The United States Is Still Under-Policed and Over-Imprisoned | Hacker News Reader

The United States Is Still Under-Policed and Over-Imprisoned

marginalrevolution.com

What the article does not consider is US police expenditure. In many major cities policing is ~30% of general fund expenditure. If US police expenditure was a country’s military budget, it would astonishingly rank 3rd worldwide.

Hiring more police is not the simple solution, there needs to be a fundamental cultural shift among American police away from militarization.

Considering how many people go into law enforcement because they want to play with military toys without the burdens of military service, it's going to be hard to pull them away from that.

Yes, this, exactly. Two different people who bullied me in high school aggressively (for my sexuality and general nerdery) have gone on to be cops—they were the type to post pictures of themselves on Facebook shooting guns.

I would run from them without hesitation if they ever pulled me over. They're not the right type to be cops. And I'm relatively confident that many, many cops are like them. It's chilling.

I spent several years as a security guard, so I've interacted with cops on the regular both when they are on duty and moonlighting as security guards themselves and all I can do is validate this perspective.

Yes there were the cops who really did believe in/want to protect people. This was possibly even most of them. Then there were the cops who were downright scary. Talking about want to drag people into the street and beat them up. Or idolizing Jason Statham in the transformer movies as some kind of "supercop" (their words). Or the guy who refused to tell the teenagers skateboarding in the parking garage they had to leave because he wasn't allowed his gun. A gun, seriously, to confront a few tell a few teenagers with skateboards to leave.

Should I ever have to interact with the cops again it honestly scares me which of these groups I'll get.

In my opinion, there are 3 types of people who get into law enforcement. 1. People who legitimately want to serve and protect their communities. 2. People who want a steady government paycheck and benefits. 3. People who have a psychological need to be in control of other people.

I post pictures on Facebook of myself and my children shooting guns.

I had one high school classmate who wanted to become a cop. He was a runt who discovered weightlifting and steroids. The thing that kept him from becoming a cop was that he got caught stealing from vending machines when we were teenagers.

It's fantastic that he didn't get to carry a badge and gun.

Yeah! I totally don't mean to cast such a wide net, but I think it was part of the character I saw in them as someone abused by them.

I'm personally not much of a gun person myself, but I've been to a range a few times with friends, so gun ownership & use is not a "one and done" indicator by any means, but it's a concerning sign when correlated with various other negative personality ticks.

The difference between people who have guns as a sports tool, and those that have guns as an expression of their personal identity. Hunters & trap shooters, versus ammosexuals.

I'm probably one of those people that you hold in contempt. There are more guns than there are fingers in my house.

I am unabashedly pro gun. I have testified at hearings on behalf of gun owners.

Still, the point I'm making here is that there is something especially troubling about those cops who see themselves as the protagonist from an 80s action movie.

Yeah, this seems like the most urgent cultural shift.

The Right insists policing is an extremely risky job, but statistics suggest otherwise. That said, policing would be much more risky if we had police who actually took the risks they signed up for. Instead, American police by and large do not take seriously their duty to serve the people. Look no further than the despicable failures on the scene at Uvalde Elementary.

> statistics suggest otherwise

No, they don't. They clearly show it is a dangerous profession. I'm sure you're going to say something like "Being a pizza delivery driver is more dangerous than being a cop", because that is exactly how this conversation always goes, because it is a meme at this point that you're just repeating instead of thinking, but it doesn't make any sense, and would probably work better on reddit than on HN.

Do you wear a seatbelt in a car? I'll assume so - why would you do that? Driving in a car without a seatbelt clearly isn't dangerous, because motorcyclists have a much higher rate of injuries while driving. See, that is a really stupid thing I just said. And it is the same exact logic that you're using to say being an officer isn't a dangerous profession.

> Look no further than the despicable failures on the scene at Uvalde Elementary.

So you're judging millions of people on the actions of a few people? That sounds suspiciously like a pretty serious flaw in rational thinking that "The Right" commonly falls subject to.

Ok - let's consider it - how many people go into law enforcement because they want to play with military toys without the burdens of military service?

Do you have any idea? Or are you just going with your gut on this one?

That's a fair call-out. I cannot link to any double-blind, peer reviewed studies. I'm referencing only my personal experience and gut.

