Freakonomics Radio - 505. Did Domestic Violence Really Spike During the Pandemic?

Episode Date: June 2, 2022

When the world went into lockdown, experts predicted a rise in intimate-partner assaults. What actually happened was more complicated.

You remember the pandemic shutdown, don't you? At first, they called it sheltering in place. That was an interesting phrase. It evoked a cozy snow day mixed with some Cold War duck and cover. It was later on they took to calling it a shutdown, even a lockdown. Whatever name you prefer. This extraordinary event produced a massive spike in certain behaviors. We all learned to conduct our business on Zoom.

Everyone in Brooklyn learned to bake sourdough bread. There were runs on jigsaw puzzles and Peloton bikes. But there were darker sides, too, of all this staying at home. As many people stay home to stay safe, that can be the worst place to be for victims of domestic violence. Organizations aiming to prevent violence say this is a particularly scary time for victims who may be forced to stay home with their abusers. Domestic violence surges during COVID-19 pandemic. That was an NBC News headline in May of 2020,

and you could find similar headlines pretty much everywhere. And there were other dark headlines, even aside from the pandemic itself. We were told that suicides would spike and that birth rates would plummet. All these predictions had a certain logic around them. The pandemic was a sudden, unprecedented tragedy. And of course it would produce additional tragedies.

But how accurate did these predictions turn out? It's a bit of a false narrative. Today on Freakonomics Radio, the difference between some of the COVID headlines and the actual data. What we find is that the crimes are actually lower. And speaking of crime, did the defund the police movement really catch fire? There has not been a neighborhood impacted by violent crime that has ever asked me for less police officers. What's the downside to overhyping

a real danger? And is there an upside? Any mention of domestic violence in the press can be helpful. It would also help if it was very accurate. Accuracy can be elusive, but we'll do our best starting right now. This is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything with your host, Stephen Dubner. Domestic violence, especially in urban areas, represents a large share of all violent crime. More than a third of all assaults can be linked to domestic violence. While there are male assault victims, the majority of victims are female. If we're concerned with violence against female victims, domestic crimes are the majority. Amalia Miller is an economist at the University of Virginia. I do research on topics

in labor economics and law and economics, often relating to the well-being of women and families. For a researcher like Miller, domestic violence is an important and rich topic because it intersects with so many other topics. There's associations with alcohol abuse and a possibility that having access to guns or weapons in the home might lead to greater escalation. You know, economic distress could be a predictor of greater DV. Just how common is DV or domestic violence? That's hard to say. Advocacy groups estimate at least 5 million acts of domestic violence are committed against women in the U.S. every year. According to the

FBI, there are only around 1 million assault charges brought per year, and that's all assault charges, not just domestic violence. So even if the estimates of the advocacy groups are way high, one salient fact is that many instances of domestic violence are never reported to the police. Amalia Miller has for years been studying exactly how domestic violence is reported. One paper she wrote, along with Karmit Segal, looked at what happened as police departments started hiring more female officers. This is mainly during the 1970s and the 1980s, when women are going from less than 3% of officers to more than 10%. They looked at data from thousands of police departments across the U.S. What we found was that when a local area police department has a greater share of female officers,

reporting of all violent crimes against women go up. So conditional on the crime happening, the likelihood that it's reported to the police goes up, and that the increase is most sizable for domestic violence. And do you know what the mechanisms are for that happening? I think that having female officers on the force might have led the police to actually treat these crimes more seriously. It could be that female officers had, you know, more sympathy with victims or that they took the crime more seriously, and it's possible that they even influenced the behavior of their male colleagues. And then the other side could be coming from victims, right, where it could be that victims feel more willing or comfortable to actually report what's happening when they're talking to a sympathetic female officer. So they kind of work

together. But the data from this study ends in the early 1990s. This is a time when the crime was seen as this private thing and the role of the police was kind of to keep the peace. You can see how keeping the peace and stopping domestic violence might be at odds with each other. And for much of human history, violence against women wasn't considered a crime at all. In early Roman law, for instance, women were considered the property of their husbands, and husbands were allowed to beat or even kill their wives with justification. In the 15th century, the Catholic Church encouraged husbands to beat their wives if it would help save their

souls. Such attitudes have blessedly evolved, at least in many places around the world. In 1993, the United Nations ratified the Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women. The following year, the U.S. passed the Violence Against Women Act, sponsored by then-Senator Joe Biden, which acknowledged the criminal nature of domestic violence. Over the next 15 years or so, as most violent crime was falling across the U.S., it's thought that domestic violence fell by more than half. So, progress.

