Which way does the arrow point? Police and crime

Question

A pundit observes that cities with more police officers per capita also report more crime, and argues that a bloated police force must be causing crime, so cutting officers would make cities safer.

Give the more plausible causal direction and explain why the pundit's reading is likely backwards.

Accepted Answer

This is reverse causation. The likelier story is crime causes policing, not policing causes crime. Cities respond to high crime by hiring more officers. So a high crime rate comes first and drives up the police count; the correlation reflects cities staffing up where crime is worst, with the arrow running crime to police, opposite to the pundit's claim. (There is also a confounder: large, dense cities have both more crime and more police, so city size inflates the association too.) Why cutting the force is dangerous. If crime drove the hiring, then removing officers does not remove the underl…

Which way does the arrow point? Police and crime

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