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Crime is at an all-time low yet spending on police is near an all-time high. (Those factors could have a causal relationship, but I doubt it's the primary cause based on reading "The Better Angels of Our Nature".) http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/spending_chart_1950_2010...

Having big budgets but less crime means these swollen budgets end up being wasted on a lot of "fun" things like military gear. (Did you know that Wisconsin has two anti-terrorism centers? One in Madison and one in Milwaukee.)

I think this has something to do with politicians being unable to touch the budgets of first responders.

Tangentially, due to stringent building codes, the number and severity of fires has been dropping dramatically over time. Yet spending on fire protection only goes one way: up. http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/spending_chart_1950_2010...

Today in the US, if you call 911 about an emergency medical condition, they will often send a fire engine along with an ambulance and a cop. It makes me wonder if firemen and firewomen are so underutilized they've ended up with mostly make-work.

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"Today in the US, if you call 911 about an emergency medical condition, they will often send a fire engine along with an ambulance [...]"

This is SOP (Standard Operating Procedure).

1. Imagine a scenario where an ambulance arrives as a first responder, and the EMTs [1] find that they cannot gain access to the emergency scene, because the home or other structure is locked or otherwise blocked. In this case, a firetruck would need to be dispatched, because it deploys with the correct equipment (e.g., Halligan bar [2], Denver tool [3], etc.) and personnel trained to handle such a situation. Also, ambulances are typically deployed with only two personnel, and that may not be enough in situations where items need to be moved or cleared to gain clear access to the emergency scene.

2. Most firefighters are cross-trained as EMTs. If they are local to the emergency scene, then they may be the first responders, while an ambulance is en-route.

3. Incoming 911 calls can often be confusing, with callers under extreme stress, experiencing situations that they have never faced in their lives. Imagine a situation where a caller is so distraught, overwhelmed, or focused on a life-saving effort, that they cannot articulate that they need firefighting support, in addition to an ambulance.

The bottom line: in an emergency situation, it is better to have more help on-hand than too little.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_medical_technician

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halligan_bar

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denver_tool

Good points.

Interesting anecdotal data: here in Italy you have to call the fire department to get a fire truck out, whereas they're part of the standard package described above in the US. Fires aren't that common here because of construction materials, so while you see plenty of ambulances and police cars whizzing around, fire trucks are a far rarer sight than in the US.

I think the same goes for most of Western Europe. You rarely see fire trucks, but police cars and ambulances are common.

In France, well Paris, it is quite common to see fire trucks. Like the US they are the first responders to most medical emergencies. And since the city is very old the buildings are mix of material, my previous apartment had plaster walls with mud and hay as fill material. And the wiring looked like it existed during WWII.

Since being here, I've observed fires are quite common amongst the disaffected youth who enjoy burning cars and motos when they are bored.

How about a HazMat team? Imagine a scenario where the EMTs cannot gain access to the emergency scene because there are toxic substances in their way. You can't rely on the incoming 911 calls to decide on a case by case basis so you might as well send a HazMat team alongside the ambulance and firetruck for each and every call.

And what about an anti-terrorist unit? Imagine a scenario where...

If those were as common as fires and doors being deadbolted closed with child 911 callers, we might do it. You act as if the scenarios outlined by the parent are as rare as biohazard emergencies.

>as common as fires and doors being deadbolted closed with child 911 callers

Are there any statistics on the number of cases on which a firetruck was really needed?

Fire trucks do more then put out fires by the way. People seem to forget that a lot. They also have car tools, ladders, and other stuff.

a fire truck costs $250000. for the truck. If you don't need a 150 foot ladder and 1000 gallons of water, then a tool-truck like many contractors have would probably do for much less cost.

In San Francisco, people have been trying to get stats on how many times the fire trucks are sent on medical emergencies ("unresponsive man on the sidewalk"). The SFFD has resisted all attempts at such inquiry. I often see big fire trucks responding for homeless people, and it seems like such a waste. But their union is too powerful.

Check out this chart: http://marginalrevolution.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/Wha...

There may even be a happy middle-ground with regards to firefighters. In eastern King County, they don't send out a firetruck and three firefighters for non-lethal medical emergencies anymore -- they just send a single firefighter in an SUV.

SUV? Over here (Netherlands) they send them in tiny cars (http://www.mijnalbum.nl/GroteFoto-SMYHWONA.jpg for example, but I've seen even smaller, two-person city cars with a flashlight bolted on). If it's just to carry a person with some essential first responder tools (fire extinguisher, medkit, axe / tools), you don't need anything big. Of course, in the US, distances are much larger than over here.

I needed an ambulance in a state park and they sent a fire truck too. When I asked the EMT from the ambulance why the firetruck, she responded "they're our toolbox."

I thought the reason the red fire ambulance needed to be around was because regular EMTs aren't allowed to administer oxygen do to its high flammability, which important in many emergencies. This according to one EMT that I know.

In general, the EMTs you see carrying out an elderly woman are people with a few months of training. When people are getting stabbed, shot, or on the brink of life, you sort of need people with better training.

https://www.cpc.mednet.ucla.edu/node/27

And yet I can imagine this is something that could be optimized; why not cross-train the three emergency respondent department members into jack-of-all-trades that can deal with 80% of cases? Or put members of the three departments into a single vehicle equipped to deal with most cases? They could travel swifly to the site and deal with most cases, and call in back-up (like a fully equipped ambulance, fire-truck, or paramilitary SWAT-team in an armored hum-vee) if the situation needs it. I'm not an expert, but that would reduce overhead and cross-department communication needs.