But then came COVID-19 and those horrifying headlines. The shadow pandemic is the name the United Nations has given to the rise of violence against women over the past year. So the pandemic and the pandemic shutdowns are completely unprecedented. And so we don't have a prior, you know, exact scenario to look at. I think that the news reporting, policymaking advocates were all very concerned that domestic violence might increase. In March of 2020, very early in the pandemic, President Trump signed the CARES Act, which included $47 million in domestic violence funding, money for messaging, for boosting the national domestic violence hotline,

and to provide housing and other resources for victims. The Biden administration would go on to disperse more funds. Amalia Miller and her fellow researchers, Karmit Segal and Melissa Spencer, started to gather data on domestic violence. They had also seen the alarming headlines. That was kind of our expectation, too, that there's definitely reasons to be worried about an increase. They wound up writing two research papers, one looking at domestic violence in Los Angeles during the pandemic shutdown, the other at Los Angeles, plus 17 other big cities. We focused on the real-time data that are made available by these

police departments, either by posting it on their webpages or that we were able to obtain by a Freedom of Information Act request. The data contained two different measurements of domestic violence crimes. One measure that we have is the number of calls for service that the police departments get. And then we have this measure of the number of crimes that the police are recording. So these reports are made by the officers after they've investigated the call and determined that they think a crime has likely taken place. So what they find? What we find is that the calls are higher than expected during

shutdowns, which suggests an increase in domestic violence. Okay, that seems to match the general perception and the headlines. But the crimes are actually lower during shutdowns, which suggests the opposite. Wait, what? Calls reporting domestic violence were up, but incidents of domestic violence were down. We were somewhat skeptical of the finding, and so we sort of wanted to understand it. Miller considered two potential explanations for why there might be more calls but fewer crimes. One possibility, and this is the one that we think is more likely, is that many of those additional calls may have been coming from an increase in the crime reporting rate,

so the number of calls per incident. And some of this may have come from third-party reporters, so people who are not victims or survivors, being more likely to call the police. Like nosy neighbors, do you mean? I would say concerned neighbors, but... That's a much better word. I agree. So that's one possibility. Either there were multiple calls for one incident, or because they were getting calls about things that when they went and investigated turned out

either not to have been a crime, maybe it was a loud argument, or it turned out not to be a domestic-related crime. I see. So this, too, is a COVID-related phenomenon because there are more people home to make those calls, yes? That's right. There are more people home, and so it could be that neighbors were just more likely to call. The other theory is the possibility that all of these calls do reflect an increase in actual incidents of violence, but that police are somehow neglecting or failing to record these cases. And so the idea there has to be that the police are less likely to

investigate and file an incident report for domestic violence during a shutdown than they would otherwise have been. And how can you determine whether that's true or not? So I can't determine it directly. Certainly, it's not something that police departments, either individual officers or police leadership, were saying that they were doing. They say that they were still prioritizing domestic violence cases. These are all big city police departments. They all have operating procedures to handle domestic cases. They have designated units and staffing to handle these cases. So I think that the face of it, I wouldn't expect them to reduce their effort.

How trustworthy do you as an academic researcher feel the data are that come from police departments? I think that the data from police departments are very flawed. They're very limited. They are very incomplete. And they are the only thing we had at the beginning of the pandemic. So I feel like availability kind of trumps everything else. You know, we can imagine perfect data, but we're not getting that. Right. But I can hear you say that and think, so maybe the story that your research is telling isn't quite as plausible because there are too many ways that the reality could have slipped between the cracks of the data analysis, between the original police data that you are getting that you admit is imperfect and the way that your analysis works. Okay, so the most convincing thing to me was the information on intimate partner homicides and the data on suicide rates. What do the homicide and suicide data tell Miller about domestic violence? Remember, domestic violence makes up a huge share of violent crime

generally. Homicide and suicide can both represent the most severe outcomes of a domestic violence attack. And so these numbers, fatal outcomes and non-fatal domestic assaults, they tend to travel together. So we don't see increases in these fatal outcomes. And so to me, that pushed me more towards believing the possibility of an aggregate decrease in incidents, knowing that it's possible that there's something unmeasured that did go up. The fact that suicides fell during the shutdown was also a surprise, since experts had been predicting an increase. But the actual data also a surprise, since experts had been predicting an increase. But the

