The Perception of Crime Since 2020 The Case of Chattanooga

Crime remains a pressing concern for Americans, even as rates of violence have receded from 2022 peaks. What explains these persistent concerns? This report investigates this question in the context of a small but rapidly growing American city: Chattanooga, Tennessee. A Manhattan Institute poll from earlier this year found that Chattanooga residents are worried about safety in their communities; this report investigates why.

In a review of Chattanooga data, it finds that the city experienced the same increases in certain kinds of crime that other American cities did over the past four years, but that, through the application of evidence-based practices, the city’s police and municipal government have brought the problem under control.

But even as violent crime has largely receded, there are multiple indicators suggesting that another problem persists: disorder. Data indicate that homelessness, trash, and certain kinds of petty crime remain elevated above pre-2020 levels. A reduction in city resources—especially police resources—appears to have caused a concentration on serious crime, at the expense of more minor but still significant issues.

Disorder, this report argues, matters, especially for a growing city like Chattanooga. Consequently, this report concludes by outlining a number of principles for addressing this problem, while capitalizing on the gains that the city has already made in getting major crime under control.

Cities across the nation experienced large increases in crime and disorder from 2020 to 2022. By some measures—particularly rates of homicide—these problems have receded. But many Americans remain concerned about crime and are convinced that it is a rising issue.[1] What is it that they are perceiving? If the homicide rate, for example, is dropping, why are people still worried?

This report investigates these questions in the context of one American city. Chattanooga is a city of roughly 180,000 people in southeastern Tennessee, close to the border with Georgia. The city is rapidly growing, as it—like many other southern cities—has benefited from Covid-induced migration.

Like many other cities, Chattanooga experienced an increase in crime in 2020. And its residents remain concerned: a poll conducted by the Manhattan Institute in February 2024 found that three-quarters of Chattanooga residents consider public safety a major issue.[2]

But are those perceptions up to date? And what produced them? As this report argues, Chattanooga did experience an increase in serious crime. But that increase has largely abated, returning to pre-2020 levels across several major crime categories, thanks largely to the use of evidence-based policing strategies by the Chattanooga Police Department (CPD). However, this focused strategy, combined with a manpower shortage—as well as an exogenous increase in homelessness—has led to levels of disorder and petty crime that remain somewhat elevated, compared with the pre-2020 baseline.

This phenomenon is driving Chattanoogans’ concerns. And while minor crime and disorder may not be as harmful, in absolute terms, as crimes like homicide, they still pose problems for cities—especially cities, like Chattanooga, that want to take full advantage of current opportunities for growth and expansion.

Consequently, the conclusion of this report outlines principles for abating disorder and petty crime. These include:

• Policing works
• Don’t just police disorder; solve problems
• Target problem properties
• Beautification reduces crime
• “Homeward bound” works
• Evaluation matters
• Messaging matters

While serious violence is and ought to be the top priority, cities cannot lose sight of the minor problems that still dramatically affect citizens’ quality of life. This report explores the case of Chattanooga to provide a lesson for policymakers across the country on how to do that.

How do Chattanooga residents feel about crime in their city? During February 10–13, 2024, the Manhattan Institute polled a representative sample of 550 Chattanoogans on their perceptions of public safety. The full results of that poll were published in March.[3] This section reports findings from the poll that cast light on the perception of crime.

Broadly speaking, Chattanoogans are concerned about crime: 76% of respondents agreed that crime and public safety are “major issues” in Chattanooga, including majorities of both sexes and all age groups, races, and political affiliations. A majority (51%) of respondents also reported they thought there was more violent crime in Chattanooga than there was before 2020; notably, black respondents were more likely to agree with that view (56%) than white (51%) or Hispanic (33%) respondents.

Residents of Chattanooga believe not only that the city as a whole is less safe than it was before 2020 but that they are personally less safe. Figure 1 shows environments in which Chattanoogans report feeling unsafe during the day and at night. Respondents were much more likely to feel unsafe at night, as well as in public places such as parks, while shopping, and, in particular, downtown. Notably, these options are not mutually exclusive: 64% of respondents selected at least one location in which they felt unsafe during the day, and 78% selected at least one at night.

