Police funding has been increasing in the US year after year
Police should be held to much higher standards than the rest of us, and the ones who can meet those standards should have pay, training, vacation, and benefits to match. Police work should be made attractive to the best and the brightest among us.
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Funding is a fairly meaningless metric because it usually includes corrections department funding (courts and prisons), and it is hard to adjust for: GDP growth, population growth, and inflation. The term funding is so loose that it can mean whatever you wish.
“While the number of sworn police officers has increased by 26% since 1987, that expansion has not kept pace with the growth of the general population. As a result, there were 11.5% fewer officers per capita in 2016 than there were in 1987.“
“ Spending on police nearly tripled (increasing by 168%) between 1977 and 2018, when adjusted for inflation. Per capita spending on police also grew during this period, but at a lower level, close to doubling (83% higher in 2018 than in 1977). However, spending on law enforcement accounts for a small share of total state and local government expenditures, and that portion has remained virtually unchanged over the past four decades, hovering at around 3.7%.”
I think that trite one sentence statements make it difficult to have interesting conversation. I knew nothing about the topic: the above is from a little quick googling that anyone could do.
You have provided no evidence against my major point: anyone arguing about “funding” is just a politically biased argument — because it sounds bad that funding has increased as a number. Yet funding hasn’t increased as proportionally. Cops per capita, and police funding percentage of budget, are less political metrics in my opinion.
Second, I think the stat you focused in on probably doesn’t tell enough of the story, either. Crime rate is HALF what it was in 1987, so police per crime is significantly up since then. Also, advancements in policing and technology would lead to fewer officers needed per capita if they’re like most industries. For instance, we have 25% fewer pilots per capita[1], but 3x the flights of 1990.
[1] - https://www.statista.com/statistics/537863/number-of-pilots-...
My main point is that we can pick whatever biased metric we like, which you demonstrate so perfectly by cherry picking your date, and you choose some unknown “crime rate” figure which depends on your assumptions which you haven’t stated.
Here’s a graph which shows homicide rates vary, but there definitely is no trend that demonstrates a decline of half: https://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/FT_19...
The usual biased opinions (regurgitated without thought) choose some figure based on “serious crime”, but as a community we also care about lesser crimes, like bikes getting stolen (California). The easiest way to reduce “crime” is simply to stop enforcing it and the number of convictions will drop.
In that same time, property crime is down 51% and violent crime down 35% for a combined reduction of 49%.[1] So we have a whopping 58% more police per crime between 1987 and 2016.
The “unknown crime rate figure” I use is the FBI reported stats. As a word of advice, in future discussions you can assume these are the crime rates used as they represent the most complete picture of crime data we have available.
FBI’s statistics show a decrease in the homicide rate from 8.3 per 100k to 5.4 during that period. Check out the site linked, it’s a clear downward trend.
Also your final paragraph shows a complete lack of understanding on what these stats are. The FBI collects stolen bicycle stats under theft/larceny, which is included in my figures. These figures represent reported crimes. Whether they are solved or prosecuted shouldn’t affect the data, merely whether someone contacted police to notify them a crime had taken place.
So those “usual biased opinions regurgitated without thought” are not opinions at all, but rather statements of fact. Crime is down from 1987 whether looking at violent crimes, property crimes, small crimes, or big crimes. It would behoove you to put a little more thought into learning the difference between opinion and fact.
[1] https://crime-data-explorer.fr.cloud.gov/pages/explorer/crim...