I don't actually know if this is true, intuitively. The highest-crime areas are not the areas with the least police. The lowest-crime areas are not the areas with the most police. Crime seems to respond as a phenomenon to other dysfunction of society, not because there is opportunity to commit them.
So, I don't know, can you educate me more about the relationship between police presence and its causation statistically towards crime? [To be clear, I'm not asking in bad faith or whataboutism. I'm genuinely trying to become more educated in this as a layperson who doesn't study crime to any degree.]
> In June 2020, Harvard economist Roland Fryer and Tanaya Devi released a paper showing evidence of the Ferguson effect. Across five cities where a deadly shooting that went viral preceded an investigation into crime and policing, they found that the violent crime rate increased, resulting in an additional 900 homicides and 34,000 excess felonies across two years. They suggest that this was caused by changes in the quantity of policing. Other theories, such as changes in community trust, were not supported by the data.
This made me chuckle out loud, well done!
> There are a lot of naive takes in this thread. Prison is objectively and disproportionately racist and classist. It's not so much about deterring crime as about terrorising and brutalising certain demographics.
Yes, there are biases against various races and classes, but they absolutely don't override the bias against criminals. Our system is flawed, but it's far from "about terrorizing and brutalizing certain demographics". This kind extreme hyperbolic rhetoric isn't helpful, and insofar as it motivated the de-policing and catch/release prosecution policies which led to the violent crime surge, it has done far more harm to minority communities than the criminal justice system could hope to do.