In short: as of February, Chattanoogans were concerned about crime and safety in their city. Their perception was that they were unsafe, particularly at night or while out in public. This perception, regardless of actual crime rates, represents a distinct challenge for policymakers.

Perceptions of crime do not always accord with reality.[4] And while polling can give a picture of a citizenry’s impressions, it cannot always provide a high-resolution picture: 550 Chattanoogans cannot provide a neighborhood-level breakdown of concerns about crime. This section, therefore, reviews data on crime and public disorder in Chattanooga, which reveal that the city’s perceived crime problem is more complex and multidimensional than Chattanoogans may realize.

Figure 2 captures trends in eight categories of crime, roughly overlapping with the “major” crimes, in Chattanooga between January 2018 and June 2024. Points represent monthly totals, while the lines represent a 12-month rolling average.[5] The shaded gray areas mark the period following the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic in March 2020. The dashed lines show the averages in the pre- and post-Covid periods.

In general, the pattern is rise-and-fall: monthly counts of aggravated assault, rape, burglary, robbery, and larceny all rose starting in mid-2020, but have fallen back to or below pre-pandemic norms. Rates of motor vehicle theft followed a similar trend but seem to have gone back up over the past year, a phenomenon that a CPD representative interviewed for this report attributed to national social media trends. Rates of simple assault and weapons violations remain elevated over the pre-pandemic normal; CPD attributes the latter to an increase in proactivity, which will be discussed below.

What about the most serious crime: murder? Figure 3 shows murder counts for Chattanooga from 2018 to 2023. It also estimates the 2024 murder count based on the count through June.[6] Surprisingly, Chattanooga experienced no major increase in homicides in 2020, and it saw rates decline in 2021 and 2022—a pattern that deviates from the trend in many other major cities.

Figure 4 looks at trends in less serious, quality-of-life-related crimes, using the same approach as in Figure 2. Here, the picture is again not exclusively one of increase. Damage/vandalism of property and drug paraphernalia violations have become more common in the post-Covid period. But drug violations and shoplifting are less common, while disorderly conduct is about as common.

Within any city—including Chattanooga—different areas have different crime rates. This is true at both the neighborhood level, and at the block level. The so-called law of crime concentration stipulates that about 5% of blocks in a given city will be responsible for about 50% of the crime.[7] Observing where crime concentrates, moreover, can tell us something about the character of that offending.

While Chattanooga-based readers may be familiar with the contours of local geography, Figure 5 provides a picture of the city for those unfamiliar. It breaks the city up into census tracts (“small, relatively permanent geographic entities within counties … delineated by a committee of local data users”)[8] and shows the median household income for each tract—thus giving a broad impression of wealth and disadvantage in the city.

The city is split by the Tennessee River, with many wealthy residents living on the western side. Downtown Chattanooga, the hub of commercial life, lies on the east side of the river, just north of where it bends. Chattanooga’s poorest—and least safe—neighborhoods lie east of downtown, in south-central Chattanooga; residents generally identify the area east of Holtzclaw Avenue as particularly problematic. These areas are also where Chattanooga’s gangs are most concentrated, as of a 2012 assessment conducted by the Ochs Center for Metropolitan Studies.[9]

Figure 6 looks at three other kinds of crime that remain concerns for the city: simple assault, motor vehicle theft, and murder. These seem to follow roughly the same geographic distributions in 2019 and 2023. I.e., crime in these areas became more intense, but the distribution of crime does not appear to have shifted.

Together, these data do not uniformly indicate that crime in Chattanooga remains higher than it was before the 2020 spike. But they do highlight areas of concern for the city. An accurate summary might be that Chattanooga experienced an increase in crime generally in the past several years, mostly concentrated in the areas where crime predominates, but many of those issues have abated. However, certain offenses—simple assault, motor vehicle theft, vandalism, and drug paraphernalia violations—remain elevated over the pre-pandemic norm. It appears that Chattanooga is coming out from the other side of a serious crime wave but that the reduction in serious crime has not coincided with a complete reversion for less severe, but still alarming, crimes.

Not all social problems, and not all phenomena that drive perceptions of crime, are best measured by crime data. Public disorder—which is sometimes, but not necessarily, criminal—shows up in other data sets, not only in the crime data. One rich source of data on this topic are calls or messages to the city’s 311 service, which provide detailed information about the situation being reported.

