACLU run the police department,” he said in the July speech in Georgia.


Visiting the Chicago cops six weeks later – and speaking on the evening of the first day of Jason Van Dyke’s ongoing trial for the murder of Laquan McDonald in 2014 – Sessions expanded his criticism to include citizen activists rooted in communities brutalized and harassed by out-of-control police departments for years. This time instead of portraying constitutionally enshrined civil liberties as “special interest,” he tarred everyone from community activists to criminal justice academics as “radicals.”

“The last thing we need to do is to follow the protestations of anti-police radicals and those who have never walked a beat,” he said. “If you want crime to go up, listen to the radicals. If you want crime to go down, we need to listen to the professionals – the police.”

Wednesday’s newest version was the first time Sessions has directly named Black Lives Matter among his cast of villains. The rewording also swapped the broad “crime” for the specific “more shootings and more death.”

In recognition of the 50th anniversary of the death of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and in solidarity with the family and supporters of Stephon Clark and others killed by police, demonstrators protest and march in the Magnificent Mile shopping district on April 2, 2018 in Chicago, Illinois. (Credit: Scott Olson/Getty Images)

But as Sessions’ football coach-style delegitimization of critics has evolved to this newly pointed accusation of complicity in murder, it hasn’t gotten any truer. In fact, the evidence has only strengthened in support of the core civilian critique that well-resourced community activism does more to reduce violence than any increase in police presence could achieve.

For years, mainline criminology held that the dramatic nationwide fall in violent crime rates from the 1990s to the present day owes substantially to huge increases in police presence, arrest rates, and the sorts of hyperaggressive policing tactics Sessions favors. Sociologists and people living where there is a real crime problem, on the other hand, have insisted throughout that time that civilian anti-violence work – whether intentionally conceived that way or not – has been more effective.

In a paper published last fall and a book released subsequently, researcher Patrick Sharkey dived into the local jigsaw of city and neighborhood crime rates underlying the national trends and found that the presence or absence of non-profit organizations working to build community connections and gin up ways to keep young people and ex-offenders productively occupied had a direct and large effect on crime rates. For every 10 new non-profits in a city, Sharkey’s research team showed, violent crime rates fell by 6 percent, murder rates by 9 percent, and property crime rates by 4 percent – each year. Over the full 20-year period they studied, they found local murder rates fell by 12 percent on net for every 10 community groups launched.


The explanation Sessions and classical criminologists favor for the great strides made on crime — more cops copping harder without over-the-shoulder nitpicking about rights and dignity from “radicals” and “special interests” and citizen groups — assumes that “the decline of violence was driven primarily by forces external to the communities that were most affected by violent crime,” Sharkey wrote last fall, and ignores the longstanding idea that “violence is regulated through informal sources of social control internal to communities,” as well as by the formal presence of armed security forces.

Sharkey’s team went beyond mere correlation to show that the formation of local non-profits specifically directed at creating employment opportunities, convening neighbors frequently around local concerns, building playgrounds, and other work that falls into the broad category of violence prevention strategies actually caused part of the crime drop. Even after controlling for the expanding or contracting size of a given city’s police force, the economic situation of the region over time, and other potential derailing factors for their research, the numbers were stubbornly supportive of the idea that it’s people organizing with each other that reduces crime.

Sharkey’s findings suggest that Sessions is getting it backwards. People who’ve never walked a beat seem to have an immense capacity to reduce violence by working together, on their own, with a mix of donor dollars and public funding. If you want less crime, you need more non-profit organizations run by and for the underprivileged residents of places where crime can seem a rational economic choice as compared to unemployment or minimum wage serfdom. Some of the most successful community non-profits didn’t intend to combat violence necessarily, but began rather as single-issue campaigns – opposition to a planned trash-burning facility here, a drive to put together a new youth center or after-school program there – but ended up providing circuit-breakers for the cycles of violence and criminality that prevailed in so many parts of the country through the 1970s and 80s.

Maybe Sessions has just missed this major development in his industry. He’s a busy guy. But he isn’t just rejecting or ignoring the evidence that people other than police have immense capacity to help reduce crime by investing in public services and creating economic opportunities for their neighbors. He’s specifically calling out anyone who thinks police do bad stuff a lot of the time and should stop doing so much bad stuff. That carries his speechifying past the realm of ignorance and into the land of malevolence.

Consider what the groups he’s attacking actually ask of the police they criticize. The Movement for Black Lives has laid out a detailed platform focused on reducing the violent predilections of the drug war, paring back the special contractual protections officers enjoy when they kill or assault people on duty, reapportioning the funding splits between law enforcement and other community services, and decentralizing accountability and input structures for police to restore community control over policing. Those advocates, some smeared as “black identity extremists” and pursued as dangerous criminals, derived their platform asks from direct experience in the very places Sessions focuses on in these speeches. Yet those years and lifetimes of exposure to the human toll of overpolicing can be discarded categorically, Sessions preaches; Walking a beat gives you credibility but apparently living in one every day and night does not.

For the ACLU, meanwhile, litigation on policing aims to restore rights enshrined in Constitution, especially the Fourth Amendment’s bar on unreasonable search and seizure of a person or their property. It’s one thing for Sessions to defend stop-and-frisk despite its inarguable racial biases and the dubious, mixed evidence on its results for quality of life in the communities police target. It’s another for him to paper over the deeper rot exposed in the investigations that fed into various police consent decrees: The malicious humiliation and dehumanization visited upon black residents of high-crime neighborhoods by officers who pursued departmental goals in Baltimore, Chicago, St. Louis, and other cities he did not name Wednesday.

Strip searches on public streets, abusive and racist language, dangerous driving and firearms usage patterns, and direct physical violence toward anyone with the temerity to get mad at how they’re treated by officers have all been tolerated, excused, and even embraced in certain corners of the policing community for decades as the law enforcement profession came to see itself as an occupying paramilitary force rather than a group of public servants.

While Sessions occasionally flavors his cop-crowd stump speech with a promise to go after individual officers who violate their oaths, he has for years rejected the idea that such misconduct has a cultural dimension that can spread rot through whole institutions. He is both cherrypicking anecdotes to frame civil liberties concerns as frivolously, dangerously bureaucratic, and discarding the somewhat trendy notion of “constitutional policing” — a phrase used by the police chiefs of Baltimore and Washington D.C., among other cities, to suggest a balance struck between aggressive, proactive beat cop behavior and respectful, dignified interactions with citizens.

Crime has jumped in Chicago in the past couple of years, by a couple different measures. But what Sessions misses — or intentionally obscures — with his simplistic assertion that crime only responds to the number of officers on the street and the impunity with which they are allowed to operate misses a huge piece of the story there. Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel has repeatedly prioritized well-to-do neighborhoods and high-dollar commercial development projects over funding for public services. The same kind of community programming that Sharkey and others have shown drives violence down has grown harder and harder to access for Chicago’s black population over the exact same period of time Sessions points out.