Re:Why Punish?
by enragedcacti on Saturday July 30, 2022 @04:44PM
(#32290111)
Adding to that, police don't operate in a vacuum and may respond to the election of a progressive DA by reducing their level of effort, whether that's in retaliation, or out of a fear of being prosecuted for misconduct, or as a form of strike [1]. Or, like you said, we just see drops because they don't bother to make arrests they know won't get prosecuted (e.g. nonviolent drug arrests in philly following Larry Krasner's election follow this pattern [2]). Or, its some demographic, or socioecenomic, or some other trend unrelated to the DA (or which also happened to result in the DA being elected in the first place).
Basically, stats are hard, crime stats are really hard, and someone who tells you Crime rates did X because Person A did thing Y without a 20 page paper probably doesn't have a clue, including me.
[1] https://www.ajc.com/news/crime--law/170-atlanta-police-offic...
They may not report those crimes to the police, but police reports aren't the only way to find out data on crime rates. Stores will still report shoplifting loses to their insurance companies for example.
It's entirely possible that a city with a progressive DA that doesn't prosecute certain types of crimes sufficiently or judges that don't actually pull criminals off the streets, end up with a social atmosphere where citizens don't bother reporting crime as much, because they know nothing will be done about it anyway.