For example, Figure 7 shows messages to the city’s 311 system that mention concerns about trash, litter, or garbage. Such requests have increased substantially since 2019. That year, the city received about 5,400 requests with those keywords. In 2020, the city received about 6,900 such messages, slightly below the 2021 peak of 7,200, but a 53% increase compared with 2019. In 2024, the city is on track to receive 6,400 complaints about trash and garbage, assuming similar rates to previous years.[10] That represents 1,000 additional complaints over the pre-2020 normal.

A related indicator are requests that relate to homelessness, depicted in Figure 8. Although less frequent, such messages also grew more common in 2020 and indeed have become more common since. In 2019, the city received just 77 requests about homelessness. In 2023, the equivalent figure was 268; the projected figure for 2024 is 233.

Calls about garbage and those about homelessness tend, perhaps unsurprisingly, to overlap. In the roughly 1,000 reports involving homelessness since 2018, 29% have included a reference to camps or camping, and 49% have included a reference to garbage. Those shares go up in the post-2020 period. In 2018–19, only 18% of homelessness-related requests mentioned camps, while 37% mentioned garbage. In 2020–24, 30% mentioned camps and 52% mentioned garbage.

The increase in 311 calls is unsurprising when looking at Chattanooga’s unsheltered homeless population. Figure 9 depicts measures of homelessness reported by the Chattanooga/Southeast Tennessee Continuum of Care to the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development.[11] As is visually apparent, levels of overall and unsheltered homelessness spiked in 2021 through 2023. While they have declined, the most recent (January 2024) figures are still elevated over pre-2020 normal. Levels of chronic homelessness—long-term homelessness concurrent with serious mental illness, drug addiction, or other disability[12]—also remain elevated through January 2023 (no 2024 data were available at the time of writing). A CPD representative reported that CPD–homeless interaction has increased 59% since 2018, with a 40% increase between 2023 and 2024 alone.

What about the geographic concentration of homelessness and related disorder—or of complaints about the same? Figure 10 plots 311 calls mentioning homelessness since 2020. The geographic pattern of these calls is notably distinct from that of crimes (as shown in Figure 6). While crime is most concentrated in Chattanooga’s areas of greatest disadvantage—i.e., the central area and East Chattanooga—the prevalence of concern about homelessness is roughly equal on both the east and west side of Holtzclaw Avenue. That suggests that disorder, or the perception of it, is less geographically concentrated than major crime is.

What these data suggest, collectively, is that disorder is an underrated component of the problem of perception of crime in Chattanooga. Increased disorder, across several dimensions, over the past four years likely plays a role at least as important as recent increases in crime in making Chattanoogans feel unsafe in their city.

Why did violent crime rise across the U.S. in 2020? The most parsimonious explanation is that there was a concurrent decline in police staffing levels and proactivity.[13] Many cities experienced sustained drops in the total intensity of policing, yielding increases in crime as the control exerted by the criminal-justice system was temporarily reduced. At the same time, shocks to the civil systems meant to manage disorder—such as mass closure of shelters to prevent the spread of disease—also contributed to increases in public disorder.

The evidence discussed in the previous section suggests that Chattanooga followed a similar trajectory, albeit not exactly. Several major crimes—aggravated assault, larceny, motor vehicle theft, and rape—rose and then fell between 2020 and 2024. But Chattanooga avoided the homicide wave that other cities have experienced. And it seems to have reined in its major crime problem, unlike some other cities. At the same time, disorder problems seem to have persisted.

So what steps did Chattanooga take to try to bring its problems under control? This section reviews such efforts, with a particular, but not exclusive, focus on CPD.

Figure 11 shows sworn officer levels reported to the FBI annually. Staffing did fall notably in 2021, dropping by about 11% versus 2020 and 14% versus the recent peak in 2018. But staffing levels seem to be back to near pre-Covid levels and above historical lows. Commenting on this trend, a CPD press representative wrote that “after 2020, law enforcement agencies nationwide have experienced attrition which can pose challenges. With those challenges, the CPD was able to maintain staffing in the critical roles by not filling some nonessential roles. We focused our efforts to maintain staffing in our Neighborhood Policing (patrol) bureau.” In 2024, the city also increased its staffing efforts.