We've militarized the police because of the long term damage done during riots. The economic impact of riots in the 60s and 70s can not be overstated and is often overlooked when we have these discussions: https://www.jstor.org/stable/40056402#metadata_info_tab_cont....

You don't stop riots by shooting at them. You stop riots by preventing or resolving the economic and social conditions that lead to them; that is, by improving the quality of life of those who have the lowest quality of life.

Unfortunately, shooting at them is easier to both conceptualize and implement, so governments tend to simply do that anyway.

That is... really complicated. 'Just improve their standard of living bro' isn't a real solution. It's like saying we can prevent murder by systemically renouncing violence and becoming a more peaceful society. This is obviously true, but the path forward is not obvious.

Right. The actual solution is complicated, so we default to easy "solutions" that don't work. That's the exact point I just made.

> We've militarized the police because of the long term damage done during riots.

Interesting—I've always assumed that we militarized the police because the military wanted to recoup some of the costs from replacing their hardware.

> In many major cities policing is ~30% of general fund expenditure

It is even more if you include the understated costs of underfunding retiree benefits such as defined benefit pensions and healthcare.

Absolutely!

The War on Drugs is probably the biggest contributor to this problem -- it's beyond vexing that such a simple solution exists yet is rejected.

This is extremely uncritical at best and copaganda at worst. We also lag behind those comparison countries in hundreds of other metrics--food security, housing, segregation, relative public spending on healthcare, education, services, etc.

What would make more of a difference for crime--expanding police budgets in cities that already outspend dozens of foreign militaries or investing those resources in systemic changes to provide people wellbeing and economic stability?

> We also lag behind those comparison countries in hundreds of other metrics--food security, housing, segregation, relative public spending on healthcare, education, services, etc.

Most of this is simply not true, even though it feels good to say. For example, US public spending on healthcare is greater than all of these countries: https://www.statista.com/statistics/283221/per-capita-health...

Spending != Quality/effectiveness of care

I’m not sure what the point of this particular goalpost movement is, but the US ranks quite highly on measures of treatment quality as well. Those are of course much vaguer than the relatively easy-to-measure dollar amount.

What is your definition of “ranks quite highly?” The US ranks near or dead last among developed countries on access to care, outcomes, efficiency, equity, etc.

> access to care, outcomes, efficiency, equity

Of these, only "outcomes" could reasonably be described by "quality," the rest are a further goalpost pushing. And the US ranks highly on those, (e.g. https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/cancer-su...). The only way to get US outcomes to look bad is to compare things that also include non-health-care inputs, like mortality, which is like comparing a sports medicine clinic to an ER room and concluding the ER room loses more patients.

This is just patently false. How are you extrapolating a high ranking for healthcare quality from the survival rate of a single disease? The US spends exponentially money per capita yet has lower life expectancy, infant mortality, childbirth safety, etc. than countries like China, Estonia, and Poland.

I don’t know where you could possibly be getting your information from but here is some reading for you.

https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/fund-reports/2...

https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2018/03/u-s-pays-more...

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullar...

> spends exponentially money per capita

It's funny, this entire chain started because someone claimed the US spent less than all those other countries and I corrected them.

> has lower life expectancy, infant mortality, childbirth safety

You completely misread my post, because I specifically addressed this point. The reason you look at treatments of specific diseases to judge quality of health care rather than something like life expectancy is that life expectancy depends more on things outside the health care system's control than in it. If you get shot or die in a car accident, that wasn't the doctor's fault, a population with much higher rates of obesity will die at a faster clip than one without, even with the exact same care, etc.

Woulnd't life expectancy reflect pretty much all major factors related to health? (outcomes, access, etc) For that, US currently ranks about number ~50 in the world, which is not that bad, but also not so great for a rich country.

Sorry, by relative I meant basically what effects to an investment in healthcare (with regards to systemic change as was my point), not total spending which is obfuscated by recent COVID-19 response spending and Medicare's inability to negotiate prescription and treatment prices historically. For instance, American hospitals being overwhelmed/at capacity and rural areas turning to telehealth due to lack of healthcare services.

And because of all the privatization we favor in the US because of "efficiency," many people efficiently extract profit from that US spending. Whether on prisons or health care.

