Patrol officers today are police AND crisis responders, mental health crisis managers, family dispute de-escalators, critical medical care responders, victim counselors, etc. And they switch hats many times a day & then go home to their own difficulties. They do all this for - on average - $60k per year. They enjoy increased suicide risk, increase risk of work-related disability and injury, increased risk of divorce, and so on.
If there were ever a profession in American that deserved more resource and less responsibility (or diversification of staffing) its police. Instead we ask too much, cut funding and criticize the outcomes.
Funding is a fairly meaningless metric because it usually includes corrections department funding (courts and prisons), and it is hard to adjust for: GDP growth, population growth, and inflation. The term funding is so loose that it can mean whatever you wish.
“While the number of sworn police officers has increased by 26% since 1987, that expansion has not kept pace with the growth of the general population. As a result, there were 11.5% fewer officers per capita in 2016 than there were in 1987.“
“ Spending on police nearly tripled (increasing by 168%) between 1977 and 2018, when adjusted for inflation. Per capita spending on police also grew during this period, but at a lower level, close to doubling (83% higher in 2018 than in 1977). However, spending on law enforcement accounts for a small share of total state and local government expenditures, and that portion has remained virtually unchanged over the past four decades, hovering at around 3.7%.”
I think that trite one sentence statements make it difficult to have interesting conversation. I knew nothing about the topic: the above is from a little quick googling that anyone could do.
Your quick googling is relying on an extremely suspect website. Blog posts are not good source material. Any librarian would tell you that at a glance.
Please provide better sources - I want to be corrected if I am wrong.
You have provided no evidence against my major point: anyone arguing about “funding” is just a politically biased argument — because it sounds bad that funding has increased as a number. Yet funding hasn’t increased as proportionally. Cops per capita, and police funding percentage of budget, are less political metrics in my opinion.
First, I don’t think there’s just one metric to use, and it’s a tall argument to say funding of all things should be ignored.
Second, I think the stat you focused in on probably doesn’t tell enough of the story, either. Crime rate is HALF what it was in 1987, so police per crime is significantly up since then. Also, advancements in policing and technology would lead to fewer officers needed per capita if they’re like most industries. For instance, we have 25% fewer pilots per capita[1], but 3x the flights of 1990.
My main point is that we can pick whatever biased metric we like, which you demonstrate so perfectly by cherry picking your date, and you choose some unknown “crime rate” figure which depends on your assumptions which you haven’t stated.
The usual biased opinions (regurgitated without thought) choose some figure based on “serious crime”, but as a community we also care about lesser crimes, like bikes getting stolen (California). The easiest way to reduce “crime” is simply to stop enforcing it and the number of convictions will drop.
Cherry picking? I think you’re confused. I chose the same year YOU chose to say police per capita was down 11.6%.
In that same time, property crime is down 51% and violent crime down 35% for a combined reduction of 49%.[1] So we have a whopping 58% more police per crime between 1987 and 2016.
The “unknown crime rate figure” I use is the FBI reported stats. As a word of advice, in future discussions you can assume these are the crime rates used as they represent the most complete picture of crime data we have available.
FBI’s statistics show a decrease in the homicide rate from 8.3 per 100k to 5.4 during that period. Check out the site linked, it’s a clear downward trend.
Also your final paragraph shows a complete lack of understanding on what these stats are. The FBI collects stolen bicycle stats under theft/larceny, which is included in my figures. These figures represent reported crimes. Whether they are solved or prosecuted shouldn’t affect the data, merely whether someone contacted police to notify them a crime had taken place.
So those “usual biased opinions regurgitated without thought” are not opinions at all, but rather statements of fact. Crime is down from 1987 whether looking at violent crimes, property crimes, small crimes, or big crimes. It would behoove you to put a little more thought into learning the difference between opinion and fact.
Not much of that seems to find its way to officer paychecks.
Police should be held to much higher standards than the rest of us, and the ones who can meet those standards should have pay, training, vacation, and benefits to match. Police work should be made attractive to the best and the brightest among us.
> Instead we ask too much, cut funding and criticize the outcomes.
The movement that was partially aimed to stop asking so much of police officers by distributing those responsibilities mentioned in your first sentence to others (Defund the Police) was almost entirely unsuccessful. As the peer poster mentioned, there are almost no instances of police budgets being cut. You are correct about us criticizing the outcomes, though.