The city has experienced substantial executive turnover. Former chief David Roddy left the department in mid-2021; he was subsequently hired to work on public safety for the government of Hamilton County, where Chattanooga is located.[14] In March 2022, Roddy was replaced by Celeste Murphy, the first black woman to hold the job.[15] Murphy subsequently resigned in June 2024 in anticipation of state criminal charges relating to alleged falsification of her residency.[16]

How has CPD adapted to its staffing challenges and the increase in certain kinds of crime? Figure 12 shows the number of arrests made by CPD by year, aggregated by rough categorization of crime type.[17] Arrests are an imperfect indicator of police priority because they are partially determined by the level of crime. Nonetheless, the data suggest that serious offenses, especially violent offenses, became a greater priority in 2020–22. Levels of arrest for violent offenses rose precipitously, while property arrests also rose, but to a lesser degree. Both then fell in 2023–24, roughly in line with trends in those offenses. Disorder and drug arrests, by contrast, were roughly flat in 2020–22—and, indeed, down slightly, compared with 2019. And they have continued to fall, even as related problems have risen.

The decline in petty crime enforcement also shows up in another place: the number of court citations, principally issued for traffic enforcement. As Figure 13 shows, citations were at a recent high in 2018–19. But they began to decline in 2020, dropping below 2016–17 levels, and have remained low since then. CPD also stopped responding to minor crashes entirely in 2023 as part of an officer time-saving measure.[18] This is despite the fact that Hamilton County reported roughly as many motor vehicle traffic deaths to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in 2021–23 (53 on average per year) as it did in 2019 (51) or 2018 (44).[19] I.e., policing attention dedicated to traffic enforcement (another minor offense) has declined relative to its intensity. CPD attributes this decline to its manpower shortage.

These trends reflect a strategy of focusing, as a CPD representative put it, “a majority of our investigative intentions on the most violent recidivists.” The spike in arrests for weapon law violations, for example, reflects a large increase in proactive, officer-initiated enforcement meant to reduce illegal gun carrying and thus gun violence. The city has embraced “focused deterrence”, an evidence-based approach that prioritizes enforcement efforts against the 2% of Chattanoogans who were either victims or suspects in 64% of violent crimes.[20]

This focus on the most serious offenders extends to CPD’s cooperation with agency partners. As a CPD representative explained, “federal partnerships also experienced significant growth [since 2020], and with that came a more intentional focus on gun-related crimes. Our efforts to employ focused deterrence strategies were not new; however, our partnerships and focused commitment from all stakeholders were at an all-time high.” In coordination with the Hamilton County District Attorney’s office, CPD has set up a system to flag repeat violent offenders, with the goal of incapacitating them before they commit the most serious offenses.[21] The District Attorney’s office has reorganized to emphasize prosecutor specialization, including dedicated prosecutors for child sex abuse and gang and violent crime.[22]

CPD continues to innovate in this space. It is a member of the National Public Safety Partnership and has received funding from the Local Law Enforcement Crime Gun Intelligence Center Integration Initiative, reflecting its prioritization of best practices in policing. And it is extending its work on people-focused policing to place-focused strategies, targeting the small number of blocks that drive crime.[23]

This shift in priorities toward violence shows up in other places. Since 2014, the mayor’s office has operated an Office of Community Safety and Gun Violence Prevention within its Office of Community Health.[24] The office focuses on prevention, and providing services to young people and families, such as grief counseling and career fairs.[25] It is also involved with coordinating the efforts of a violence-interruption nonprofit group, the 423 Chainbreakers, made up of former offenders who work to reduce violence in their communities. The Chainbreakers have operated in East Chattanooga’s Avondale and Bushtown areas; violent crime declined 12% during their operation, although the extent to which the Chainbreakers caused that reduction is unclear.[26] They have also been deployed downtown—a departure from conventional violence interruption, which tends to focus on areas of concentrated dysfunction.[27] The city is seeking federal funds to expand its violence prevention work, and the Chainbreakers are looking to expand across Chattanooga.[28]

Over the past four years, Chattanooga has responded to rising crime and resource constraints (including a decline in sworn officer staffing) by prioritizing serious, especially violent, offenses. That strategy appears to have paid off in spades, as measured by the decline in violent crime and the approximately flat murder level. At the same time, fewer resources are now being dedicated, in absolute terms, to preserving public order and managing petty crime, which may explain why those have risen or remained persistently elevated, even as major crime has returned to baseline.

