[1] Here's an interesting question - how does police/prosecutorial inaction in cases of shoplifting compare to police/prosecutorial inaction in cases of other crime? Is it more? Is it less? Is it the same?
But I don’t understand why this is a necessary relationship: the political incentives of the police are such that it always makes sense to make crime rates look as bad as possible (since more crime means more police funding). So we’d expect them to continue to make arrests, even if those arrests don’t result in a convictions. But that isn’t happening, and nobody has produced a particularly satisfying explanation other than “the cops are depressed.” Which, in turn, strikes me as a larger indictment of the police than of the DA.
Honestly that doesn't make any sense (I dunno, maybe english is not your primary language).
1. You're correct that it always makes sense for police to make crime rates as bad as possible.
2. $FOO is *NOT RECORDED AS A CRIME* if the apprehended suspect is not convicted.
So your assertion that:
> So we’d expect them to continue to make arrests, even if those arrests don’t result in a convictions.
is completely and totally incorrect in every sense of the word and under even the broadest possible interpretation.
Why would a LEO make (for example) 100 arrests in a week if every single one of them *WOULD NEVER BE RECORDED AS A CRIME* due to prosecution not getting a conviction?
> But that isn’t happening, and nobody has produced a particularly satisfying explanation other than “the cops are depressed.”
I just gave you one now; a guaranteed no-conviction of shoplifters in turn guarantees that LEOs would rather spend their efforts on making their numbers.
> 2. $FOO is NOT RECORDED AS A CRIME if the apprehended suspect is not convicted.
This is not true in any municipality that I'm aware of. For example, the NYPD's CompStat[1] system publishes weekly and monthly crime reports based on pre-conviction arrests. That information isn't considered guilt-presumptive, because it doesn't assume that any particular arrested person has committed a crime -- it's an agglomerated statistic.
Given that crime reporting data doesn't require convictions, it's not clear to me that your counterpoint holds.
I'm not sure this is completely correct... In my home town, the police used to send a list of arrests to the local paper, who would print all of them in the weekly issue. How many of those translated into convictions was something I wouldn't even know how to find out, but they certainly were able to publicize their arrest rate.