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Comment by ajmurmann | Hacker News Reader

As others have pointed out the US has a massive prison population.

Our problem isn't insufficiently harsh punishment. Our problem is unlikely punishment. The US spends more on incarceration and less on policing and the justice system. You are less likely to get caught and punished in the US but if you get punished it's harsher. Yet studies have shown that a milder punishment that happens more swiftly and with higher certainty is much better for preventing crime.

Not sure that helps with mentally ill homeless but it's at least an improvement we could aim for

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This is what China has done. Aside from drug crimes it doesn't seem like they punish any harsher than the rest of the world, they just have an incredibly good ability to follow up. If you smash the window of a store, they will find you and you'll have to pay for it. Just the knowledge that there is an almost 100% chance of having to pay to restore anything you break seems all that's needed to stop the destruction of public spaces.

On the less extreme end, Europe also has much higher rates of catching criminals and punishes then less. I understand the US is really the outlier.

I read an interesting article that laid out how that's ultimately rooted in what level of government pays for what. It's easier for local politicians to call for harsher punishment because prisons are run by state or federal but police is funded locally.

I don't think the police is underfunded in the US though?

It simultaneously is and isn't. It's overfunded on things that don't matter for the problem at hand - traffic enforcement using full fledged officers in expensive vehicles, militarized SWAT teams, regulations requiring huge officer presence at all events, etc. But it's underfunded on what would change things for the better - foot patrols, investigation, etc.

This is why you can get pulled over for a broken taillight in the US and have 3 police cars behind you complete with a K9 unit, but if that same car gets stolen, you'll probably get asked to make a report and never hear a peep from the police again.

Reminds me of a story I read recently where they deployed a SWAT team to deliver a letter. I thought it must have been fake, but maybe not..

(It was news because the old building's stairs couldn't support the weight of the SWAT team and collapsed, injuring many of them.)

Look at officers per 100k: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependen... France has 422, Germany 349, Italy 456, US 242. There are countries that are super safe like Japan and Singapore with only 255 and 174 but I think it's safe to say that the US probably is better compared to France here. China also has only 258 but I think they make up for it through surveillance which isn't welcome in the US.

The US also doesn't train police officers well compared to most European countries. In the US it takes just a few months to become a police officer. In Germany it takes years.

Very good conversation on the general topic: https://youtu.be/6gMwh3jkWy0?is=MiTI5N1wdEpd_izP

The thing there that the West has not been able to accept to achieve this is the surveillance state. Just look at Flock.

I'm not sure anyone has really cracked how to get it done without that part, though certainly tweaking the spending from prisons to police would help a lot. The trouble in the US at least is people (rightly) don't trust police, and don't want to give them more power, so it also needs to be paired with reform on that front for the population to accept it.

Because cameras alone do nothing useful, and there's precious little evidence these are being used to help address petty vandalism.

The UK already went down this road years ago - cameras everywhere, public restrooms nowhere, prompt and automatic ticketing for parking violations but precious little in the way of assistance from humans should you need it. The shut-in dotage of a former empire too afraid to leave its house.

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