A point made in the previous section bears repeating: Chattanooga’s police and civilian leadership are doing their job. They are implementing best-practices strategies for reducing and preventing serious crime, and—according to the available measures—these efforts are working. The city has faced many of the same challenges as other cities since 2020 and has responded admirably to them.

Against that backdrop, raising concerns about homelessness, trash, and disorder might seem petty. Why should we worry about these things if the major crime indicators look good?

Broadly speaking, there are two reasons to be concerned about petty crime and disorder. One reason is instrumental: petty crime and disorder, left uncontrolled, can breed more serious and even violent crime. As George L. Kelling and James Q. Wilson first articulated in their “broken windows” theory, disorder does not inevitably cause major crime but can create circumstances that engender it.[29] Kelling and Wilson’s original claim yielded an intense and ongoing empirical debate. Much of that debate is beyond the scope of this report, but the balance of evidence indicates that the policing of disorder—especially via certain methods, as will be discussed below—can yield reductions in crime.[30]

But the instrumental justification for combating disorder is perhaps not satisfying in a jurisdiction where violent crime is declining. Consequently, we should consider another reason for managing disorder: that the quality of life, as well as the disorder and petty crime that reduce it, matters to residents intrinsically. The sort of challenges that Chattanooga is dealing with today might not be the most severe. But residents’ persistent sense of fear reflects a desire not to live where public disorder, dysfunction, and petty crime are tolerated. Even if the average Chattanoogan is no more at risk of brutal murder than she was five years ago, she may be at greater risk—even if only somewhat—of being harassed on the street, aggressively panhandled to, or having to walk her children past an encampment. All these experiences alter the quality of day-to-day life in a city.

That people feel this way ought to be enough to motivate action on the part of the city’s government(s). But from the perspective of a self-interested municipal actor, now is a particularly important time to worry about quality of life in a city like Chattanooga.

Chattanooga, Hamilton County, and the broader Chattanooga metropolitan area have all grown significantly since 2020—about 1% per year, per census data.[31] That’s in line with growth trends across the South, where population growth has accelerated relative to the rest of the country since 2020.[32] The South added some 3 million people in 2019–22, compared with fewer than 2 million in the rest of the country combined.[33]

This population growth represents a major relocation, as millions of Americans left high cost-of-living states, particularly in the North, for “suburbs, smaller metropolitan areas, and rural areas.”[34] This trend is driven partly by the dramatic increase in remote work: as of mid-2023, 28% of workdays were done at home, four times the equivalent figure in 2019.[35] This great relocation may be a one-time phenomenon. Over the long run, rates of mobility have steadily declined, with 2020 representing a temporary deviation.[36] After spiking in 2020, the share of remote workers appears to have leveled out at its current (elevated over 2019) level, suggesting that, in the medium term, there will be little further growth in remote work to counterbalance the secular decline in mobility.[37]

The current situation represents a unique opportunity for small cities that aspire to grow. Population growth is essential to a city’s flourishing. It creates jobs, fueling commerce and innovation.[38] It also grows the tax base, in turn creating fiscal capacity for more ambitious municipal projects. And a possibly one-time burst of population growth is a particularly valuable resource that cities like Chattanooga may want to compete for—especially as population growth and migration are likely to slow over the long run.

People on the margins of moving to or within such cities—especially in the apparently attractive South—will make decisions about their locations based on a variety of factors. But central to their concern must be quality of life, holistically understood. Moreover, because such people are often moving from high-tax, high-service jurisdictions to low-tax, low-service jurisdictions, the set of policy inputs that determine quality of life will be relatively small.[39] That means that a sense of safety—which is largely determined by the level of ambient disorder[40]—is a particularly important variable for municipalities looking to attract these relocators.

To put it more simply: if people don’t feel safe in a city like Chattanooga, they won’t want to move there or stay there. And Chattanooga—like many small cities across the South—has an interest in attracting people, especially at this moment. One of the most attractive things the city could offer to new arrivals is a sense of safety—which, in many cases, means cleaning up disorder problems.

