What These 11 Cops Think People Don’t Understand About Crime

One of the goals of our Times Opinion focus groups is to bring together subsets of Americans and explore assumptions that others might have — digging deeper into them, challenging them, in some cases stamping out stereotypes. In our latest group, with 11 police officers and other members of law enforcement from around the country, one assumption we had at the start was that some or all of them would see crime as the most important issue in the country. In fact, none of them did.

Many of them were...