Police are not primarily crime fighters, according to the data
reuters.com
reuters.com
As a counterargument, I read somewhere that the number one way that serious criminals are caught is due to motor vehicle violations. The theory being that someone who doesn't care about laws against serious acts cares even less about traffic laws.
Timothy McVeigh was caught because he was stopped for driving without a license plate on his car. Law enforcement perhaps would never have solved one of the biggest crimes in U.S. history if the police had not made a minor traffic stop.
Stop and frisk reduced crime as well.
It’s like the fact that the greater the number of people in jail, the lower the crime rate. It’s true because a certain percentage of people commit crimes and if they’re in jail, they won’t.
That doesn’t mean we should go these things. We need to evaluate net impact. Or just not do things that are wrong even if they have utilitarian benefit.
"papers, please"
Someone had to catch McVeigh -- it just so happened it was cop that pulled him over.
If we focused resources on the community instead of punitive 'catch the offenders (if it is convenient, like, you already stopped them)' maybe McVeigh wouldn't have wanted to blow up a Federal building because the FBI was involved in a string of mis-advised deadly interactions where they shot first and asked questions later (Waco, Ruby Ridge -- this is what McVeigh was specifically pissed about).
Yeah, but the problem with this approach is that the benefits are uncertain and take forever to materialize. Going back to the example of heart attacks, we might be able to prevent them if only we convinced people to have healthy diets and exercise, but doing so is fiendishly hard, so we end up with the imperfect solutions of open heart surgery and statins.
Makes me wonder if writers have an obligation to ensure what they right is realistic to prevent the masses from being mislead...
Basically, if you look somewhat rich (e.g. in a suit) or in trades clothings, and your car isn't too shabby you won't get stopped randomly.
Someone driving a beater though because that's all they can afford? Perfect target for "random" traffic spots.
‡ While an unfortunately large number of police officers in the U.S. (and elsewhere) are outright racist, not all are. However, most do pattern matching according to what they’ve been trained as "indicators of criminality", and most of those patterns have their basis in systemic racism that have no connection to real criminality. As I pointed out on a wholly separate discussion the other day, the most common and largest form of theft — and the one least prosecuted — is wage theft by white collar workers.
https://news.stanford.edu/press-releases/2020/05/05/veil-dar...
Daytime, black drivers get disproportionately pulled over. Nighttime, same rate as others. Daylight savings time switch used to eliminate other variables in a really elegant way.
Somewhat going off topic here but I'm curious: do you think in the USA African Americans have the same real rate of serious criminality (such as murder, not speeding) as other groups once you adjust for poverty?
The real incidence rate is hard to tease out because of the presumption of criminality baked into the American system — we know, for example, that Blacks in America are on average charged more frequently, convicted more frequently, and imprisoned for longer than any other group. White defendants are more likely to be offered diversion programs or be offered leniency, even if they are from the same economic circumstances.
In Canada, that presumption of criminality is placed on Indigenous peoples and the imbalances between groups on charges, convictions, and imprisons are similarly lopsided as those for Black Americans.
I don't think it's as hard as you make it out to be. We have multiple independent sources collecting this data. The FBI collects racial data on perpetrators and victims, and multiple national surveys ask victims of crimes about the demographics of the perpetrator. The numbers from all these independent sources are fairly consistent.
Murders are especially easy to get reliable numbers on because there's a body. We know black people are murdered at dramatically higher rates than any other race and that most murder is intraracial. The reported racial crime statistics are accurate unless we believe that white people are sneaking into inner city majority black areas to murder black people undetected in massive numbers and the FBI is conspiring with multiple independent data collection groups to cover it up.
I've gotten pulled over multiple times in a crappy old pickup, while never being pulled over in a slightly less crappy, slightly less old Lexus that I drove far more regularly and far more... spiritedly.
Might this make sense if what they're looking for are outstanding warrants or drugs?
I could see those two groups having a lower likelihood of those two things.
His parents knew it too. He literally never once drove the car again and got rid of it soon after. They continued to let him drive their cars until college.
Seems entirely consistent to me. If traffic stops are (nearly) the only thing police do, that is the only way police will find criminals. It doesn't mean it's a good way.
Racism in laws and law enforcement is intentional and by design.
His job is to investigate violent and serious crimes, rather than to bother motorists.