actual data tell a different story. The data that have been released on suicides from the CDC are still preliminary estimates. The second quarter, which was the quarter when the shutdown started, shows significantly lower suicides. Miller is talking about the second quarter of 2020. So not just no increase, but significantly lower than would be predicted from previous years and seasonal trends. in the face of predictions when it comes to unprecedented life-changing events. And that maybe, you know, we have a basis for our ideas, but we don't know. Experts had also predicted the pandemic would have a big effect on fertility rates in the U.S. On this very show, in fact, episode 447, published in January 2021, the economist Melissa Carney shared her research

with us. So this is work I did with my frequent collaborator, Phil Levine. We are expecting a pretty large baby bust. Carney and Levine's reasoning was sound. Birth rates tend to fall during a recession, and COVID-19 certainly produced a recession. As further evidence to support their prediction, Carney and Levine pointed to a big birth decline after the Spanish flu in the early 20th century, even though that pandemic did not create a recession. So how large of a COVID baby bust were they predicting? We should expect a 10 to 13 percent reduction in births, and based on annual birth rates, that leads us to predict 300,000 to 500,000 fewer births next year.

But guess what actually happened? Not only did the U.S. birth rate not plummet last year, as predicted, it rose by 1%. It was the first increase in the U.S. birth rate in more than seven years. How do the researchers explain their busted prediction? They said that the labor market recovered much more quickly than expected and that thanks to massive government financial stimulus, families felt more secure. All of which makes sense, but the point is, any predictions, especially those made in the heat of a global crisis, are susceptible to being wrong. I asked Amalia Miller what she thought about news coverage saying that domestic violence was surging during the pandemic.

Yeah, I don't know. It's hard to think of what I would have done differently. I think that it makes a lot of sense where if you're hearing anecdotes and they're concerning that it seems like a journalistic responsibility to write about it. The way I interpret it is that it was coming from a feeling of concern and wanting to care for the most vulnerable. And then I think also, at least for my co-authors and me, and I think for many people who did research during the pandemic, there was a desire to feel like you were doing something helpful. Thinking that there's this horrible thing happening and you could help sound the alarm seems like a noble pursuit. Some of the other data that Miller used to cross-check the police data on domestic violence did seem to sound the alarm.

This data came from the Los Angeles County Domestic Violence Hotline, which has nothing to do with the police. And there we were able to see that calls went up during the shutdown and then stayed elevated after reopening. That would suggest, however, more domestic violence crimes, not fewer. So how do you square those? So I think that the reporting rate went up because of the advertising. In LA in particular, they had this program to set up domestic violence victims and survivors at hotels. And just the presence of that program may have led more people to come forward to the hotline to get help. And it's possible that that reduced some crime incidents. I see. So it's not necessarily that shutdowns didn't increase the propensity for domestic

violence, but perhaps there were these measures that actually did work against an increase. Yes? I think that's right. There could be some cases where the shutdowns directly reduced incidents, but we don't have that experiment, right? What happened in the U.S. was the shutdown happened, and then there were these pretty remarkable countermeasures, huge increases in resources devoted to addressing the issue. What would have happened without that increased spending or increased attention? We don't know. One way to think about what might have happened in the U.S. is to look at what happened in other countries. Many countries reported early on that domestic violence was spiking because of the pandemic. China, Australia, countries across Europe and Latin America. Some of those countries

did spend big money, as we did, to try to forestall the domestic violence crisis, others much less so. So what happened? Did domestic violence rise in the places that didn't spend money on it? And did it fall or at least rise less in the places that did spend money? Miller tells us the results are somewhere between mixed and inconclusive, at least thus far. And in this case, she says, a cross-cultural comparison may not tell us all that much about the U.S. The U.S. differed from a lot of countries in the sense that the shutdowns were typically not as strict or severe, and everything else is different in terms of, you know, police and the social services and kind of the whole context. We also reached out to the sources of the domestic violence data

that Miller collected from Los Angeles. We couldn't get the LAPD to give an interview, but we did hear back from her other data source. Hi, my name is Eve Sheedy. And until about two weeks ago, I was the executive director of the Los Angeles County Domestic Violence Council. Does that mean you got fired or something two weeks ago? What happened?

