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Comment by everdrive | Hacker News Reader

The comment section here is in poor shape. Violent crime is up all over the united states, and at least from what I've seen, there is not a single easy explanation for why. ie, I'm very sympathetic to the argument that "de-fund the police" has had very negative effects, however we're seeing violent crime rise in districts which were not de-funded. The whole red vs. blue states / cities thing doesn't seem to stack up either, as violent crime appears to be up just about everywhere.

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My guess is that it’s a secondary consequence of the initial 2020-2021 wave of media theft-apologia, increasing liability for police, and defunding/prosecution-abstention: now it’s the copycat problem writ large due to social media. People seeing visceral videos and group chats of crowds, gangs, and individuals doing blatant petty and violent crimes in a few places (and oftentimes getting away with it) is probably emboldening would-be criminals to copy techniques they think would work in other places. I think the rise in mass shootings is another result of the social media copycat effect.

I think there's a much simpler and more historically universal reason: murders go up in bad economic times. Inflation is high, inequality is increasing, people are losing or have lost their jobs, and who has suffered this seems pretty random, particularly since other groups (like software engineers in 2020/2021, solar installers in 2022, tradespeople in 2023) are doing just great. All this makes people on the losing side very angry. Some angry people kill people.

There was a similar spike in murders during the 1970s and early 80s, and during the 1920s and Great Depression.

As NPR is the source of this story and I’m too lazy to look up actual statistics…

They had a story a week or so ago about how all crime is up and speculated that the police are less likely to interact with the public because they’re afraid the encounter will escalate and they will end up getting prosecuted for doing their job. Think they even had an “expert” to back their claim.

So what you get is police who won’t do their job out of fear of retaliation and people seeing there are no consequences for their actions just doing whatever they want.

And, of course, the current narrative is the police are “silent quitting” in protest because who else are they going to blame?

Low solution rates are nothing new. So is the lack of causality between police funding, crime, and police effectiveness. TBF another poster pointed out that hiring more detectives is effective, and that's plausible.

It's too bad nobody has the political will to get rid of and rebuild whole PDs. That's what it will take to get rid of bad cops.

Does it rise less or the same in the districts that were not de-funded?

Not according to stats: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/10/31/violent-c...

Totals are not up, and "red states" are much more violent.

As you observe, police funding has about zero effect on crime.

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