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Comment by lrem | Hacker News Reader

Also note this is not about replacing a police force of a city. It's about replacing the police force of a country of 40 million people.

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To be fair, the cold reboot was their way of dealing with the traffic police specifically, not all police.

But still, the scale here is massive - they fired 30,000 people overall, and half of them on a single day. And, just as in US today, the opposition claimed that such a disruptive measure would unleash a wave of criminal or reckless behavior (on the roads), and a lot of people would die as a result. That didn't happen.

NYC is running this "experiment" now, with the NYPD having disbanded it's anti-crime units, and with many reported incidents not being responded to.

New York City’s homicide rate has hit a five-year high as the amount of people shot has jumped 42 percent compared to last year.

Shooting incidents have gone up 86% since last year, and the murder Rate has gone up 47%.

It's obviously a result of many different factors, but I'm not so sure the same thing that worked there would work here.

Any change from approximately zero is large.

Nyc has had several months without a single murder.

When quoting percentages, it is helpful to establish what the baseline is and how it compares historically.

Previous “slowdowns” by the NYPD have resulted in a drastic reduction in reported crime in NYC. https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-nypd-slowdowns-dirty-littl...

Months without a single murder? Which months?

Some historical data -- 2019 average just under one murder per day, 2020 is over one murder per day and up significantly from 2019 so far:

https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/nypd/downloads/pdf/crime_statist...

More like one every three days in 2019.

319 is not one every three days. It's technically .87 per day if you want to be precise.

Or, a little over 5 every 6 days.

that's certainly another way to put it.

Thanks, I read it wrong!

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/20/nyregion/east-new-york-pr...

> Previous “slowdowns” by the NYPD have resulted in a drastic reduction in reported crime in NYC.

I couldn't find where that was mentioned in your linked article, but the Occam's razor takeaway is that the crime is still happening and not being reported because people know nothing will be done.

Hard to not mention violent crime though

Disbanding all traffic police also seems to be very different from disbanding all anti-crime units.

It sounds to me that:

1. The NYPD isn't trying to replace their police workforce. They've simply stopped policing.

2. The current social ajd political environment would cause a hike in crime-rate regardless of police action, and it's not easy to disentangle the effects.

My bad, I just glanced and conflated two events. The one I had in mind was replacing the police force of Ukraine in 2015. A country of 44 million people fired all the 150 thousand policemen and hired 120 thousand new ones.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Militsiya_(Ukraine) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Police_of_Ukraine

Small correction, population of Georgia (the country) is ~4 million, not 40 million. I've been there multiple times, it's a country trying very hard to become more European and less Soviet. I wish them well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Militsiya_(Ukraine) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Police_of_Ukraine

I don’t think anyone expects that to be done atomically. Most of the advocacy I have seen is directed at individual police departments, with some organization between the efforts and some advocacy for nationwide criminal justice and policing reform.

An order of magnitude mistake. The population is circa 4 million.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Militsiya_(Ukraine) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Police_of_Ukraine

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