I would feel much safer if the majority of police resources were allocated to the 'worst' violations of the laws (hardest crimes) first.
Having driven in places where some roads are dotted with cameras and others are bare, the driving behavior is clearly altered. With cameras present, most drivers don't speed. Others speed just below the ticket threshold (+5mph?), or speed only between the cameras. On the roads without cameras drivers are often 10-15mph over the limit with some even faster.
I'm also not crazy about it from a privacy perspective.
In North America we’ve given up on this safety aspect and just ticket the vehicle owner with no ability to assign liability (or points) to the actually guilty driver.
Like motor vehicle deaths? In 2022 there were 42,795 such deaths in the US. Meanwhile there were only 22,941 murders in 2021.
However I'd rather the full cause of those deaths were broken down. How many were _just_ someone driving fast? Many drivers do go faster than the recommended / suggested speed, without incident, every day in many places. Surely most of those instances involve some other factor. Maybe it's drugs or alcohol, maybe it's mechanical failure or a medical condition, maybe it's criminal intent to harm. They are rare but I can think of two or three somewhat recent national news stories that involve someone crazy using their vehicle as a weapon on sidewalks or against crowds.
It certainly would be a safety device if you were seen traveling effectively +20 mph over 15/20/30 minutes along a highway.. proves a willful negligence to traffic laws while leaving unharmed those that go 15 over to skirt by an 18 wheeler that is fish-tailing.
They do in the UK.
But OTOH I'd like to get the cops entirely out of the business of enforcing traffic laws and doing stops entirely. Make all traffic enforcement automated and legalize all drugs. Make the cops go find something else to do with their time.
Here in the UK they are clearly signposted so you can slow down before you get to it.
If you don't slow down because you're going too fast or aren't paying attention then you're behaving dangerously and need discouraging. They genuinely improve safety imo.
[1] https://abc17news.com/news/crime/2022/01/28/numbers-rising-f...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jan/06/us-police-ki...
Edit: I've often wondered why someone didn't put a license plate reader at every on/off ramp. You can compute speed from the elapsed time and there's no way to game/avoid/learn the positions of the cameras. Purge readings that don't generate tickets, for privacy. Wouldn't take many cameras.
What do you think speed limits are for then?
In the presence of vulnerable bystanders or users of the road (e.g cyclists on city streets), limit serves as protection against fatal outcomes in case of an error. That's the only case where no one could argue against limit.
Does UK track average speeds in cities? I'm not familiar with their system. But aware that Dutch use it on highways to make everyone miserable. While their east neighbor doesn't have a default limit on highways at all while still having one of the best in the world highway safety record.
There's a couple places it's used and the only people it makes miserable are people who speed. Unlike in some places over here the speed limits are generally sensible, speeding above those limits is inherently dangerous.
The mis-step we have in some areas is that we still have some police forces that are effectively just a highway patrol, at least in Southern Ontario.
We do have a regulatory problem: most accidents require a police report. And a response problem where police would be first to a scene of a blocked lane on a major highway.
Meanwhile in France, they have a “safety” crew that first-responds to mechanical issues. After a collision, there’s just a form that both parties fill out and send off to their insurance company. No police involvement unless it was serious.
There's that one pair of overpasses on the 401 that the Woodstock police setup as a giant speed trap machine like every other weekend in the summer.
Part of me is impressed by the efficiency of the whole thing.
And we wonder why our roadways are among the most dangerous in the world, especially for people not in enclosed motor vehicles. On rare occasion when people are stopped it's for racist reasons, they're not ticketed (because the cops were looking for drugs and guns, you know Real Police Stuff) so motorists learn there's no consequences to dangerous behavior.
Things aren't much better on the other coast, with NYPD issuing the vast majority of bicycling tickets to non-white riders: https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2022/01/04/nypds-racial-bias-in-...
This is the real icing on the cake:
> The new data follows similar reporting by Streetsblog, which revealed that police issued a whopping 99 percent of tickets for jaywalking to Black and Hispanic New Yorkers during the first quarter of 2020 — a stat that worsened after Streetsblog's initial expose. A City Council bill to decriminalize jaywalking was held up in committee, and would have to be resubmitted by a new council member.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Not_Being_Governe... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_C._Scott#Major_works
Increasing police staff by 10% reduces violent crime by 13%: https://twitter.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/16507235903066890...