It does not. It does not. No, I have been working for almost 40 years. So I officially retired, although I am consulting and opining about domestic violence after having been in the field for a long time. The Domestic Violence Council is run by L.A. County's Public Health Department. It works to connect people who experience domestic violence with services that can help them, and that includes the hotline. So what did Eve Sheedy see during the pandemic shutdown? In Los Angeles County, there was not a significant increase in the amount of domestic violence.

There was an increase in calls to service provider hotlines. In other words, a similar pattern to what Amalia Miller measured in the police data. I think it's a bit of a false narrative about the increase in domestic violence. What we have seen is an increase in severity. So the narrative pushed an understanding of domestic violence that there were people, because they were locked in, they all of a sudden sort of became abusive people. When you're in a dangerous domestic violence relationship, whether there's a lockdown or there is no lockdown,

you are stuck in your home. So the concept of a survivor having his or her movements limited because of domestic violence is not limited to a lockdown. That's their life. When you were reading these headlines and seeing on TV these reports that domestic violence was spiking, did you feel that there are people who think this problem is much, much worse than it is? Or were you grateful for any attention being paid to the problem? Because just because there might be less domestic violence, even one is still a problem. So what was your position? Any mention of domestic violence in the press can be helpful.

I do believe there's a bit of a public misunderstanding of both the scope of domestic violence and what it really is. The fear is that people confuse rage with power and control. Those are not the same things. done, if we could talk about domestic violence much more openly and much more frequently, when you talk about what would help address domestic violence, that would help. It would also help if it was very accurate as well. What we should say is domestic violence is incredibly pervasive throughout this society, and it demands our attention every single day. Coming up after the break, what kind of attention gets results? Having that economic cushion, I think, could make a big difference.

And how a big city police chief thinks about domestic violence. What that tells me is that the same individuals that are committing those assaults, robberies, and using firearms are the same individuals that are hurting their loved ones. I'm Stephen Dubner. You are listening to Freakonomics Radio. If you or someone you know needs help, call the National Domestic Violence Hotline

at 1-800-799-7233. That's 1-800-799-7233. We'll be back in a minute. Hey there, Stephen Dubner again. Since you listen to Freakonomics Radio, I think you'll also like the Cautionary Tales podcast. On Cautionary Tales, economist and bestselling author Tim Harford uncovers the valuable lessons we can learn from history, finding the morals in the greatest mistakes, tragic catastrophes, and hilarious fiascos of the past. You will get a front row seat as an award-winning choreographer and a rock legend came dangerously close to opening the worst Broadway musical of all time. You'll hear how a tiny change in the blueprints of a hotel

led to tons of concrete, steel, and glass crashing down on hotel guests. The hotel story is so interesting that we're going to share a preview of it at the end of this episode, so stay tuned. You can listen to the full story and more from Cautionary Tales wherever you get your podcasts. As we mentioned, both the Trump and Biden administrations invested millions of dollars in social services and programs to address domestic violence. Some

of this was spent on outreach and messaging campaigns, some on housing and other support. But in many cases, the social service that is most directly involved with domestic violence, especially in its worst forms, is a police department. And police departments in the U.S., as you surely know, have come under serious pressure since the pandemic began. Many of them are facing a significant rise in crime, especially gun violence, while also facing political pressure over racial justice and police abuses of the past. So we called up one big city police chief, Eddie Garcia of Dallas, to talk this over. I was born near San Juan, Puerto Rico and moved to California when I was very young.

I grew up and became a police officer in the city of San Jose. Garcia rose through the ranks in San Jose. Whether it be narcotics, SWAT, homicide, community services, vice, special investigations, criminal intelligence. And I was the chief of police in San Jose for about five years before retiring. But a month later, he came out of retirement when he heard that the Dallas job had opened up. I'm a huge Dallas Cowboy fan. I was a Cowboy fan probably before I spoke a word of English. So I've been to the city a few times. Always loved the diversity of it.

What was your perception of Dallas and the job in Dallas and the crime in Dallas and all the other parts that go along with being a police chief? Very large city, very diverse with an issue that was going on that we that saw in 2020 with violent crime going up, seeing levels of violent crime that the city hadn't seen in a while. What did you know about the causes of that rise in crime? Violent crime is rooted in poverty, education, lack of jobs, family structure, food deserts,

and those types of things, right? The police come in and we have to deal with the symptom, not necessarily the disease. The police obviously have quite a bit of leverage and ability to do things, but you don't really have that much leverage to address the underlying root causes of all these things. So how do you first think about controlling what you can control and then doing something about it? Well, that's exactly right. You got to look at what you can control. What we did in the city of Dallas is we broke it down in about 101,000 crime grids.

