Rising Crime and Reducing Harm

Article summary

“Prevention is better than the cure,” Erasmus wrote, five hundred years before a modern police chief would need to hear it. Alikhan argues that's exactly backwards from how agencies actually respond to rising violent crime: training, policy, and organizational development get deprioritized right when the risk of dangerous encounters is climbing fastest. Drawing on Malcolm Sparrow's systems-thinking, harm isn't a knot you solve by pulling harder, it's one you solve by understanding its structure, then working it loose. When the LAPD applied that approach in 2015 under Chief Charlie Beck, across a 13,000-person department, reporting results publicly every quarter, it produced measurable reductions in force incidents, collisions, and workplace harm within five years. The real risk, Alikhan argues, isn't taking necessary risk, officers are expected to do that. It's unnecessary risk from bad tactics, inadequate training, or poor judgment. The countercyclical message: the moment agencies are under the most pressure to cut training is the moment they can least afford to.