The Injustice of Under-Policing in America
papers.ssrn.com
​In the United States, roughly three people are incarcerated per police officer employed. The rest of the developed world strikes a diametrically opposite balan

‘Socialist’ Harvard professors: 🥺👉👈 just five hundwed thousand mowe cops pweas

Article criticizing this paper: https://equalityalec.substack.com/p/a-warning-to-journalists-about-elite

biggest issue:

  • authors claim US has below average cops per capita using lowball estimate of ~700k (ignoring feds, etc)
  • admit in private correspondence that the total number of cops could be 1.2 million (hey look there’s the 500k cops you’re asking for)
  • toss in private police and that makes the US have twice the cops as average :porky-happy:

Also the authors have the premise that more police = fewer prisoners since there’s just too few cops so they have to throw you in jail for a decade for possessing weed or else they couldn’t keep up with all the crime

I looked at some data myself: Louisiana has the highest incarceration rate and wait, hold on, THIS CANT BE!!! THE 3RD HIGHEST NUMBER OF COPS PER CAPITA!!! this is simply impossible to predict

  • HumanBehaviorByBjork [any, undecided]
    ·
    2 years ago

    what the fuck reading the abstract that's such an insane way to frame criminal justice. why would the ratio of cops to incarcerated people be a useful metric in itself? if we did view it as a problem, why would we assume the cause is too few cops instead of say THE LARGEST PER CAPITA PRISON POPULATION IN THE WORLD?

    • iwillavengeyoufather [she/her]
      ·
      2 years ago

      It’s wild because they have a plot which shows a positive correlation between prisoners and cops, but the takeaway is more cops for fewer prisoners