Explaining the Great 2020 Homicide Spike

Re:Explaining the Great 2020 Homicide Spike by nonameiguess on Wednesday February 03, 2021 @04:57PM (#26019703)

Something else to keep in mind is you can trivially eliminate crime with a sufficiently vast and committed police state. Put an officer on the street per non-officer resident. Allow them to stop and search any person randomly at any moment. Allow them to enter and search any house whenever they feel like it. Ban all encryption and put all communications channels through state MITM proxies that monitor the content.

We don't do this because we have values as a nation other than "minimize crime at any cost." Allowing it to be possible to commit some level of non-state violence is the price we pay for personal freedom from absolute government tyranny.

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Re:Explaining the Great 2020 Homicide Spike by prepend on Wednesday February 03, 2021 @06:48PM (#26020811)

I actually think this was a price we paid for some of the stop and frisk police work. It did reduce crime, but at a cost to justice for the innocents arrested, killed, and bothered.

So it’s important to plan police not to eliminate crime, but to reduce crime as much as possible given liberties. There’s probably some optimal frontier to it, but I don’t want to trade tyranny for crime.

What will be interesting is whether these higher murders had some trade offs elsewhere. I would like to see some research that all those fewer arrests also did something positive.

I don’t think there’s many accidental/unjustified police shootings of civilians but I would guess those went way down.

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