This section provides guidance on how to think about improving public order. It focuses on evidence-based interventions that can reduce crime and disorder. Police should be involved in this process but are not the only—or, in many cases, the most central—component. This is deliberate: CPD’s full-time responsibility is and should be controlling violence in Chattanooga, so it makes sense to try to find supplements to help with less serious, albeit still pressing, issues. At the same time, leaning on civil remedies and civilian agencies is a cost-effective way to expand the reach of the criminal-justice system.

Conspicuously, the focus of this section is not on addressing “root causes” of disorder or crime—poverty, systematic disadvantage, etc. This is for two reasons. One is that addressing such causes, insofar as they are actually “root” to social issues, takes a long and often indeterminate time. The principles below are meant to be effective in the here and now. The second is that disorder and crime are often not exclusively the product of such root causes but driven by specific issues, which can often be addressed without cutting to the root. Indeed, crime and disorder independently contribute to the well-being of all residents, especially those most at risk of criminal victimization: they are, in effect, root causes themselves, deserving of independent remediation.

Policing Works

That policing reduces crime is well attested in the empirical literature.[41] The bulk of the high-quality evidence supports the view that policing is an effective strategy for reducing disorder and that the policing of disorder can reduce crime generally.[42] Policing can reduce crime and disorder through coordinated, strategic efforts, but mere visibility can also be important. In fact, simply having police on patrol is a simple and effective tool for restoring order and reducing crime.[43]

CPD’s staffing ratio of 2.4 officers per 1,000 residents—the figure most recently reported to the FBI—is well above that of many struggling cities but no better than the national average ratio for police departments, which is also 2.4 officers per 1,000 people.[44] The department appears to have recovered from a temporary slump in its staffing numbers, but increasing the number of sworn officers further would create slack capacity that could be dedicated to visible patrol.

Doing so is easier said than done. Staffing is not free, and the national hiring environment for policing remains challenging, with a shrinking workforce and tight labor market continuing to drive up wages. Low local tax revenue—local sales and property tax in Hamilton County are both only 2.25%[45]—further constrains the city’s hiring capacity. A CPD representative noted that “several local, county, and state agencies have increased their officers’ salaries and we believe that an increase in salaries at CPD would assist with recruiting and retention.” To the extent that this is possible, it is desirable, but budget realities may conflict with it.

One alternative approach is to seek supplementary support from outside CPD. The Hamilton County Sheriff’s Office has 184 sworn officers as of the most recent figures reported to the FBI, and has worked to expand recruitment efforts in recent years.[46] Sheriffs can detail their officers to other agencies under Tennessee law.[47] Private security could also supplement the work of CPD, with some evidence finding that unarmed private patrols are an effective deterrent.[48] Security measures provided by local business improvement districts have, in particular, been found to yield large social benefits in terms of crime prevention.[49]

One place where private actors could be particularly helpful is in resourcing CPD’s Homeless Engagement Team, a CPD-led initiative focused on connecting the homeless with services and abating associated disorder. Expanding the role that, for example, downtown businesses play in funding and staffing this initiative could help alleviate business owners’ concerns while taking some weight off CPD.

Don’t Just Police Disorder; Solve Problems

A recent review of disorder policing as a crime-control strategy found that targeting disorder was generally an evidence-based intervention, producing a 42% reduction in crime, on average. But not all disorder-reduction strategies performed equally. The authors distinguish between community problem solving, which typically involves “a combination of collaborations with community stakeholders and problem analyses to identify creative solutions to reducing disorder at public places,” and aggressive order maintenance, which relies “exclusively on the intensive enforcement of social disorder as the singular treatment to reduce disorder at places.” The former, on average, outperformed the latter; in fact, while community problem solving yielded a 33% reduction in crime outcomes, on average, aggressive order maintenance had no statistically significant effect.[50]

What does community problem solving mean? In general, it means understanding disorder as the effect of a specific social problem—a house where drugs are sold, a park in which it is too easy to camp, a bar that stays opens too late and lets its patrons drink too much, or a motel where prostitution or drug dealing is allowed to happen. Such problems often show up as crime hot spots, and the aforementioned review notes that disorder policing strategies that focus on hot spots are often particularly efficacious. Once a problem or problem spot is identified, the next issue is the remediating steps that need to be taken, including, but not limited to, arrest. Civil remedies—e.g., condemnation or eviction—may also be appropriate, as may intergroup conflict mediation. Other agencies, or private citizens, can serve as important partners in such efforts.