And these grids are areas a little bit bigger than a football field. We ended up really focusing proactive and visible presence in about 45 to 50 of those grids. Now, 45 to 50 of those grids is actually a very small percentage, obviously, of 101,000 grids. But those 45 or 50 grids represent about 10% of the city's overall violent crime. Our mantra here in this police department is weed and seed. We need to take the criminal element off the street, but we also have to seed our community with positivity. And so you look at that problem apartment complex or strip mall and you ask yourself, after the police take the criminal element out, what else is needed? Does it need lighting?

Does the street need fixing? Does there need to be a park nearby so that the kids have somewhere to play? Do we need to bring landlords and have them accountable? Do we need more libraries? This grid system that Garcia is describing and directing resources to the biggest trouble spots, that's known as hot spotting, and it's been a common policing practice for quite some time. Dallas has so far seen success under Garcia. Violent crime in most big cities has been

going up since the pandemic, but in Dallas, it's been falling, even with the number of arrests falling too. So that's one way in which Dallas is an outlier, but there's another having to do with domestic violence. Back in the 1980s, before the federal legislation that increased protections for victims of domestic violence, Dallas had one of the first police units devoted to it. How'd that happen?

There had been a class action lawsuit by women in Dallas who argued that the government was denying them equal protection under the law. This forced the police department to create a specialized unit. We were only required to do it for two years, but it's still going to this day. That's Kylie Hawks, a police major in Dallas who used to run the Domestic Violence Task Force. The task force is amazing because it has created communication between the police department and the advocacy groups. Many cities now have specialized police units to fight domestic violence.

The Dallas unit is staffed by detectives trained to help the victims, but also to follow up after the crime to make sure the offenders are properly prosecuted. The domestic violence detectives can get anywhere from 30 to 70 cases a month. The one thing about domestic violence that is different from a lot of other offenses is that our probable causes are pretty much handed to us, right? So a patrol officer goes out, answers a 911 call. They get all the elements of the offense. They take pictures of the victim's injuries. They have their body-worn camera.

We have the 911 audio. When you have a large volume of cases, these detectives have to really keep up with it. All this requires a lot of resources and personnel. Chief Garcia recently proposed a plan to increase funding and staff for his domestic violence unit. You know, our crime plan in those grids is based on street-level violence, the robbery at a gas station, the aggravated assault on a street corner, what have you. It's not necessarily concentrating on crimes that happen in homes in the middle of an apartment complex. But as we saw reductions in robbery and ag assaults and murder, we also saw

reduction in intimate partner violence. What that tells me is that the same individuals that are committing those ag assaults, robberies, and using firearms are the same individuals that are hurting their loved ones. So I'm reading here that the long-term trend in violent crime in Dallas is still down, but I see that domestic violence assaults are up around 13%, it looks like. You were talking about the correlation between the criminals in the community, and when those guys are arrested, that tends to lower domestic violence reports, which makes sense. I'm curious if you think about, you know, if you could get the arrow to travel in the other direction, is there anything that you can do directly? I realize it's in the home. You're not going to go into every home and make sure that there's no

trouble going on. But do you think about trying to drive down domestic violence numbers on their own, whether just for its own sake or to drive down crime in the community? I think they go hand in hand. I know you only get a snapshot in time, but as of this morning, our domestic violence numbers are trending down once again.

But again, those are snapshots in time, right? No police department has a silver bullet to this. We absolutely need to work with our partners and our advocates out in our community. A lot of it was doing home visits to former survivors and former oftentimes batterers to do two things. To number one, let the survivor know that we care, we're here, we're paying attention. But on the flip side of it, to let the survivor know that we care, we're here, we're paying attention. But on the flip side of it, to let sure that the former batterer, who hopefully is a former batterer, knows that we're here, we're present, and we're also paying attention. What about the legal side? How effective are the legal tools to prevent domestic