It would help if you better understood why the outcomes are criticized, though.
US police killings are 7th most in the world, with peers like Syria and Afghanistan. If you look at it on a per capita basis, US police kill at a rate 3x higher than the next closest developed nation, 10x-20x more than most developed nations.
The NYPD—a police department—has a greater budget than the entire military of Ukraine—with 1/5th the population. Its budget would make it the 33rd largest military in the world.
If their role is supposed to be stopping crime, I know you’re aware that the US has among the highest crime rates of any developed nations. If their role is supposed to be investigating and solving crimes, our police officers are among the worst in the world at the clearance rate.
So. A single police department with more budget than most of the world’s militaries. The sum of our police spending dwarfs other nations. Our police kill more citizens, our crime rate is higher, and fewer of our crimes get solved. What’s not to criticize?
At this point it takes intentional ignorance to believe there’s a chance that all police violence is legitimate. Not only is there a glut of video evidence to the contrary, but internal investigations and courts have conclusively resolved this that _some_ police violence is not legitimate.
Is most police violence legitimate? Maybe. But it’s a pitifully low bar to say > 50% of the time police resorted to violence appropriately.
I think this is probably the simplest way to point out the major flaw with claims like that the article makes. To properly assess risk in any scenario, one must account for exposure. People implicitly understand that men are more likely to be involved in a situation where police respond with violence (such as being armed).
I’m not sure if there is a surefire metric that can be used for this kind of exposure, but violent crimes are probably decent proxies. For example, according to the most recent US demographic breakdown, and FBI crime statistics [0], black Americans are about 4x more likely to commit murder than white Americans. So if that were to be used as a measure of exposure to potential police violence, they might actually be less likely to be killed by police than a white person, given the number of situations in which police violence has potential to occur.
It’s important to note that this doesn’t mean black Americans aren’t the victims of systemic racism. But it means that the racism is occurring not necessarily due to trigger happy cops who hate black people, but due to a society in which black people are disenfranchised in more banal, but impactful, ways (educationally, economically, socially), which results in higher crime rates, which results in more police contact/confrontation, which results in more deaths at the hands of the police.
This is all to say that many of the “defund the police” efforts, while understandable as a knee jerk reaction to police violence we sometimes see, is fundamentally misguided. It’s akin to campaigning against chemotherapy, because lots of chemotherapy recipients end up dying. Defunding the police won’t change the underlying systemic racism that is the source of the problem, and if anything will exacerbate it. This is reflected in polling of black Americans who live this reality, the majority of whom want more policing in their communities.
Most murderers are not caught in a shoot out with police. And murderers account for such a small number of police interactions that it’s a little bizarre to extrapolate the murder rate would strongly correlate to victims of police violence by race.
What’s a better consideration? That more police interactions happen with black people. Some of this is due to racism. Black people are far more likely to have the police called on them for being “suspicious” and police are more likely to stop or question black people (as shown in NYC stop and frisk or traffic stops, etc.).
Statistically, white people and black people have about the same rate of drug use. There are 4x as many black people getting arrested for drug use.[1]
Now one way to interpret this is that police target black people more, and so they find more crimes, reinforcing the idea that black people are criminal, leading to even further over-policing.
This isn’t to say there isn’t a gang problem in black communities, but it’s a complicated problem and the solution isn’t improve policing OR support black communities… it’s we need to do both.
> This is all to say that many of the “defund the police” efforts, while understandable as a knee jerk reaction to police violence we sometimes see, is fundamentally misguided. It’s akin to campaigning against chemotherapy, because lots of chemotherapy recipients end up dying. Defunding the police won’t change the underlying systemic racism that is the source of the problem, and if anything will exacerbate it. This is reflected in polling of black Americans who live this reality, the majority of whom want more policing in their communities.
I think this shows a misunderstanding of what defund the police was, and comes off as patronizing in that ignorance. The intent of the movement was that the difference in funding would then be invested in those communities, which is something you seem to agree would help accomplish their goal of reducing crime.
I don’t think this is surprising. Police killings are more likely to happen when the officer feels threatened. Research regularly shows we’ve been conditioned to see Asian people as less threatening than white people.
