Hacker News Reader

Comment by gruez | Hacker News Reader

>Do most people in New York want their police force to have a budget larger than military of a mid sized country? Probably not?

Pareto distribution strikes again! Apparently new york city has a GDP that ranks 15 in the world, above mexico[1][2] and ranks 59 in the world in terms of population[3], so the fact that new york exceeds "a mid sized country" (median?) in some statistic isn't surprising. If you want to make the argument that the US is over-policed, use some statistic like officers per 100,000 people or something.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_New_York_City

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependen...

View on HN

Unlike Mexico, New York City does not need to maintain its borders or enforce a monopoly on the use of force and a supreme law -- because New York City is not a Westphalian state, it is just a municipal government covering a few hundred square miles!

It is completely bonkers to have this many uniformed officers and this much money poured into security forces, and so little positive result of any of it.

The reason that comparisons to Mexico are alarming is that it plainly does not make sense for a municipal government enclosed within a large and heavily militarized state to have an army of its own! It is strange to compare a city government to a large country! It is SUPPOSED to sound strange!

> Unlike Mexico, New York City does not need to maintain its borders or enforce a monopoly on the use of force and a supreme law -- because New York City is not a Westphalian state, it is just a municipal government covering a few hundred square miles!

you'd think that's the case, but it seems fairly normal for countries to have more police officers than soldiers[1][2]. Just looking at g8 countries:

     soldiers police officers
    Canada  67,400  67,425
    France  203,250  282,612
    Germany  183,500  279,200
    Italy  165,500  276,750
    Japan  247,150  296,700
    United Kingdom  148,500  148,893
    United States  1,388,100  686,665

Which makes sense, considering that it's the police officers that are in charge of "enforce a monopoly on the use of force and a supreme law". In the 21st century, border incursions are rare compared to criminal activity.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependen...

[2] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/military-...

But that was not what he was saying. His argument was that just because NY has such a high GDP does not mean they need to spend that much on their police force. The number of police (+soldiers) you need is more a function of the number of citizens and area.

Just taking your numbers above. The NY police has 50,000 police for ~8.5 M people. Germany has ~280k police for 80 M people, and that number likely includes border police, customs police, federal police (all jobs the NY police does not do). So NY has probably around 2x as many (regular) police per citizen as Germany.

NY deals with more violent crime than Germany tbf.

That makes sense by number of personnel, but not overall budget. Your local police department doesn't need tanks and aircraft carriers...

The NYPD does actually maintain tanks

God only knows what they expect to do with them

Crime statistics are not well-known for following GDP. I am not sure why you would use that as a comparison point. Population? Sure. Surface area? Sure. Total local government revenue? Sure. But GDP?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com