fines from escalating? Let's say there's been a report, let's say there's even been an arrest, how good are restraining orders and injunctions and so on? I think they work, but a restraining order is only as good as the individual that's actually going to follow it. And so those are, quite frankly, blind spots. I'm not quite sure we'll ever be able to get over, but the system that we have in place has worked well for us. It's not to say it's perfect. In this profession. We could always do better as a team, whether it's us, the DA, or the courts. Okay, let's talk then about what happens after an arrest and a conviction even. In a lot of places, including New York where I live, including Los Angeles, many other places, there's been a real change in philosophy about bail reform,

about recidivism. We all know the story. And you read one article about somebody who was in jail or in prison for a short time, a long time, whatever, gets out and kills somebody. Everybody hates that story, but also people are trying to balance from a human rights and civil rights perspective too. So can you talk about the relationship of the PD there with the DA or other institutions to try to strike that right balance and where you're pushing that to get to? What we have been seeing are irresponsible decisions made by individuals on the bench where individuals have committed violent acts, particularly with handguns that are released very quickly. And when they get released, they get released back to their

communities. And so when they re-offend, we have to stand to our communities, explain to them why that was and why that is. I'll say this. There has not been a neighborhood in the city of Dallas impacted by violent crime, regardless of language spoken, racial makeup or economic status that has ever asked me for less police officers. And in fact, unfortunately, it's our communities of color that often beg me for more presence because they're tired of the violence. So right around the time you were coming in to take over Dallas PD, there was this huge movement inspired by the police murder, George Floyd, that was centered around a few mantras, Black Lives Matter, but also defund the police. I'm really curious to know whether that vibe was present in Dallas. Well, you know, I'll say this. Our city leadership here, led by our mayor, quite frankly, was not, we're not going to talk about defunding the police and recognize what an irresponsible decision that would be. I think it takes more conversations like the one we're having right now

that yes, absolutely, we need to reinvest in our communities. We need to reinvest in areas that have not been invested in before in a lot of ways that don't have to do with policing. However, those reinvestments are not gonna manifest themselves into stronger communities today,

this weekend or next weekend. And oftentimes when I have individuals that are talking about less policing or what have you, I invite them, please, I beg you, come with me to my next community meeting. And you stand there with me as I tell this community that there's going to be less police officers in their neighborhoods because they will let me have it. I understand you have proposed a plan for higher bail being set for domestic violence crimes. Can you talk about the coordination to make that happen? I am definitely an advocate for higher bail for domestic violence or intimate partner violence crimes.

I know DA's office oftentimes will get scrutiny when it comes to charging individuals. But a DA has very little power over the bail or bond system. That's on judges. And I'll be frank with you, particularly as I see the numbers of individuals being released that have committed violent crime, I'm actually going to send an invite to judges at some point to come with me to community meetings. They need to hear from the people that they're here to protect. It doesn't have to be adversarial. It'd just be an issue of maybe have this in mind the next time you're setting bond or thinking about renewing a bond. So you do need to balance that with fairness, obviously. But there's a narrative

that has been going around, let's just call the elephant in the room, that's very far from reality when we're talking about our communities and our neighborhoods that are impacted by violent crime that I think judges do need to listen to. You sound way too smart to get into any kind of political pissing match. But let me just ask you a kind of philosophical question. You know, judges are elected or appointed. Do you feel that most of the judges that you've interacted with in your tenure as a police chief have acted less on a rational assessment or even a common sense assessment and more on an underlying political belief. You know, I don't want to say I never like to use absolutes, but when decisions have been made that I scratch my head on, particularly when it has to do with violent crime. Very often, decisions are being made in the name of social justice that does not make the neighborhoods that we work with,

our beautifully diverse neighborhoods, oftentimes that are impacted by violent crime, more safe. They make them less safe. And so, yeah, I'd like to see a level of common sense used, absolutely. Criminal justice reform in the U.S. is a volatile subject. In the most progressive circles, there are arguments to abolish the police and prisons entirely. In Los Angeles, District Attorney George Gascon has pushed to largely eliminate cash bail. He said, quote, we can break the multigenerational cycles of violence, trauma and arrest and recidivism that has led America to incarcerate more people than any other nation. I asked Eve Sheedy, who until recently ran the L.A. County Domestic Violence Council, if this new bail policy was worrisome to her. Well, my personal opinion is I would say no.