Leftists publications such as these imply that violence is bad. It is not. That is why police force have the word "force" in it. This is also called civilization: the idea that a designated layer of society has the right to use of violence in common interest.
Violence is bad. Yes. I can’t believe that has to be argued.
The glorification of violence in your posts here is disturbing.
State sanctioned violence on innocent people is especially bad, but even guilty people should have their day in court. When an officer kills someone when it could be avoided, it’s a bad thing.
Struggling to believe that on an enlightened forum as HN this is debate worthy.
And finally, regardless of whether state sanctioned violence is required in civilization today, it should be one of civilization’s aims to eliminate violence.
33 comments
[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 77.5 ms ] threadIf there were ever a profession in American that deserved more resource and less responsibility (or diversification of staffing) its police. Instead we ask too much, cut funding and criticize the outcomes.
Like politicans, we get the police we deserve.
https://i1.wp.com/blog.skepticallibertarian.com/wp-content/u...
Funding is a fairly meaningless metric because it usually includes corrections department funding (courts and prisons), and it is hard to adjust for: GDP growth, population growth, and inflation. The term funding is so loose that it can mean whatever you wish.
“While the number of sworn police officers has increased by 26% since 1987, that expansion has not kept pace with the growth of the general population. As a result, there were 11.5% fewer officers per capita in 2016 than there were in 1987.“
“ Spending on police nearly tripled (increasing by 168%) between 1977 and 2018, when adjusted for inflation. Per capita spending on police also grew during this period, but at a lower level, close to doubling (83% higher in 2018 than in 1977). However, spending on law enforcement accounts for a small share of total state and local government expenditures, and that portion has remained virtually unchanged over the past four decades, hovering at around 3.7%.”
I think that trite one sentence statements make it difficult to have interesting conversation. I knew nothing about the topic: the above is from a little quick googling that anyone could do.
You have provided no evidence against my major point: anyone arguing about “funding” is just a politically biased argument — because it sounds bad that funding has increased as a number. Yet funding hasn’t increased as proportionally. Cops per capita, and police funding percentage of budget, are less political metrics in my opinion.
Second, I think the stat you focused in on probably doesn’t tell enough of the story, either. Crime rate is HALF what it was in 1987, so police per crime is significantly up since then. Also, advancements in policing and technology would lead to fewer officers needed per capita if they’re like most industries. For instance, we have 25% fewer pilots per capita[1], but 3x the flights of 1990.
[1] - https://www.statista.com/statistics/537863/number-of-pilots-...
My main point is that we can pick whatever biased metric we like, which you demonstrate so perfectly by cherry picking your date, and you choose some unknown “crime rate” figure which depends on your assumptions which you haven’t stated.
Here’s a graph which shows homicide rates vary, but there definitely is no trend that demonstrates a decline of half: https://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/FT_19...
The usual biased opinions (regurgitated without thought) choose some figure based on “serious crime”, but as a community we also care about lesser crimes, like bikes getting stolen (California). The easiest way to reduce “crime” is simply to stop enforcing it and the number of convictions will drop.
In that same time, property crime is down 51% and violent crime down 35% for a combined reduction of 49%.[1] So we have a whopping 58% more police per crime between 1987 and 2016.
The “unknown crime rate figure” I use is the FBI reported stats. As a word of advice, in future discussions you can assume these are the crime rates used as they represent the most complete picture of crime data we have available.
FBI’s statistics show a decrease in the homicide rate from 8.3 per 100k to 5.4 during that period. Check out the site linked, it’s a clear downward trend.
Also your final paragraph shows a complete lack of understanding on what these stats are. The FBI collects stolen bicycle stats under theft/larceny, which is included in my figures. These figures represent reported crimes. Whether they are solved or prosecuted shouldn’t affect the data, merely whether someone contacted police to notify them a crime had taken place.
So those “usual biased opinions regurgitated without thought” are not opinions at all, but rather statements of fact. Crime is down from 1987 whether looking at violent crimes, property crimes, small crimes, or big crimes. It would behoove you to put a little more thought into learning the difference between opinion and fact.
[1] https://crime-data-explorer.fr.cloud.gov/pages/explorer/crim...
Police should be held to much higher standards than the rest of us, and the ones who can meet those standards should have pay, training, vacation, and benefits to match. Police work should be made attractive to the best and the brightest among us.