Dedicating a CPD detail to such interagency-dependent, community-based problem solving—which will be easier if CPD staffing is expanded—would almost certainly yield outsize returns. It would also boost departmental knowledge, as officers responsible for targeting and remediating problems develop skills necessary to perform more quickly and effectively in the future.

Target Problem Properties

Poorly managed residential or commercial properties are common generators of disorder and crime. So-called problem properties often lack competent landlords or property managers, and can become hot spots for drug dealing, prostitution, vagrancy, and other visible signs of disorder. Many cities have implemented so-called problem property interventions, which pressure owners of such properties to address their issues or face serious penalty.

One such program, implemented in Boston, involved the identification of problem properties that generated outsize crime or disorder. Owners of problem properties were notified that if their property was not fixed, they would be liable for the cost of police or other city agency visits to the property, as well as work on the property. A recent quasi-experimental evaluation in the journal Criminology found that the intervention significantly reduced criminal and noncriminal complaints in the vicinity of targeted properties, compared with match control properties, and increased owner investment in the targeted properties.[51]

More generally, abating nuisance properties can be an efficacious strategy for crime reduction. Tennessee law defines as nuisances properties where prostitution, drug dealing or use, unlawful gambling, “breaches of the peace,” or gang activity are carried out.[52] City or county attorneys can petition for the abatement of a nuisance, as can “ten or more citizens and freeholders.”[53] Chattanooga already maintains a robust nuisance abatement program, including a fast-track program for vacant properties.[54] Expanding awareness of this program—including letting citizens know that they can collectively petition for an abatement—may expand its reach.

Beautification Reduces Crime

The role that the built and natural environment can play in combating crime is often overlooked in crime policy discussions. Concentration of greenery is consistently and inversely linked to fear of crime, with residents in greener areas reporting less fear.[55] That relationship is plausibly causal: the plausibly exogeneous loss of trees to pests has been shown to increase crime, and the greening of vacant lots has been shown to reduce certain kinds of crime and improve residents’ perceptions of safety in quasi-experimental research.[56] Cleaning up vacant lots and abandoned buildings has also been shown to causally reduce gun violence in the surrounding area.[57] Greening and cleaning programs are relatively cost-effective, partly because of their crime-reducing benefits.[58]

What this suggests is that cleaning up and greening otherwise unattended areas of Chattanooga might make the city not only prettier but more orderly and safer. Beautification helps communicate to residents—of the rich western part of Chattanooga and poor East Chattanooga alike—that they are in a safe environment. And that perception is well-founded because such beautification appears to make places objectively safer.

“Homeward Bound” Works

Chattanooga has responded to the surge of homelessness with a three-pronged strategy: expanding permanent supportive housing; implementing programming—including eviction prevention programs—meant to prevent homelessness; and creating “temporary” measures, including building new shelter capacity and deploying bike and foot patrols downtown.[59] Collectively, these approaches appear to have driven homelessness down substantially from its peak, although not (as of the most recent data) down to pre-2020 levels.[60]

Insofar as homelessness remains a challenge, it is worth asking whether and to what extent Chattanooga is responsible for all the new homeless residents of Hamilton County. Anecdotally, locals report that some homeless residents are not familiar to them, suggesting that they might have come from other parts of the state, region, or country. In those cases, it might be more cost-effective and humane to help them return to their home communities.

How many homeless residents are not native Chattanoogans? The answer is unclear, but a street survey would be a relatively cheap way to answer this question. Assuming a significant proportion, the city could work with those individuals to identify communities where they have connections and provide them with transportation and monetary support for when they arrive.