Plenty of protests that challenge the authority of the state are completely legal. The state will not lose much authority if laws broken behind the front door of a family go unpunished.
Most of us here are lucky enough to live in a country where the laws were written for more than maintaining the authority of the state.
not really the same
[In 2019, 88% of the time L.A. County sheriff’s officers spent on stops was for officer-initiated stops rather than in response to calls. The overwhelming majority of that time – 79% – was spent on traffic violations. By contrast, just 11% of those hours was spent on stops based on reasonable suspicion of a crime.
In Riverside, about 83% of deputies’ time spent on officer-initiated stops went toward traffic violations, and just 7% on stops based on reasonable suspicion.
Moreover, most of the stops are pointless, other than inconveniencing citizens, or worse – “a routine practice of pretextual stops,” researchers wrote. Roughly three out of every four hours that Sacramento sheriff’s officers spent investigating traffic violations were for stops that ended in warnings, or no action].
[0] The report was published Oct. 25 by advocacy group Catalyst California and the ACLU of Southern California. It relies on county budgets' numbers and new policing data provided under the state’s Racial and Identity Profiling Act, which took effect in 2019.
[1] Report https://catalyst-ca.cdn.prismic.io/catalyst-ca/126c30a8-852c... [PDF]
Sure they do. They’re still getting the broken taillight fine after the cop searches the car.
Such actions are most emphatically NOT pointless, they are preventative: informing someone that their bad behaviour is noticed is often enough to keep well-meaning citizens on the right side of the law. What's your proposed alternative? That every interaction with the police must result in a fine?
So cops are just stopping drivers and giving them warnings. It sounds like harassment to me.
in the case of i stopped you because -rear lights, i see noone else has a notation on your marker, go get it repaired, right now...then your free to go,
thats how i generally see a traffic stop actually being a traffic stop.
Sounds quite logical to me that they'd spend the largest amount of time and resources on that.
Naively, forcing cops to apply the law even more strictly and always issue fines for minor violations, is not something we want, is it?
The 79% on traffic stops is an officer acting on what they classified to be a traffic violation -- it's not 79% of them are pretextual stops & warnings, and 11% are catching speeders/reckless drivers... it's 79% pulling over speeders/reckless/etc. drivers and 11% "reasonable suspicion of a crime that is not traffic related"
If you think about it that way... People CONSANTLY violate traffic laws... So it's not terribly surprising. I certainly hope calls for help are promptly answered, but that source doesn't seem to include data other than the fact that responding to calls for help takes twice as long as a traffic stop for an officer's time.
Edit: removed attribution to parent post
so please take this into account.
cheers
I have a personal hypothesis that that some small locations depend too much on traffic fines and pay for productivity pluses. Most of those fines will be from outsiders. Probably it all started with an unexpected income, a proud politician announcing tax reductions and traffic fines become a real need for this location
(If they actually prioritized crime severity, they would prioritize visibly rich business owners over the poverty-stricken or marginalized populations given that wage theft is by far the largest category of theft)
Your personal hypothesis has substantial basis in fact: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/31/us/police-ticket-quotas-m...
> When New York police officers temporarily reduced their “proactive policing” efforts on low-level offenses, major-crime reports in the city actually fell, according to a study based on New York Police Department crime statistics.
>[...] the NYPD held a work “slowdown” for about seven weeks [...]
>[...] The scientists found that civilian complaints of major crimes dropped by about 3% to 6% during the slowdown. [...]
If we assume that "complaints of major crimes" is a reliable proxy of actual major crimes being committed, as the article suggests, what are we supposed to conclude from this? That within weeks of the police not catching people for minor crimes, that criminals called an armistice stopped committing crimes? Or 3-6% of "major crimes" were only committed because police were doing stop and frisk? I'm aware of arguments about how aggressive policing creates a cycle of broken families and thereby creating future criminals, but that can't explain the effect materializing within weeks.
Hell, start at both ends and meet in the middle. Top-down change seems like it’d benefit a lot from bottom-up support.
https://youtu.be/bpAi70WWBlw?t=493
Another highlight: https://youtu.be/bpAi70WWBlw?t=981
They finally created a program last year to address repeat offenders:
https://www.fox13seattle.com/news/seattle-crime-118-repeat-o...