I would say that is not the opinion of everybody in the domestic violence field here. But if we look over the past 30 years, we have some larger problems in the criminal justice system. There are structural racism issues within that system. And there are other issues that directly impact domestic violence. There are many people who get taken to jail for a minor level of physical violence, which is not to say there's not true domestic violence. job, the family loses their income. And the question becomes, are there other ways that we can address this that are effective? Where we've used incarceration and law enforcement as a response, in certain instances, is it successful? It is. In many instances, does it get rid of the

domestic violence? It does not. But you're suggesting that having a lighter touch when it comes to automatic incarceration, let's say, may actually prevent a lot of domestic violence long run, yes? What I'm saying is choice is what people need. There are cases which are incredibly dangerous to someone's life, and they need a police response. There are cases where people have strong family or community support or they are not in that kind of physical danger. They need other kinds of support and they don't want to access law enforcement, either because they have a fear of law enforcement, which many times is, in my opinion, a legitimate fear, or it is not the remedy that they're looking for. So the real answer, in my opinion, is not to do away with one or the other,

but to provide choice and provide knowledge so that people can access the services that they need. Some of the research that economists have contributed to that's been really helpful in thinking about domestic violence is the role of non-police factors. That, again, is the economist Amalia Miller. And in particular, I'm thinking about work by Anna Azar and others that shows how female empowerment, so when women have better employment opportunities and better wages, that that's associated with significant declines in domestic violence. Having that economic cushion, I think, could make a big difference.

Do you feel in this case where there was such widespread and really noisy reporting about how terrible domestic violence was during COVID because of lockdowns, do you feel there's a little bit of a problem in hyping danger that doesn't exist to the degree that it does? Is there a, you know, boy cried wolf problem here? I think it would be really wrong to interpret our findings as saying, oh, yeah, you know, that was a bunch of hullabaloo about nothing. And we should cut funding and cut resources. You know, that would be very upsetting to me. And we don't find direct support. But it's certainly consistent that the drop in crimes partly did come from this expansion in financial resources, like in the CARES Act, but also just all this attention and publicity. And to me, I think that suggests, if anything, that we were leaving some opportunities untapped to try to address domestic violence.

And I do want to know what are the factors that actually reduce violence. And if we can't measure it and we can't study it, then we're never going to improve things. You know, I'm not objective in the question of do I want women to be victimized or not. I'm biased. I'm against violence. But at the same time, I'm unbiased when it comes to, you know, methodological approaches or policies that can be beneficial. Thanks to Amalia Miller, Eve Sheedy, Eddie Garcia, and Kylie Hawks for their insights and analysis today. And thanks to you, as always, for listening. Again, if you or someone you know needs help, you can reach the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-7233.

Coming up next time on the show. Live Golf is a Saudi-backed attempt to get the world to not pay attention to their atrocious record on human rights. A political controversy is broken out in the usually very boring precincts of professional golf. Sports and politics are in a relationship. They're having an affair, so to speak, and their illegitimate child is sports washing. So that's a pretty new term. Basically, it means using some sort of sporting event to try to cover over any problems a country has had in the past. The term may be new, but the practice isn't. So does sports washing work?

It's not going to erase tanks rolling across a border. A strange story about a murderous Saudi prince, the best left-handed golfer in history, and pad thai? That's next time. Until then, take care of yourself, and if you can, someone else too. Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Renbud Radio. This episode was produced by Zach Lipinski.

Our staff also includes Neil Carruth, Gabriel Roth, Greg Rippin, Ryan Kelly, Julie Canfor, Rebecca Lee Douglas, Morgan Levy, Eleanor Osborne, Jasmine Klinger,ippin, Ryan Kelly, Julie Canfor, Rebecca Lee Douglas, Morgan Levy, Eleanor Osborne, Jasmine Klinger, Emma Terrell, Lyric Bowditch, Jacob Clemente, and Alina Kullman. Our theme song is Mr. Fortune by the Hitchhikers. All the other music was composed by Luis Guerra. You can get the entire archive of Freakonomics Radio on any podcast app, along with the other shows in the Freakonomics Radio

network. Please check out our newest show about dogs called Off Leash. To learn more or to get our newsletter, go to Freakonomics.com. I'm the kind of person who thinks that they're rebellious, but nobody else thinks that about me. Like high school, I think I wore pajamas to school one day and was sent to the principal's office and was told, this is going to be on your permanent record. And I was like, yeah, whatever. I don't care. You are wild. It's amazing you're not in prison wearing pajamas to school. I had a nice blazer on top also. It was cute.