Such approaches have not been rigorously evaluated. The best analysis might be a 2019 San Francisco Chronicle investigation of San Francisco’s “Homeward Bound” homelessness initiative. Data obtained from the city found that 57% of program beneficiaries were stably housed within a month of leaving the city—a high success rate, relative to other homelessness interventions.[61]

A “homeward bound” strategy like the one employed by San Francisco should probably not be Chattanooga’s frontline approach, especially not for longtime residents experiencing temporary or chronic homelessness. But insofar as the city or region might have attracted nonlocals, a bus ticket is a valid and effective supplement to other homelessness-reduction policies.

Evaluation Matters

The 423 Chainbreakers, Chattanooga’s community violence intervention program, follows a nationwide trend in experimentation with “violence interrupters” as an alternative or supplement to traditional police work. Where successful, such programs offer tremendous promise in expanding the tools available for combating violent crime. Success is by no means guaranteed. In some evaluations, violence interrupters reduce violence. In others, however, they have no effect; Washington, DC’s violence interruption program appears to have just displaced homicide to nearby areas.[62] In some cases, such as an implementation in Pittsburgh, violence interruption programs are associated with increases in violence.[63]

This does not mean that Chattanooga should forgo the Chainbreakers, who are perceived to be successful. Rather, it should commit resources to a rigorous, randomized, or quasi-randomized evaluation of their impact. Rather than just noting changes in crime in areas where the Chainbreakers operate, an evaluation would select statistically similar comparison areas prior to intervention, and follow up to see how crime changed in areas with and without violence intervention. Alternately, if the Chainbreakers have collected geographic data on their activities, blocks where they have intervened could be statistically matched to similar blocks where they have not intervened, and the two compared. Such an approach would give the city a better handle on the efficacy of this program and potentially even justify its expansion if it were shown to be successful.

Messaging Matters

It is easy to dismiss perceptions of danger as irrational—as the product of fixation on the national news, rather than knowledge of the data on the ground. But as we have seen, the perceptions measured in our polling correspond to a feature of reality: to disorder and minor crime, rather than to violence and major crime. But more important, policymakers who simply dismiss their citizens’ fears as irrational—who tell them to turn off the TV and that everything is fine—will not win the argument. They will not assuage citizens’ concerns. What is necessary is to take concerted policy steps aimed at addressing the sources of that fear in the least costly and most just fashion.

CPD has, this report has argued, taken deliberate steps to curb violent crime in Chattanooga—and it has been successful. But local stakeholders often appear unaware of these steps, or of their success. CPD could do much more to make clear to the public that it is using evidence-based tools to combat violent crime.

It is this author’s impression that something like the opposite is going on in Chattanooga—that there is a palpable tension between different stakeholders, including the city government, the county government, CPD, and influential private citizens. That CPD’s effective policing is not more widely recognized might reflect an unwillingness to, as one county official put it, “brag on” itself. Less charitably, this may reflect an unwillingness to engage with community stakeholders. Collecting details on CPD’s activities for this report—details that largely reflect well on CPD’s activities over the past four years—was a laborious and halting process, with missed meetings, unanswered phone calls, and at least one explicit attempt at obfuscation directed at the author.[64] This is not how an agency that wants its people to feel safe acts.

The principles above are designed with Chattanooga in mind. But they apply to similar cities across the country—small cities that might not face major violence problems but are still suffering from quality-of-life issues that they recognize need to be addressed. Above all, they should understand that addressing these issues is vital to their continued thriving.

Indeed, as crime and disorder declined nationally through the 1990s and 2000s, quality-of-life issues—like crime control—tended to take a backseat to concern about the inequities imposed by systems meant to address them. As major American cities continue to grapple with the disorder challenges generated by Covid, lockdowns, and depolicing, it is important to get our approach right: to embrace evidence-based strategies that marry concern for public concerns with a commitment to fairness and justice for all.

Charles Fain Lehman is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, working primarily on the Policing and Public Safety Initiative, and a contributing editor of City Journal. His work has appeared in outlets including the New York Times, The Atlantic, the Wall Street Journal, National Affairs, and National Review. Lehman has discussed public safety policy before the House of Representatives and the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, as well as at colleges, including Carnegie Mellon and Cornell. He is a 2023–24 Robert Novak fellow with the Fund for American Studies. Prior to joining the Manhattan Institute in 2021, Lehman was a staff writer at the Washington Free Beacon. Originally from Pittsburgh, he now lives outside Washington, DC, with his wife and sons.

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