Considering the abysmal clearance rates while violent crime rates have gone down, it is clear these cats are not good at catching mice. There is some other factor at work.
Edit: It's not a rhetorical question. If you disagree please tell me where the problem is. I don't agree with the policy decisions in question, but I respect democracy so I live with being in the minority whose policy preferences aren't enacted. That is how the system is meant to work, right?
If you want to argue that cops are good at their job regardless of how they spend their time, then do that, but your analogy by itself isn't very convincing of anything.
Pulling away from the analogy, the argument seems to be "There is a lot of hints that high-level crime still persists, and yet cops aren't spending much time fixing it, so their job must not be fighting high-level crime".
Under the current set of rules, ACAB until proven otherwise. Police, in terms of the institution police, the theories behind policing, and its staff, need to be torn down completely and replaced by something entirely new, based on an actual legally defined purpose which was democratically decided and with clear metrics, transparency and accountability on all levels. No charlatans like Dave Grossman ("Killology") and his ilk should be allowed anywhere near a police precinct.
[1] https://www.propublica.org/article/what-can-mayors-do-when-t...
Remember George Floyd or all the others who died under suspicious circumstances without a bystander live-streaming their deaths.
Of course, as someone associating with the far left side of politics and being politically active in general, I may be a bit more opinionated than many other people - but that fact alone is sad, given how important governmental institutions are for our daily lives.
They could be the stupidest idiot and still be right occasionally, and vice versa. So if you have issues with the point they are making, engage with the point instead of looking for dog whistles.
Also, seriously, you have to be in the US for antifa to be considered a bad thing somehow. I thought we decided back in the 1940s that we were all anti-fascists.
I'm going to go out on a whim and say you wouldn't be comfortable saying that all black people are bastards because they don't stand out against their peers.
Their employment in a bastardizing profession is entirely voluntary, and they can forego that employment in favor of earning an honest living at their leisure.
That's a critical point in the discussion, this is a job is a voluntary occupation. Nobody forced them to take the position.
At anytime they can quit and find other employment, but all it seems to often that most are complacent and complicit in the terms of their employment. Boss says do this, this and that, and they do it lockstep.
There should be more discussion on the policy and procedures they use. i.e. "broken windows policy", "stop and frisk policy", "Tuesdays & Thursday" [ I have experienced this one personally, in New York city there is a known tactic that nyc police undercover (plain clothes officers) would stalk the streets harassing citizens in the name of crime prevention[Washington Heights, which is north of Harlem], and if you're darker skin, or just in a irradiated mood for being harassed weekly by these "crime stoppers", you can find yourself in handcuffs, and the drama that follows it.]
Again there are lots of people who say " but, but the police are there to protect you" or "if your not doing anything wrong you have nothing to be afraid of" when the cold hard truth is, it's selective enforcement of laws and selective outrage on "blue crime" that creates these false narratives. Case in point, the policing in Witchta, KA is different from Las Vegas, NV or Los Angeles, CA or NYC. But those differences do not green light racist or elitist policy that protect chosen few communities and while systematically injuring the majority of the other communities. [i.e. Greenwich Village vs. Harlem NYC, this is small atom of the picture of disfunction that is NYC, that I am trying to relate.]
Respect for your fellow human should be transparent and universal, Dr. King's speech "I have a dream" is achievable, but we're not there yet.
I often wonder if it's capitalism in the US that keeps Dr. Kings dream just that a dream...
I got more experience in that than one might believe on a tech forum, from working as a bartender in soddy half-casino half-bar locations.
The entire point of dismantling and rebuilding police from scratch obviously includes creating actually sustainable structures to help people with issues: expanding mental health care access, housing-first programs, financial/food aid and safe injection sites would be the top priorities.
Someone with mental health issues and a drug addiction on top isn't going to get helped by getting arrested and thrown into jail repeatedly, and yet that seems to be the common approach to such people worldwide.
You talk about preventing kids from growing up and becoming bad people, but consider what it does to a kid (or any person for that matter) to see the government only interact with anyone through violence. Is that not going to exacerbate the problem?
The cops bring that pain indiscriminately. The people who can't move away get it every bit as much as the sociopaths, maybe more so... because unlike the sociopaths, some instinct of theirs is that they should be safe for being innocent, and so do less to avoid interactions with cops.
