The agenda and video of the session are available online. Richard Hahn’s testimony begins at 1:05:57.
Chair Goodman, members of the committee, thank you for the opportunity to speak with you today. I’m Richard Hahn. I’m a senior researcher at the Niskanen Center, a nonprofit, nonpartisan think tank, and I’ve been asked to talk about the evidence on responses to crime.
Before I do, I want to acknowledge something you heard in the first panel: In Washington State, as in the country overall, most categories of crime are down from their long-term highs. But that fact doesn’t fully capture how people feel. Public perceptions of crime remain elevated, and we should take that seriously.
One reason is that the public often experiences and labels neighborhood disorder — open-air drug use, encampments, vandalism, broken lighting, trash, or abandoned buildings — as “crime,” even though these conditions don’t show up in official crime rates. They may not be as dangerous as armed robberies or shootings, but they profoundly shape whether people feel safe leaving their homes, letting their kids play outside, or using public spaces. Disorder is not trivial, and it is worth addressing.
The search for solutions to disorder points directly to a large body of research on what criminologists call Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design. The underlying idea is simple: When we invest in the physical character of a neighborhood by, for example, cleaning up vacant lots, improving lighting, and maintaining public spaces, we make nuisance crimes harder to commit, and, in many cases, we also reduce serious crime.
Research by UC Irvine Professor Emily Owens and colleagues suggests the explanation may be that police tend to increase their presence in neighborhoods that have been improved, and this added presence causes part of the crime drop. I don’t interpret their finding as “policing is all that matters.” Instead, I see it as evidence that places send signals. When a community or a city improves a neighborhood, it signals that the place is valued. People, including police agencies, treat valued places differently.
In other words, policing and neighborhood investments are complements, not substitutes. They work better together than either does alone.
Another example of this phenomenon comes from University of Pennsylvania Professor Aaron Chalfin’s work on street lighting. When cities add or improve street lighting, nighttime crime falls, often by substantial margins. Lighting changes the opportunity structure for crime, but it also changes how people use spaces and how police patrol them. Again, we see this pattern: Invest in the environment, and you make enforcement easier and more effective.
Now, this matters especially in the current climate. Police agencies nationwide, including here in Washington, are struggling with recruitment and retention. This isn’t just older officers retiring. We are seeing younger officers leave the profession early and fewer new recruits entering it. Both groups are doing this in spite of significant financial incentives in the form of pensions and signing bonuses. That means this is not a short-term demographic blip; it may reflect a long-term challenge for the policing profession. As a result, we are going to have to do more with less.
One of the clearest lessons about doing more with less from the policing literature is the value of hot spots policing: concentrating limited resources in the small number of places where crime happens. My colleague Marc Krupanski will discuss this in depth later, but in general the idea is to push a high-crime, high-impunity block or corridor past a tipping point into a better equilibrium, after which normal levels of enforcement can maintain safety.
Hot spots policing is usually discussed as a temporary tactic, but the lessons apply to everyday operations. Agencies need better systems for knowing where their officers are, what they are doing, and how to deploy them strategically. That becomes especially important when staffing is low.
And even though crime is currently down, there is another trend we should pay close attention to: Crime clearance rates remain stubbornly low across much of the country, including here in Washington. This is important. Crime rates depend on a wide range of social and economic forces, many of which lie outside the control of police. But the rate at which crimes are solved is much more dependent on factors that can be readily influenced by public policy, particularly the development of investigative capacity, training, and modern forensic tools.
Clearance rates matter because when victims and communities believe that offenders are unlikely to be caught, it creates a perception of impunity. That perception erodes trust, reduces cooperation with law enforcement, and can contribute to future crime spikes. A community that believes nothing happens when crimes occur is a community that becomes more vulnerable to repeat victimization, retaliatory violence, and disengagement from the justice system.
