Hacker News Reader

Comment by vimy | Hacker News Reader

Turns out when you defund the police and disband special units murders go up.

From the linked article:

> New York's homicide count went up by nearly 40 percent with Mayor Bill de Blasio stating that the figures should worry all New Yorkers and it has to stop.

Numbers started to rise after this:

> The New York police commissioner announced on Monday that he was disbanding the Police Department’s anti-crime units: plainclothes teams that target violent crime and have been involved in some of the city’s most notorious police shootings. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/15/nyregion/nypd-plainclothe...

The other cities mentioned had similar decisions that seem to have backfired spectacularly.

View on HN

Turns out motivated reasoning is powerful...

How does that change in June explain rising homicides in the first half of the year? And how does this New York policy explain homicides in 52 other cities? Including, by the way, the likes of Tulsa or Omaha[0] which I suspect aren't sharing too many policy prescriptions with NYC?

[0]: https://twitter.com/Crimealytics/status/1343950694672379905/...

alternately, de-emphasiing intervention and prevention and focasing on enforcement also doesnt work. Omaha didnt "defund the police and disband special units" yet saw 61% increase.

[https://omaha.com/news/local/crime-and-courts/omaha-saw-a-61...]

> Turns out when you defund the police and disband special units murders go up.

Turns out - correlation doesn't equal causation.

From my criminology 101 class - crime goes down when the likelihood of being arrested/convicted of a crime goes up. The problem is that the likelihood of being arrested/convicted is a complex system whereby no one single factor can affect it.

Especially last year you had several huge sociological factors that likely played into this: social reactions to BLM, riots, domestic terrorism, record high unemployment, mental health contributions due to stay-home regulations, AND defunding of the police.

To pretend that one factor is the only contributing factor to a complex system is a fool's errand.

Maybe I've missed this somewhere, but:

- do you have a finer grained (month by month, for example) break down to support your assertion of the correlation in timing of the NYPD disbanding the "anti-crime" units and the homicide rate?

- if so, is there something indicating there is causation rather than a coincidence?

Do you have evidence that this is directly due to police funding and not issues like the pandemic, unemployment, etc?

I'm glad you cherry picked an example to push a narrative.

It’s not cherrypicking. I’m on mobile and it’s not fun to make a huge post on a small screen.

Another example:

Portland defunded the Gun Violence Reduction Team at the beginning of July.

28 shootings in July of 2019. 99 in July of 2020. The police chief said it was because of a lack of resources.

That's not a meaningful statistic in itself -- you need to exclude shootings within the Autonomous Zone, where the team would have been unable to operate anyway.

People care about the murder statistics because they don't want to get murdered. If you're trying to use them to measure the performance of the police force, that might make a small amount of difference, but for the way most people are using these stats arbitrarily excluding a whole bunch of murders because they occurred due to the wholesale, officially sanctioned breakdown of law and order would be very misleading.

Please don't post flamewar comments like this. You've done it repeatedly in the past, and that's not ok here. Fortunately most of your comments are much better.

Obviously you can disagree with the GP, but please do so within the site guidelines. If you'd review and follow them from now on, we'd be grateful: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

Note these ones:

"Don't be snarky."

"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."

Reply on news.ycombinator.com