The cops don't even help much when their attention accidentally falls on the sociopaths. Far from prosecuting and deterring the crimes that impact those "who can't move away", they invariably target drug crimes. Why? Because it's free cash. There are no amounts of cash that are so low that they don't invite civil forfeiture. Or for that matter, no sorts of valuables... jewelry, electronics, just whatever. If the cops only had sailing ships and eyepatches, they'd meet every criteria there is to become classical pirates. (Funny, but civil forfeiture law seems to originate in laws much like the letters of marquee nation-states used to issue...)
They perform no investigations, save those obligated in obvious homicides. None for larceny, petty or gross. Often, they'll only take reports of such things when victims require it for insurance claims, but then only begrudgingly and only because too many accusations of refusing to take reports is likely to stir up shit at the state capitol. They do not patrol, and if you see a car out there that looks like it might be patrolling it's more likely it's just out there trying to ambush someone for that sweet, sweet civil forfeiture money.
For some very vast majority of the public, if the cops disappeared tomorrow, nothing would change at all for better or worse. And that could continue for as long as no one realized they were gone (the panic is what could cause chaos, not the "lack of deterrence" that some would expect).
Please don't try and generalise problems from (parts of) the USA to the entire world.
That the phrase "All Cops Are Bastards" originated in England suggests otherwise.
They are really not. The whole thing is dubious and the several recents scandals in local police forces show it (the latest example being the chief constable of the Devon and Cornwall police being suspended for misconduct a couple of days ago).
I do agree that it is still way better than in the US, in that you don’t expect to be killed just or having interacted with a cop and they are not vengeful thugs.
Maybe you’re thinking of the fine upstanding members of the Greater Manchester Police who destroyed evidence and did not turn over evidence to the prosecution (to provide to the defence) which have cost Andrew Malkinson 17 years of his life: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/jul/26/appeal-court...
Or are you perhaps thinking of the upstanding members of the South Yorkshire Police involved in the disastrous crowd control and subsequent cover up of said incompetence around the Hillsborough incident?
It seems unlikely that Northern Ireland’s police services are fine, either, given that sectarian violence and military involvement rampant in the Troubles (caused mostly by hard-liners and reciprocal incidents, and the Iron Lady’s stance helped everything as much as anything she ever did, which is to say not at all), but that may have changed since the Good Friday Accords took effect. It may also not have changed, given that sectarianism is still fairly rampant and the DUP are acting like spoiled children.
Maybe the Welsh and Scottish police are fine, but I am sure that a few minutes of searching could find examples of institutional issues for both of them.
When someone says X has Y property they don't normally mean it has Y property by definition or law of physics, they mean that almost all instances of X have Y property, to the point that you can effectively treat Xs as all being Ys and you're unlikely to run in to something in your life that contradicts this.
It's like saying "trans peoples aren't mass murderers". Yes, there may be an exception, but for pretty much all practical purposes it's true.
They’re not, and pretending that they are is disingenuous. Compared to American police services, they may seem fine. And the nominal theory of policing in Britain (Peelian principles) is more sound than the theory of policing in America…but that does not mean that police forces in the UK are free from power-trippers, abusers, and even systemic bias against whole classes of UK citizens and residents.
UK police also tend to improve and institutionally learn over time as we get inquests and some of the recommendations get implemented.
The entertaining book Seattle Justice details how Seattle's police was conceived to protect business interests and quickly morphed into a protection racket. With drugs, gambling, and sex trafficking as side hustles. Adorable!
I now assume that's the norm (in the west).
The stated purpose of our "well armed miltias" was to repel slave rebellions (in response to Haiti as well as some domestic agitators).
The job of sheriffs et al was to catch slaves.
The job of Texas Rangers was to exterminate the Comanche.
This is just what I remember from popular media. I'm sure an expert has many more examples.
What we want is the police to prevent crime, not stop it.
Their role in that project is not to solve every crime but catch every criminal.
I imagine they do not do well from that metric either.
In too many places the police are the army of the rich controlling the plebians
Police aren't a hammer, that is the first problem.
A lot of crime comes from poverty, drug usage and mental health issues. Fix that and crime goes down, without the followup costs of throwing people into jail where nothing improves in their lives.