NYC cops did a work stop, yet crime dropped
arstechnica.co.uk
arstechnica.co.uk
During the slowdown, police continued to respond to calls, and the arrest rate for major crimes (murder, rape, robbery, felony assault, burglary, grand larceny, and grand theft auto) remained constant. But the arrest rate for non-major crime and narcotic offenses dropped, as did the number of stop-and-frisk events.
So the crime that dropped was that which the cops stopped pursuing because there were no calls about it. No action means no official, recordable data.
There's a lot of shady and shoddy data in the social "science" around crime. As has been said more generally, torture the data enough and it will tell you whatever you want to hear. IMHO, the best indicator to look at is murder rate, because there is a body which has to be dealt with and accounted for in the stats, despite any political pressures.
"But the authors argue that the data suggests the opposite is true. “The results,” they write, “imply that aggressively enforcing minor legal statutes incites more severe criminal acts.” Rather than proactive policing deterring major crime, Sullivan and O’Keeffe think it’s more likely that this kind of aggressive enforcement “disrupts communal life, which can drain social control of group-level violence.” In other words, overly aggressive policing brings a level of social disruption that actually leads to more crime—and the reduced proactive policing during the slowdown produced a calming effect."
Emphasis, mine.
Link to Nature article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41562-017-0211-5
Ideally, police would be responsive to community demands. So, if a high-crime community demands more aggressive policing in the Broken Windows mold, they get it. Conversely, if community representatives see that policing is causing more trouble than it's solving, they should be able to request an easing-off without being deemed "pro-crime".
Unfortunately, most cities tend to take a much more top-down approach with the allocation of enforcement power.
I think what a lot of people would like is more policing but less aggressive policing.
Such as the ability to call the police for minor crime like broken windows and know the police aren't going to shoot someone dead. e.g http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/07/17/australian-woman-... (but there have been a number of other examples, especially involving non-white people)
"Minneapolis police are investigating, but their work has been hampered because the officers’ body cameras were switched off. The police department said the squad car's camera also failed to capture the incident."
How convenient.
This black-and-white view of policing ends up getting a lot of citizens killed. Police officers often end up getting called out to fill the gap in social services, so why not allocate funds to those programs to help people out of poverty? I mean, I know the reasons (police unions and the prison-industrial complex) but it would make more sense than making the police do this crap.
Right now, the police have to act as social workers. When your social worker carries a gun, anything they do to help you sounds more like a command than advice (and the police often confuse the two as well, since maintaining a sense of control is rule #1 of modern policing).
Myself, I don’t fuck with the police. I don’t volunteer information to them either; I don’t trust the police to be good at their job, so anything you say will only serve to get you in more trouble. And I grew up as an upper-middle class privileged white kid.
An example situation might be a person who sees some neighbor waving a gun around and generally being pretty dangerous. That person should call the police, but since that person likes to smoke pot every once in awhile they will probably not call the police out of fear that they will end up who one being harassed and treated as a criminal. The police and DAs have made it such that it is in everyone's interest to never speak to the police, and that is how policing fails.
Admittedly not all police officers are like I describe above, but since you'll never know who you will interact with you have to assume they are one of the bad ones. I once had a police officer acquaintance and even he would tell me stories how he would never want to be pulled over by some of the guys he worked with.
Finally, I'm not sure how society comes back from this mistrust. Once trust is broken it is so hard to regain. Body cameras can help, but then you see the above where they are turned off.
This is likely to provoke strong reactions from people who think you're against social science as a whole, but you raise an important point: much of what passes for academic social science is political activism in disguise.
[1] https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/slightly-blighty/201510...
Very interesting find. Thanks!
- Charles Goodhart, Economist
Seriously, nothing gets HN outraged like police tactics, draconian or otherwise.
Don't we have like tons of history showing us that police doesn't actually exist to fight crime? Not much to argue about, unless you believe in government propaganda.