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

  • zifnab25 [he/him, any]
    ·
    2 years ago

    Excited to hear about which crimes these police are expected to enforce.

    Financial crimes? Scams and Frauds? OSHA violations? Corporate Tax Evasion? Anything white collar? Anything at all? No? Its all petty theft, vandalism, blue laws, and vagrancy isn't it?

    homicide accounts for a large proportion of the total harm caused by crime. Insofar as standard measures of the crime rate give equal weight to each act criminalized by the state, they are conceptually meaningless. A society with a thousand petty larcenies and one murder has much less serious crime than a society with a thousand murders and one petty larceny, yet the raw crime rate would be the same in both. A meaningful measure thus has to account for the relative seriousness, or harmfulness, of each action.

    ...

    Consider one measure of police focus: the number of homicide arrests made per police officer. The clearance rate (homicide arrests/homicide) is the product of police focus (homicide arrests/police) and the police footprint (police/homicide). The conventional view of policing in the United States suggests that the problem with America’s clearance rate is that footprint is high, but focus is low. In fact, as Figure 3 suggests, the converse is true: footprint is low, but focus is high.

    Oh. They're all supposed to be on the homicide beat. Lolz. Lmao, even. We're hiring 500,000 extra cops to do Minority Report.

    One other thing I can't help but glare at...

    American police killed around 1,800 people in 2019. In the rest of the developed world, the average number of police killings is around 5 per year; the median is just 2. It seems intuitive that to reduce the level of police violence, we must reduce the footprint of the police. Yet cross-country comparisons suggest the opposite conclusion. As Figure 5 shows, there is a striking and negative cross-national correlation between the rate at which police kill civilians and the number of police officers per homicide.

    Graph

    So, the observation in the article attempts to suggest that we can normalize the data in order to establish a trend. But what I'm noticing isn't the trend line. It is the presence of particular countries above and below the regression. I might concede that countries below the line could benefit from more police by virtue of the fact that their police-homicide ratio is relatively low. One more Japanese or Nigerian cop adds a relatively low risk of one more police homicide.

    But the reverse is rather horrifying. Do I really want to add police officers to El Salvador, a country absolutely rife with police-initiated violence? Maybe not.

    The US, I can't help but notice, is a healthy step above the fold. Even Mexico can't compete with American rates of police violence and Mexican police are also... not great.

    I also can't help but notice the Y-axis is a logrithmic curve, which seriously distorts the comparative rate of police violence on the high end.