The Freakonomics Radio Network network the hidden side of everything Stitcher and now here as promised is an excerpt from an episode of the Cautionary Tales podcast with host Tim Harford. Friday night at the Hyatt Regency, one of Kansas City's most popular dates since the hotel opened just a year earlier. There are queues at the lobby bar. The place is buzzing. It's the summer of 1981,

but the orchestra is belting out the big band sounds of the 40s and 50s. Dance contestants with numbers pinned to their backs are doing the mambo and the east coast swing. But while the music is nostalgic, the hotel lobby is distinctly space age. It's big and airy, with a glass wall letting in the light, and three walkways, skywalks crossing the space on the second, third and fourth floors. They're suspended from the ceiling, so that the lobby itself is unobstructed by columns, all the more room for dancing. Cindy Paulson briefly looks down from the terrace restaurant

to see if she can see her father out on the dance floor. The restaurant, on a large mezzanine overlooking the lobby, provides the perfect view. But the lobby floor is packed and she can't pick him out of the crowd. After a moment, she goes back to work. Cindy's a college student. Her family live in town. Being a hostess at the Hyatt is her summer job. It's five past seven in the evening. Cindy will always remember that, because she glances across

the lobby, out through the floor-to-ceiling glass wall, and sees the time on the clock on the bank just across the street. Then there's a sharp crack, clearly audible even above the music and the loud buzz of conversation. Cindy's eyes refocus from the distant clock to the skywalks in front of her. But she can't believe what she's seeing. I'm Tim Harford, and you're listening to Cautionary Tales. Dr Joseph Wackerley got the call almost immediately from emergency dispatchers. We need you at the Hyatt. He grabbed a stethoscope and scrubs and ran to his car. Wackerley, just 35 years old,

had already served as the director of Kansas City's emergency medical system. He rushed to the scene. When Wackerley arrived at the Hyatt, it was lit by the flashing lights of ambulances. Amid the crowd, there were dozens of injured people. Some were bleeding, others had broken bones, some were lying on stretchers. Wackerley sprang into action, checking who needed assistance most urgently. Then a paramedic grabbed him.

You're in the wrong place, he said. The real casualties are inside the hotel. You need to get inside. The lobby was no longer airy and bathed in evening sunlight. It was coated in concrete dust. The skywalks no longer levitated across the atrium. Two of them had fallen, crunching onto the busy dance floor. Voices were calling out for help.

Electric cables were swinging loose, arcs of electricity sending flashes of light across the dim space. Somewhere high above, a pipe had fractured and water was gushing onto the lobby floor. It was six inches deep already and threatened to submerge those who were trapped, if anyone had survived the impact, that is. Wackerley could see arms and legs sticking out of the rubble. Dr Wackerley took charge of the medical operation.

It was bolstered by a huge voluntary effort, with taxis, buses and private cars helping the ambulances to get injured people to hospitals. Locals were doing whatever they could to tend to the walking wounded, free the trapped and comfort families. Among them was Cindy Paulson, the restaurant hostess. She'd helped evacuate the diners at the restaurant, but then she'd returned to the lobby.

Somewhere in the middle of that mess was her father. She moved through the lobby, doing what she could. She comforted one couple, pinned under the wreckage. After firefighters were able to free them, Cindy kept looking for her father. 250 miles away in St. Louis, Jack Gillum and his wife arrived home to find the telephone ringing. The call was from one of the architects at the Hyatt Regency Hotel. There's been a collapse at the Hyatt. Jack Gillum was stunned.

He was the structural engineer of record for the Hyatt Regency Hotel's construction. That meant he was the one who'd signed off on all the designs, certifying that they were safe. And now Gillum was being told that those elegant walkways across the hotel lobby had fallen out of the sky and smashed into the crowd of people below. Jack, the rescue teams are trying to get equipment that can move the fallen sections of walkway. They need to know how heavy the sections are. Reeling, Gillum could hardly think. He stammered out an approximate answer. Each of those airy-looking skywalks

weighed over 30 tonnes. A single walkway section weighed about 8 tonnes. They were going to need cranes. Gillum managed to charter a plane and fly over, arriving a few hours into the rescue effort. Whatever he expected to see, the disaster was worse. But his job now was to try to figure out how the structure had failed. This was a brand new building. It looked bold, but the engineering was simple enough. Somehow the structure had failed catastrophically. Somehow they'd missed something.

But what?