So when we talk about doing more with less, we should not only be talking about patrol and deployment, but we also have to talk about investigations. Improving clearance rates requires strengthening investigative units through targeted hiring and specialized training, expanding access to modern investigative technology, and improving forensic capacity, including timely DNA analysis and the use of state DNA databases. It also requires finishing the work that has already begun on eliminating the rape-kit backlog and ensuring policies that guarantee timely testing in the future.
Taken together, these steps help ensure that when crimes do occur, they are solved, and that offenders face swift consequences. This is especially vital when agencies are short-staffed, because improvements in investigative efficiency have a large payoff. Solved cases deter future offending, build public trust, and restore the sense that law enforcement can actually deliver justice.
If we want to prevent another crime wave, improving clearance rates is one of the most direct and evidence-based things we can do. Low clearance rates create a dangerous feedback loop; higher clearance rates help break it.
I’m pleased to report that several states have begun to prioritize certainty of punishment by focusing on improving clearance rates for homicides and other violent crimes. Arkansas, Texas, and Missouri have passed bipartisan legislation to set up new funding streams that would give law enforcement agencies additional resources to improve investigative outcomes. Bipartisan bills aimed at improving clearance rates are also currently pending in Michigan and Pennsylvania. In each state, these bills have received overwhelming bipartisan support because just about everyone recognizes the wisdom of solving as many murders as we can. We expect several states to follow suit in 2026 and beyond. We encourage lawmakers here in Washington to consider joining them, and if you do, we’d be happy to help.
Returning to the broader picture: Even with stronger investigative and patrol strategies, history tells us that crime is cyclical. At some point, crime will rise again. And if that happens while agencies are understaffed, policymakers may feel pressure to return to highly punitive policies and long sentences, the approach that led to high incarceration rates in earlier decades. Those policies were not only costly in human terms but also left states with large long-term financial obligations, because long sentences continue to impose costs long after a crime wave has passed.
To be crystal clear: Good policing is not the cause of incarceration; it is an antidote to it. When police respond quickly, deploy efficiently, solve more cases, and maintain order in public spaces, they create deterrence that reduces the need to impose punishments, so states feel less pressure to ratchet up sentences to maintain safety. Effective everyday policing is one of the best tools we have to avoid overreliance on prisons.
But even with strong policing and improvements in clearance rates, some people will continue to commit crimes, so we need tools beyond incarceration when crime does rise. Fortunately, we have several strategies backed by strong causal evidence, strategies that can effectively deter future offending without a prison cell. Programs like 24/7 Sobriety and Swift, Certain, and Fair (SCF) supervision are good examples.
24/7 Sobriety requires individuals who have committed alcohol-involved offenses to undergo daily breath testing or continuous alcohol monitoring, with immediate but modest consequences for any violation. This is important because the available research suggests alcohol is a factor in nearly half of violent crimes committed each year. 24/7 Sobriety programs reduce recidivism by increasing the certainty and swiftness of accountability rather than relying on severity. And importantly for this committee, Washington State already operates a 24/7 Sobriety program. It is a strong foundation that the state could expand and adapt.
Swift, Certain, and Fair supervision works on similar behavioral principles for a broader population of people on probation or parole. Rather than waiting for violations to accumulate and then imposing a harsh sanction, SCF emphasizes immediate, predictable, and proportional responses. The evidence indicates that people respond much more strongly to the certainty of a mild sanction delivered quickly than to the threat of a severe sanction delivered late.
Electronic monitoring and other structured supervision approaches also draw on this same behavioral logic. They provide accountability and structure while allowing individuals to maintain ties to work, family, and treatment. These tools reduce reoffending, avoid the economic and human costs of long-term imprisonment, and give jurisdictions more flexibility when crime trends shift.
If we invest now in building the capacity to use these tools — and in strengthening police deployment, investigative capacity, and neighborhood investment — Washington will be in a much stronger position the next time crime trends turn upward.
Thank you, and I look forward to your questions.