The movement that was partially aimed to stop asking so much of police officers by distributing those responsibilities mentioned in your first sentence to others (Defund the Police) was almost entirely unsuccessful. As the peer poster mentioned, there are almost no instances of police budgets being cut. You are correct about us criticizing the outcomes, though.
It would help if you better understood why the outcomes are criticized, though.
US police killings are 7th most in the world, with peers like Syria and Afghanistan. If you look at it on a per capita basis, US police kill at a rate 3x higher than the next closest developed nation, 10x-20x more than most developed nations.
The NYPD—a police department—has a greater budget than the entire military of Ukraine—with 1/5th the population. Its budget would make it the 33rd largest military in the world.
If their role is supposed to be stopping crime, I know you’re aware that the US has among the highest crime rates of any developed nations. If their role is supposed to be investigating and solving crimes, our police officers are among the worst in the world at the clearance rate.
So. A single police department with more budget than most of the world’s militaries. The sum of our police spending dwarfs other nations. Our police kill more citizens, our crime rate is higher, and fewer of our crimes get solved. What’s not to criticize?
Is most police violence legitimate? Maybe. But it’s a pitifully low bar to say > 50% of the time police resorted to violence appropriately.
I’m not sure if there is a surefire metric that can be used for this kind of exposure, but violent crimes are probably decent proxies. For example, according to the most recent US demographic breakdown, and FBI crime statistics [0], black Americans are about 4x more likely to commit murder than white Americans. So if that were to be used as a measure of exposure to potential police violence, they might actually be less likely to be killed by police than a white person, given the number of situations in which police violence has potential to occur.
It’s important to note that this doesn’t mean black Americans aren’t the victims of systemic racism. But it means that the racism is occurring not necessarily due to trigger happy cops who hate black people, but due to a society in which black people are disenfranchised in more banal, but impactful, ways (educationally, economically, socially), which results in higher crime rates, which results in more police contact/confrontation, which results in more deaths at the hands of the police.
This is all to say that many of the “defund the police” efforts, while understandable as a knee jerk reaction to police violence we sometimes see, is fundamentally misguided. It’s akin to campaigning against chemotherapy, because lots of chemotherapy recipients end up dying. Defunding the police won’t change the underlying systemic racism that is the source of the problem, and if anything will exacerbate it. This is reflected in polling of black Americans who live this reality, the majority of whom want more policing in their communities.
[0] https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-...
What’s a better consideration? That more police interactions happen with black people. Some of this is due to racism. Black people are far more likely to have the police called on them for being “suspicious” and police are more likely to stop or question black people (as shown in NYC stop and frisk or traffic stops, etc.).
Statistically, white people and black people have about the same rate of drug use. There are 4x as many black people getting arrested for drug use.[1]
Now one way to interpret this is that police target black people more, and so they find more crimes, reinforcing the idea that black people are criminal, leading to even further over-policing.
This isn’t to say there isn’t a gang problem in black communities, but it’s a complicated problem and the solution isn’t improve policing OR support black communities… it’s we need to do both.
> This is all to say that many of the “defund the police” efforts, while understandable as a knee jerk reaction to police violence we sometimes see, is fundamentally misguided. It’s akin to campaigning against chemotherapy, because lots of chemotherapy recipients end up dying. Defunding the police won’t change the underlying systemic racism that is the source of the problem, and if anything will exacerbate it. This is reflected in polling of black Americans who live this reality, the majority of whom want more policing in their communities.
I think this shows a misunderstanding of what defund the police was, and comes off as patronizing in that ignorance. The intent of the movement was that the difference in funding would then be invested in those communities, which is something you seem to agree would help accomplish their goal of reducing crime.
[1] https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/new-aclu-report-despite-...
I’m not from the U.S., so I have no idea how that fits in with the stereotypical narratives.
The glorification of violence in your posts here is disturbing.
State sanctioned violence on innocent people is especially bad, but even guilty people should have their day in court. When an officer kills someone when it could be avoided, it’s a bad thing.
Struggling to believe that on an enlightened forum as HN this is debate worthy.
And finally, regardless of whether state sanctioned violence is required in civilization today, it should be one of civilization’s aims to eliminate violence.