I sleep easily, knowing it's for profitable efficiency and not merely corruption.

Crime isn’t caused by the lack of social services. Villages in Bangladesh have less crime than many parts of America. Indeed, America itself has higher crime than it did in the 1950s, even though most modern social programs didn’t exist back then.

In modern economies, social services reduce crime. That doesn't mean that crime is caused by a lack of social services.

Part of the reason that social services are necessary is that modern society does not support traditional support networks such as those you might find in a village in Bangladesh. Many people today don't even have families they can turn to for help.

Increased crime rates today compared to the 50s are largely due to higher rates of reporting. In the 50s, crime in low income neighborhoods wasn't reported. It's much safer today, and continues to get safer every year.

Countries with excellent social safety nets, such as Finland, Japan and Germany have much lower crime than the US.

> Increased crime rates today compared to the 50s are largely due to higher rates of reporting. In the 50s, crime in low income neighborhoods wasn't reported. It's much safer today, and continues to get safer every year.

Source? Homicide rates have been well reported since the 19th century, and they track the same general pattern as violent crime rates: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States. Also, I’m not sure how underreporting is an explanation since crime was higher at the turn of the 20th century and decreased after that.

> Countries with excellent social safety nets, such as Finland, Japan and Germany have much lower crime than the US.

Those countries are also homogenous and socially rigid compared to the US. Homicide rates in Germany and Scandinavia fell below the 5 per 100k (the current US level) way back in the early 1800s, long before the modern welfare state: https://ourworldindata.org/exports/homicide-rates-across-wes...

You picked Japan, Germany, and Finland, three countries that happen to have high social spending and low crime. But Korea also has low crime and has lower social spending than the US: https://mobile.twitter.com/oecd_social/status/98735230257827.... By contrast, Brazil has a very high crime rate with similar levels of social spending as the US.

The data just doesn’t tell the story about the root causes of crime that you want to tell.

> Homicide rates have been well reported since the 19th century, and they track the same general pattern as violent crime rates:

There is one confounder here which makes the tracking progressively less and less good for past 50 years, and makes it seem like the current crime rate look better than it actually is, relative to the past crime rates: improvements in trauma medicine.

Basically, what would be a homicide 50 years ago, today increasingly is “only” an aggravated assault, because of advanced treatments. If you adjust for that, if you assume that the standard of care today is unchanged for past 50 years, today’s homicide rate would likely double.

In addition, the 50s were a period of high wealth equality even though there were less social programs. After the Great Compression ended crime began to increase.

Racial homogeneity is proven to also contribute to lower crime rates. A very under looked reason.

This is misleading, crime massively increased from 1960 to 1980 and has been steadily decreasing ever since.

It correlates with access to abortion interestingly. Of which blacks use it the most.

I know this was made popular by freakonomics but it has since been disproven. Crime rates dropped in other countries that didn't have Roe v Wade and the data better fits the hypothesis that the drop in crime was caused by the banning of leaded gasoline.

Interesting! Thanks for this comment and update.

The authors are libertarians, not the people we'd expect to be pushing social services.

Bit of a laughable conclusion from the data if you ask me. The comments discussing it under the actual article do a good job debunking what this author was trying to suggest.

I think this makes a really poor argument for the under-policed part of their claim; on the first graph, the US is not an outlier in terms of police per 100k, only in our number of prisoners per 100k. We could have fewer prisoners without having more police. In addition to being more humane, this could save money, decrease inequality, etc.

Relative to other rich countries, we have more homicides. But if you look at homicides/100k vs Gini index for all countries, we're right in the middle of the pack. Perhaps if we actually want less crime, we should try to create a more equal society.

https://www.gapminder.org/tools/#$ui$projector:true;&model$m...

The data cited by the article works against it. The US has a reasonable number of police per capita for a developed nation, falling between Canada and Australia which are culturally very similar (common law, english speaking, a few dense urban centers but also large rural areas, etc). The issue is that despite having an adequate number of police, they are not effective at suppressing violent crime.

