I was surprised to see a man as liberal as Matt Yglesias argue that expanding the size of the Metropolitan Police Department from its current 3,800 officers to the proposed 5,100 would effectively help decrease crime in the District. I suppose I rarely expect liberals to be on the side of such dramatic increases in police power, given that militarizing a city or country doesn’t often track well with pacifying it.

Last week Matt claimed to have the evidence to show that we liberals might be wrong. And though the academic study he presented as conclusive evidence was full of big words like “regression” and “elasticity,” I’m still not terribly convinced that 5,100 police officers will lead to the 9.5 percent decrease in crime he claims. Why? Because the study he quotes is limited to Police District 1, which, the authors rightly note, includes the National Mall, the U.S. Capitol, and other buildings and monuments of national significance. The decreases in crime they found on days of higher police deployment seemed to be limited to the Mall, while other police districts saw decreases that the authors even confess were statistically insignificant. What this proves is that on days when the terror alert is raised and more police are on duty, the Mall and its environs — patrolled by a number of police forces, mind you — become safer. The rest of Police District 1 and the rest of the city? Well, they don’t say. Had they focused on Police Service Areas (PSA’s) instead of Police Districts, we may have gotten a better idea of how the terror alerts and police deployments tracked with levels of crime.

If we think the District needs more police, we should really think again. Beyond the trusted officers of the MPD, we have more distinct police forces than any other city in the country, and probably the world. If you add up all the officers serving in all the different police forces and consider their jurisdictions and areas of deployment, the number of police officers per square mile and per resident jumps dramatically. Yet crime rates remain high. This points to the solution that everyone but Police Chief Charles Ramsey and D.C. Mayor Anthony Williams seem to consider wise — more community policing. In an editorial in the Examiner on the matter, a policeman anonymously admitted, “We’re like an army of occupation. We don’t have the community’s trust. We talk community policing, but we don’t do it.” As many commenters have noted, police officers sitting in their cruisers and driving through neighborhoods at 30 miles an hour don’t do much to serve the needs of the community, much less do they get to know that community any better. Consequently, they remain blissfully unaware of crimes their on-the-street presence could help deter. I’ve lived in the same neighborhood for four years, and in that time have yet to see a police officer walking the beat. I’m not saying that one doing so would automatically lead to a drop in crime, but having one develop links to the community he or she is charged with protecting and serving would be an obvious first step.