What Can the Police Do About Violence?

Abstract

Most people assume that the police can do little to stop violence, but there is little evidence for that assump tion. The police have frequent contact with both communal and stranger/instrumental violence, contacts which might allow effective interventions. If police records tabulated violent crimes according to the relationships of victims and offenders, rather than according to the legal categories, if police departments mounted careful experiments to test the effects of different ways of dealing with communal violence, and if the police made greater efforts to detect and confiscate illegally carried guns, then the police might—or might not— be more successful in reducing violent crime.