This is hardly surprising if you dig a little deeper. There has been a long trend throughout the US of reduce spending on dedicated public services -> shift remaining responsibility for those services to local police -> increase police budget to handle additional workload -> budget issues -> reduce spending on dedicated public services. The problems all those services were dealing with fester, leading to lower quality of life and worsening socioeconomic situations for residents, which in turn increases both demand for these services and crime rates. At the same time while the cops are doing inadequate jobs dealing with problems they are neither equipped nor trained for, they are pulling resources away from the job they are actually supposed to be doing. These penny pinching policies have ironically fiscally ruined many communities across the nation. Unfortunately many have dug themselves so deep that the damage is likely irreversible, especially when you consider demographic trends that are depleting these communities of their young, their wealthy, and their skilled citizens. Those communities that can be saved will likely need a complex cocktail of creative measures and external assistance. Any simple proposal like "just hire more cops" is as laughable as "let them eat cake."

nonsense article that feigns data-based objectivity and curiosity but simply takes for granted that more violent crime is solved by having more pigs on payrolls

I've always though the biggest problem with the criminal justice system in the United States is that it somehow manages a weird trick of being both too lax and too punitive.

Punishment is very severe on the face of it. Long jail sentences; even the death penalty is possible in more then a few places. Even after you've served time a criminal record will affect you for the rest of your life.

The effect of that though is a weird laxness. The harsher the penalty the greater the temptation to give people multiple chances. The greater the penalty the more effort you need to put in to making sure that the person you're putting away really committed the crime. All of this means it takes longer to actually convict anyone. All of which increases the temptation to let people out on bail while the wheels of justice are turning.

The end result is that people commit multiple crimes with no consequences until they finally trip the line and the consequences are a metric ton of bricks falling right on their heads. And this is affecting people who almost by definition are not good at making long term plans on possible future rewards or problems - if they were they'd be tax payers.

A better system would - in my opinion - be one that comes down very fast with relatively small consequences on criminal behavior. If I knew that people who shoplifted $20 worth of goods were almost certainly going to spend a week in jail - even if there would be no record of them doing that jail time anywhere - I honestly think that kind of petty crime would be greatly lessened.

Frankly (and please don't ask me Kitty Dukakis type questions ) I think the general principle goes all the way through criminal conduct.

> Shifting to more police and less imprisonment could reduce crime and improve policing. More police and less imprisonment also has the advantage of being a feasible policy. Large majorities of blacks, hispanics and whites support hiring more police. “Tough on crime” can be interpreted as greater certainty of punishment and with greater certainty of punishment we can safely reduce punishment levels.

This conclusion is questionable. While the data seems to suggest we have an astonishingly high imprisonment and recidivism rate I don't think the thinly veiled "abolish the police" argument, coupled with it's typical race-based arguments, will solve anything.

We can really, truly, improve an unfortunate necessity of society by a few things in my estimation:

1. Regular psychological evaluation for police and yearly training on de-escalation coupled with firearms training. Additional scrutiny for people with previous experience in combat roles in the military. Lack of sufficient firearms qualification should prevent you from carrying a firearm under qualified immunity, additional PT should be done every 6 months and two failures removes you from the force.

2. Removal of most of qualified immunity. Your job was never "get home safe".

3. Defang the police union which by-and-large is how police get away with murder. Force police to carry malpractice insurance instead (value > 1MM).

4. Disincentivize crime hunting as a method of police keeping their job. For example, your next review at the precinct won't look so good unless you have N number of arrests. This can be done either by punishing police for over-policing, or changing laws that are designed to imprison people for trivialities (minor drug charges, child support, etc).

5. De-militarization of the police and a return back to the "old" times. Police should walk the beat and mingle with the people. As it stands now they drive around in veritable IFVs with more weaponry than is even close to reasonable for their day to day job. Right now they are closer to UN peacekeepers than civil servants.

6. Undoing Castle Rock v. Gonzales which allows police to not have any duty to defend.

7. Most importantly, seriously scrutinize the roles and motivations of DAs and their relationship with judges who are responsible for perpetuating the majority of non-violent crimes that put people in prison for decades.

Of course none of this will ever happen because the true purpose of the police is compliance and control, not safety. If you don't believe me think really hard about how comfortable you are talking to the police, and then think about how comfortable you are talking to a firefighter. The police are simply the meat enforcers of The State and so any desire to change them is simply wishful thinking. Even the military is nicer to citizens in an occupied country than the police are to their own countrymen. It's frankly shocking.

