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Comment by dcolkitt | Hacker News Reader

And yet, violent crime this year is at a multi-decade high[1]. It's one thing to suffer the indignity of a surveillance, but it's quite another when the surveillance doesn't even deliver its purported benefits.

[1] https://time.com/5922082/2020-gun-violence-homicides-record-...

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The “multi-decade high” here is the highest in 20 years, which is two decades - a time of historically low crime. “Multi-decade” sounds like a much longer range than two decades.

That article throws out a bunch of numbers without really putting things in a proper historical context. Violent crime has fallen dramatically since the 90's and the murder rate is about as low as it was in the 60's in 2019 (according to the FBI). While a ~35% spike is alarming, one should look at what the full 2020 stats end up being.

Furthermore, with the massive disruption of the Covid-19 crisis it'd going to take a lot of analysis before we can draw any useful conclusions.

But to your main point, I'd agree that surveillance doesn't really buy you safety. Crime has a lot of facets and just increasing the number of security cams and license plate readers is no substitute for problems with the criminal justice system and socioeconomic woes.

It’s pretty clear that a huge percentage of police budgets have nothing to do with public safety. All one needs to do is point out how many small towns have APCs for some inexplicable reason. It’s not a huge jump to assume that a non trivial percentage of police techniques don’t have anything to do with stopping crimes either.

This is only “clear” if you are completely unqualified to make such assertions but do so anyway to fit some narrative.

It’s not hard to discover why some departments have APCs (which are used extremely rarely) and how much they actually spend on them (almost nothing, they’re free). By and large, Police budgets go almost entirely to personnel costs.

LAPD spends 94.4% on salaries. That remaining 6.6% covers everything including equipment, helicopters, cars, body cams, firearms, IT infrastructure, forensics labs, and supporting services. They spent more on servers, radios, and body and dash cams alone than they did on ground vehicles.

http://www.lapdpolicecom.lacity.org/112415/BUDGET.pdf

You’re correct that a lot doesn’t have anything to do with stopping crimes though, but since that is not their primary responsibility (nor should we want it to be), this is expected. They are not psychic, so they cannot really act on a crime until the crime happens. As you can see from this thread, doing anything proactively is not something that the public wants. Most prefer to be left alone until they have done something wrong.

Nearly all of that gear was distributed by the DOD after the war and it was already paid for. Nearly all of it is never used. When it is used, it is in fact used for public safety. It’s not like they use the SWAT team to get groceries.

I always find it funny how many people seem to think that vehicle maintenance is free. Especially large military vehicles. Even if the vehicle is free, you’re not going to take that to the jiffy lube every 3,000 miles.

And as far as the LAPD budget goes, I have two words in response: overtime fraud. Saying that you spend 90+% of your budget on salary is not equivalent to saying that it’s well spent, especially since how cops manage to game the overtime rules is a well studied subject.

This isn’t a counterargument that you want to use. These don’t have 3,000 mile service intervals (nor does any fleet vehicle besides perhaps motorcycles) and oil is extremely inexpensive at this frequency and quantity. They spend more on toilet paper.

That sharp rise in crime makes 2020 dissimilar to recent years which largely continued a multi-decade decline in violent crime.

Could it be there is something else peculiar to 2020?

Well, realistically, it isn’t about preventing crime, it’s about catching criminals. (I’m not a fan of all this)

Isn't catching criminals a pretty good way to prevent crime?

Not particularly, no. The nature of having caught a "criminal" means the crime has already occurred. Crime prevention is less a cause of justice and more a cause of social work.

I would imagine that past offences correlate quite strongly with a proclivity for future offences. Hence reformation and/or incarceration should reduce the number of opportunities for repeated offence.

For an individual, yes. However criminality is not a finite resource. You can't lock up everybody.

No one said the surveillance was meant to stop poors stabbing each other. Its for protecting assets and securing power.

Surveillance is hardly the only variable in play, though. Unemployment is also at a multi-decade high, due to covid. Seems like the second option passes the Occam test a bit better to my eyes.

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