Pritzker Fellow Matthew Yglesias on "Crime & Policing"

(Current UChicago Students Only)

Tuesday, April 11

3:30-4:45 PM

By 2015, two decades of falling crime rates left the public ready to rethink “tough on crime” policies from the 1990s while the rise of ubiquitous mobile phone video brought home to white Americans longstanding complaints about police misconduct in a visceral and compelling way.

But while the injustice of the deaths of George Floyd, Tyre Nichols, and others is manifest what to actually do about it is much less clear.

In the wake of Floyd’s death, activists swiftly coalesced around “defunding” police as a key demand. This was sound coalitional politics, as shifting financial resources out of policing and into other public services is welcomed by the civilian public employee unions who are cornerstones of progressive politics in most cities whereas pushing for changes to collective bargaining agreements that would make it easier to dismiss officers would have been received skeptically by civilian unions. But was it good policy? We will examine a moment when passions were running high, and many outlets simply abandoned the normal toolkit of policy journalism. Several years later, with public safety outcomes now much worse than they were a decade ago we need rigorous thinking about how to create safe communities and how to wrestle with evidence the same way we do when covering stories about health care or Covid data or any other complicated topic.

Pritzker Fellows seminars are off the record and open to current UChicago students only. Seating in the IOP Living Room is limited and available on a first-come, first-served basis. 

If you have any questions about accessibility, please contact Ashley Jorn (ashleyjorn@uchicago.edu).