> Your job was never "get home safe".

You raise some good points but this isn't one of them. Dehumanizing police is NOT how we build an effective police force.

Instead of grappling with the issue of their safety, you say "fuck you, you just shouldn't care if you die." What kind of police do you attract with a policy like that? People who have nothing to live for, that's who. And those are the people you LEAST want policing, because they probably don't give a rip if they go to jail.

Policing in America is fundamentally different than in nearly all other parts of the world simply due to the pervasiveness of firearms. That's a reality we all have to contend with, like it or not.

I disagree with the original phrasing, but not necessarily the point being made. A cops job isn't to "get home safe", but rather to make sure everyone gets home safe. If in trying to make sure everyone gets home safe, they reduce the chance they do... well that's the job. It's not for everyone, and there's no shame in it not being for you (there's a reason I'm not a surgeon or physiologist, despite those being actual careers I considered), but if it's not something someone is capable of, we shouldn't be putting them in that position.

Way back in my first year of college as I was getting ready to leave for class I saw a guy in my bushes. Needless to say I hesitated leaving, then I noticed a cop car up the street. I called 911 and told them about the guy hiding from them, and put the dogs in the back yard. A few minutes later, they chased him away from the gate and he started messing with the front door. I went out the back, hopped the fence and headed for the cops through my neighbors side yard, where I was met by one of them. He was naturally suspicious (remember he's just received reports of a guy in the bushes) but after explaining that I was the one who called (and I think showing him my ID that I lived there) we went to look for his partner. At no time did he so much as reach for his gun. We found his partner at the end of the driveway, she had seen him hide behind me car, and he had been ignoring her instructions to come out, so she was waiting for her partner. With him there she proceeded to walk behind and car and bring him out. She was maybe 5'2 and 120 pounds I'd put this guy at 6'. Obviously she had no way of knowing if he was armed, he could easily have had a gun in his cargo pants. Despite that, she too never drew her gun. Just walked back there, told him to turn around, and put the cuffs on him.

This is what I expect from police.

To be fair I was mostly mocking the line because the implication is that they should shirk their civil duty in the interest of their own safety. Unfortunately, their job is to be unsafe so we don't have to. I can understand how you interpreted that way because the thick layer of sarcasm doesn't translate well through text.

I didn't really mean "fuck you I dont care that you die" just that there is a high probability of your untimely demise as a result of your position. If you want respect commensurate to this duty then you should honor that duty. "Just trying to get home safe" is what OSHA is for. Not the police.

Without reading the article or data, but wasn't there a huge push in the US to defund the police? Did that go anywhere?

There were a few initiatives in a few large cities, but largely police budgets have not dropped, and in most cases have increased since 2020.

It’s important to remember that in the US policing is incredibly fractured. Most cities in the US have at least 4 or so independent agencies that have jurisdiction (transit, county sheriff, city pd, state patrol), it’s entirely possible that there are more in many places. This makes it hard to know if police are funded or not

No, there wasn't. There were groups of activists pushing that message, and it was loudly broadcast by partisan media seeking to tie those activists to mainstream politicians. The cities where such activists were particularly loud elected mayors and municipal attorneys opposed by those activists (e.g., New York, Portland, Seattle). Police budgets remain intact.

Yes there was. It didnt't go far. Anywhere it did saw huge spikes in crime. Imagine that.

"Defund the police" is a widely misunderstood message.

But I don't blame people for misunderstanding it. As much as I agree with the left, they suck at coming up with slogans. "Black Lives Matter" should have been "Black Lives Matter Too", but I digress...

"Defund the police" was supposed to really mean two things:

1. Stop sending police to handle cases they are not trained to handle, such as drugged out people wigging out on the street. Police should only be sent if deadly force may be required to handle the solution.

2. Hold police accountable. The cop that show Brianna Taylor should be in prison for murder. The cops involved in the death of Freddie Gray should be in prison for manslaughter. The cop that shot Daniel Shaver should be in prison for murder. Instead, either the DA doesn't press charges, or the judge is just as corrupt as the police and sabotages the case. For example, the judge in the Daniel Shaver shooting did not allow the body cam footage to be shown to the jury, an act that is inexcusable.

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