The highest case clearance rates were for violent crime and aggravated assault (45.5% and 52.5%, respectively). These crimes typically occur between people who already know each other, and yet it's basically a coin flip whether the police will deliver a case for prosecution.
Think about how attractive a crime is when you have a 0.01% chance of going to jail for it vs a 13.9% chance of going to jail.
A clearance rate could be only a few percent and still be an effective deterrent if the marginal benefit of the crime over some other activity is enough worse than the punishment.
Also consider that a significant fraction of all crimes is committed by a small portion of the population. Even if we fail to send someone to jail for 90% of crimes they commit, eventually they are caught and removed from the community, preventing their future crimes -- stopping all the crimes they would have otherwise committed. The end point here isn't necessarily jail-- either, if they're caught once and scared straight the same thing applies.
It's insane to me that people would rather dump hundreds of millions of dollars into a pointless effort to try to terrorize communities into law-abidance rather than invest that money into addressing some of the material desperation and crises in mental health which would actually make our communities nicer to live in for everyone.
Nah. This is completely reasonable. We tend to have punishments that are large multiples of the benefits of committing the crime, because people know they will not likely be caught. So, you face the situation of doing something that you 90% know you'll get away with, but the remaining 10% is really, really inconvenient. And if you keep rolling the dice, you'll get caught eventually. (And in a perfect world, would be rehabilitated).
> Would you pay 30% of your salary to go to a hospital that historically only cured 3% of patients
NNT's tend to be pretty high for most medical interventions. e.g. statins. No mortality benefit, you need to treat 217 to prevent one nonfatal heart attack, and you need to treat 313 people to prevent one nonfatal stroke-- so about 0.5% see a benefit.
We pay a small percentage of our income to what becomes city budgets, so I think you're engaging in hyperbole to compare this small percentage of our salary that goes to policing to spending 30% of our salary.
I am paying a bunch of money for home insurance and it only rarely helps anyone...
This is another fantasy. It's only true for certain types of people. Are the punishments for crimes committed by police officers scaled based on the likelihood of punishment?
> NNT's tend to be pretty high for most medical interventions. e.g. statins.
I would not pay 30% of my salary for statins.
> We pay a small percentage of our income to what becomes city budgets
All of the money that cities use to purchase police service comes from taxes. The question is not what percentage of an individual's income goes to police, but whether, from the perspective of the city, the overall allocation is an effective use of public funds.
No, but they should be.
> I would not pay 30% of my salary for statins.
Do you pay 30% of your salary for policing?
> The question is not what percentage of an individual's income goes to police, but whether, from the perspective of the city, the overall allocation is an effective use of public funds.
That's an.. ahem.. interesting way to look at it. So if the city wastes twice as much money elsewhere, policing becomes a better deal?
Or if the city gets 30 pennies, and uses 33% of it to stop a fraction of crime, that's a bad deal?
It might be better to look at the services that residents receive in exchange for the amount they pay in taxes, instead of using some ridiculous metric based on fraction of one political entity's tax income.
Otherwise we come up with ridiculous silly comparisons. The sheriff is a tiny proportion of my county's expenditures, and police are a big proportion of my city's expenditures... by your metric, the sheriff is more cost effective, despite costing nearly the exact same amount per capita for the people they're first responders for. (Because the county gets a much bigger share of tax income and spends a bunch on other services that my city doesn't have to pay for).
Or if we're going with the health analogy-- we spend the overwhelming majority of our public health "income" on things with very high NNTs.
"Effective" to me means "achieves desired outcome". You seem to be using a different definition.
If a city represents the interests of its residents and the residents share an interest in material safety, then the question becomes: which strategies provide the residents as a whole with the most safety for the least expenditure? And which strategies are the most in harmony with the resident's other interests (e.g., equality, human dignity)?
For a given outcome: it's the same deal whether the city spends 33% on policing and it's 100x dollars, or if it spends 33% on policing and it's 1x dollars? Surely the proportion of residents' money spent on policing is what matters.
> "Effective" to me means "achieves desired outcome". You seem to be using a different definition.
Basically nothing achieves desired outcome. Case clearance rates are hardly a figure of merit for policing: I think it's likely that you believe as such, too. Or do you think the system would be better if it threw more people in jail?
Argue in good faith. There's plenty of an argument for different police policy without going through ridiculous gymnastics ("percentage of income", arguing low case clearance rates makes policing ineffective, etc). Otherwise, you end up losing the people who might mostly agree with you-- maybe on purpose, are you just trolling?
Similarly, most fines don't scale with wealth. So a speeding ticket might be a terrible blow for an impoverished individual, but completely inconsequential for the super rich.
Regarding what United States cities spend on police, Mother Jones has some information here: https://www.motherjones.com/crime-justice/2020/08/the-blue-b...
Honestly, the numbers are surprising to me. Example: Normally, New York City is quoted as having the largest police force in the United States. However, NYC only spends 8% of its city budget on police. I lived in Manhattan for a few years, and it was normal to see police on foot/bike/car patrols even in wealthy, relatively crime-free neighborhoods.
Also: In the Mother Jones article pie charts, Oakland spends 44% of its city budget on police. But in the historical graphs below, they spend about 8%. There must be a subtle difference in what they are measuring, but it is unclear to me.
