This article talks about a program designed to fix the "root" of crime and homelessness. Instead of arresting people, they'd call social workers. "Success" was measured by how many people were arrested and so the program "succeeded" because they responded to 750 calls but didn't arrest anyone. But is arrest really related to how well a program solves the root of the problem?

It seems like a better measure would be something related to their actual goal. So why didn't they measure rate of property crime? Rate of homelessness? Poverty? Drug addiction? Supposedly these are the real causes of crime and homelessness.

If they did actually measure those things, I think their evaluation of the program would be different [0] [1].

>> "Denver saw significant increases in most types of property crime in 2020. In comparison to the average of the previous four years, burglaries rose 23% in 2020, larceny rose 9%, auto theft rose 61% and theft from cars rose 39%, Denver police data shows." [0]

[0] https://www.denverpost.com/2021/03/15/denver-property-crime-...

[1] https://denver.cbslocal.com/2021/05/20/aurora-homeless-campi...

And this is what it looks like at scale.

https://outsidevoices.substack.com/p/mounting-violence-casts...

There's a pretty wide spectrum of how people interpret "defund x". US Republicans have agitated for "defund Planned Parenthood" for a while, and by "defund" they meant "don't give any tax dollars to it" [1]. In that context, it's not really surprising that a big chunk of the population "misunderstand[s]" the phrase. They may be inferring the wrong context, but the word has definitely been used that way.

[1] https://www.ernst.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/2019/1/ernst-i...