According to that list police budgets make up an average of 30% of overall spending.
But pension obligations are a pretty significant component of the price of policing, so excluding them in these calculations doesn't make a lot of sense.
20%-30% is pretty typical. Almost all cities with lower numbers have enormous transportation budgets (e.g., NYC -- they do spend a ton on police, but they also have transportation budget that's comparable to many states).
If someone picks your pocket, that’s theft. If someone steals something from your house while you’re at work, that’s burglary.
Second, as I understand burglary, it is a property crime, like breaking & entering into a home, business, or car. Robbery is person-to-person theft (stick-up by knife, gun, etc.) If we think about burglary for a moment, most burglaries happen when no one is around. Thus, imagine how difficult it is to have enough evidence to even lay a charge against someone. Vanishingly small. I'm not sure that is a good way to judge the effectiveness of police. I lived in an apartment building many years ago where someone got to the roof, then entered an open window and stole some things. The chances of catching this person are incredibly low. The police came to our building to ask questions and look at the inside of various apartments. The effort was made, but it would be nearly impossible to lay charges with so little tangible evidence.
Third, think about robbery. When I think about robbery, I think about "wrong place, wrong time" -- on a street alone at night. What are the chances the police will be able to gather enough evidence to lay a charge? Again, vanishingly small.
Lastly, about this clearance rate for these two crime categories: How does it compare to other high income countries like Canada, UK, France, Netherlands, Germany, Korea, Taiwan, Japan, etc.? I'm sure it is also fairly low.
The point is that we should take the massive amount of funding that police receive in the US ($5.1 billion of which has gone towards military vehicles and equipment through the DOD 1033 program) and reallocate it to strategies which extend to people other options beyond a cycle of crime and punishment.
See, e.g. here I'd agree with you totally: almost the entirety of that money spent on the militarization of police is worthless, or, worse, actively harmful. You don't need to make bullshit arguments to support it. Indeed, you weaken people's perceptions of the strength of the case when you give them bullshit arguments.
And the average clearance rate for murder is around 60.
Given that police prioritize some crimes over others, one should be careful in using the stats for things they don't place a priority on as a basis to pass judgement. If the violent crime rate could be lowered for example, say by removing the ability of a violent gang to operate (i.e., arrest and convict them), this frees up time to go after other crimes. We are looking at the current equilibrium achieved as a result of all their efforts, not some law of nature that happens either way (i.e. fixed clearance rates).
Had my bike stolen DIRECTLY in front of a security camera in Seattle.
The police didn't even bother to look for the plates on the car in the footage identify the person. They also wouldn't let me see the tape. They just showed up and said, "This is a cold case" and then left.
I guess the illusion of them showing up gave me some sense of validation.
People committing property crimes will trip themselves up and get caught eventually, even if the probability of any individual case being solved is low.
Perhaps only coincidentally, the department is struggling to hire and crime- both violent and nonviolent- is up. My friend's workplace just finished reinstalling bullet proof glass due to the rise in shootings and rock throwings.
That is nothing like what is being suggested here. The police haven't been abolished yet, but only because nobody can agree on what to have instead.
Most common suggestions are to have neighborhood watch, plugs social workers to be dispatched for most crimes- unless a gun is held to someone's head, there are city board members suggesting that police shouldn't be dispatched at all. Even in cases of rape, they're saying that social workers are better suited to "deescalate if necessary and to deal with the emotional trauma".
This is what the "abolish" advocates around here are pushing for- "abolish" not "start over with new offices in the same capacity as the old ones".
> We need to disband all of the police forces and start again with a new culture based around a guardian mindset and community service
There are indeed people who want to abolish the police. There are those who don't. That's why I said "depends who's suggesting a replacement": in this particular case the top-level comment was calling to create a police force with a different institutional culture, not to create some non-police institution.
About Camden: a rebuilding of the department involved massive cultural change, selectively rehiring to weed out bad influences, recreating the hierarchy to put more civilian-friendly people on top, and breaking the back of the police union. Rebuilding an organization to do the same task from the ground up let's you accomplish that. You're still going to end up hiring from the same talent pool, but those individuals can behave very differently in a different organizational culture.
Why should the same logic not apply to police forces?
Moreover, the threat of this happening would help whip a lot of other forces into shape.
Yes, we are. That's what "abolish police" means.
Could we please abolish the police force? They do far more harm than good.
Ref: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/new-jersey-city-disband...
> Camden and Newark, two cities in New Jersey, are among those that have been held up as powerful examples of positive change. The two cities have seen structural reforms to their police departments and a steep drop in crime, both within the communities and inflicted by the police.
Clearly it was an effective structural reform. But it does not constitute "police abolition" in a way that would be meaningful to police abolitionists.
And Newark didn't even do that. They just started actually investigating police abuses and imposing actual consequences for abuse.
If anything, it goes to show that you don't need police abolition to make an improvement. But you do need to make changes that amount to more than lip service.
Became a complete hellhole as calls to burglary, home invasion and death threats would take an hour or more for county sheriff.
After numerous incidents sherif us told to get a gun; but gave a lot of warnings about how we would go to jail if we defended ourselves. Unless a very narrow range of criteria were met.
Moved as far as way as possible.