Of course, the risk is that if the one vehicle has an accident in itself, there's no others that can fall in right then.

> And yet I can imagine this is something that could be optimized; why not cross-train the three emergency respondent department members into jack-of-all-trades that can deal with 80% of cases?

Because we need firefighters anyway, and EMT's in ambulances are often volunteers or paid substantially lower than a fireman in most areas of the country. Bear in mind, you're also talking about putting additional equipment in what is already a jam-packed ambulance, if you end up needing to dispatch another vehicle it might as well be a fire-truck (you never know when someone forgot to say "my house is on fire" when they called in because their wife isn't breathing after dragging her out of the house).

Firemen and EMTS DON'T WANT to be cops! That's why "public safety" movements fail. They don't want to be forced to issue citations for petty drug laws while trying to save people from health or fire emergencies. It's not an uncommon situation for somebody with petty illegal activity to start shooting at firemen trying to stop their house being on fire because they think firemen might arrest them. Regular fireman just want to take care of safety.. They don't want to put on jackboots and arrest people.

Of course the Feds want as many police as possible because of the laws militarizing them and actually disincentive separete rate fire protection with rigged grant processes.

> And yet I can imagine this is something that could be optimized; why not cross-train the three emergency respondent department members into jack-of-all-trades that can deal with 80% of cases?

Because that's very expensive (increasing initial and ongoing costs for training and equipping every first-response unit), and in the many cases where more than the minimal response is known to be necessary from the first call, and in cases where those departments aren't acting as first responders, it doesn't save anything.

> I'm not an expert, but that would reduce overhead and cross-department communication needs.

No, training and equipping EMTs to be adequate-for-most-cases firefighters and cops, firefighters to be adequate-for-most-cases cops and EMTs, and cops to be adequate-for-most-cases EMTs and firefighters would not reduce overhead. Quite the opposite.

I believe crime is at an all time low because everyone is in prison.

http://dcj.state.co.us/ors/images/Stats%20Images/crime%20rat...

Even greater reductions in crime rates are visible all across the Western Europe, and they have worked to reduce incarceration.

Interesting :-) Where can we read about that?

I'm going to go with Freakonomics on this one and believe crime is low because fewer criminals are being born.

Link? Or is this your way of expressing you believe criminal tendencies are a genetic trait?

> criminal tendencies are a genetic trait?

What?! No, I believe criminal tendencies are produced from your environment. Kids in bad homes tend to grow into bad people.

Link: http://www.freakonomics.com/2005/05/15/abortion-and-crime-wh...

http://www.freakonomics.com/2008/01/22/what-do-declining-abo...

The original argument is in the book. The idea is that children from disadvantaged families are more likely to be aborted, while at the same time, children from disadvantaged families are also more likely to be crime prone. So, logically, abortion reduces crime with a twenty year delay. Personally, I like the lead theory[1] better, but it doesn't matter. It's not about eugenics or genes.

1 http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/01/lead-crime-li...

"Crime is at an all-time low yet spending on police is near an all-time high."

Isn't this cause and effect? Crime is lower because we are hiring more policemen. That is certainly one conclusion from Freakonomics.

This is just a digression, because I do think the "Cops as Warriors" model is very scary, as "collateral damage" becomes acceptable in a war.

But if spending AND crime were at an all time high wed be saying that its cause and affect in the other direction and probably be making the argument that we need even more spending! So no matter what high budgets are always justified.

If you're not adjusting for inflation, spending on nearly everything is at an all-time high. (And when you're arguing that budgets are too high, it's rarely in your interest to adjust for inflation).

I attempted to address that in my comment. Check out, Steven Pinker's "The Better Angels of Our Nature" which shows that violent crime is down globally, not just in the US.

Also, Levitt did say increased policing decreased crime, but only caused around 5% of the decline ( http://pricetheory.uchicago.edu/levitt/Papers/LevittUndersta... p. 184)

I found that talk riveting. I tried to tell that to people in real life, but stopped that after a couple of tries... Noone really believes that...

Pinker's thesis is not without serious detractors. Edward Herman and David Peterson's critique[1] in ZNet is worth considering before taking it as fact.

[1] http://www.zcommunications.org/steven-pinker-on-the-alleged-...

That is atrociously bad.

Among other things, it argues against the concept of normalizing death tolls of war by population (when the primary variable under consideration is the likelihood of one person to die violently across different times), it tries to cram as much contemporary political rhetoric as it can, and it uses highly pathetic analysis such as "the phenomenon of structural violence, or the kind of violence that is “built into the structure” of social relations" (yes, because past societies based aristocracy that brutally extracts what it can from the majority of the population is so much less structurally violent) and "the increasingly savage global class war of the 1 Percent against the other 99, and the “endemic undernutrition and deprivation”" (conveniently ignoring the fact that endemic undernutrition was the normal state of the world prior to recent times).

It staggers me that someone can actually read that and take it at face value. His entire thesis seems to be "ignore statistics, look at these pretty individual cases" and "look at how bad the world is", completely missing the point that Pinker didn't actually say the world is peaceful, only that it is more peaceful than it has ever been before, and completely failing to make any case against this.

There is substantial evidence that lead poisoning, particularly that from leaded gasoline, is the causative element behind the violent crime spike and subsequent decline: http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/01/lead-crime-li...

About now I usually are the below story quoted. It's such a fascinating read that I'll stick it in as someone may not have seen it. Leaded petrol and crime.

http://m.motherjones.com/environment/2013/01/lead-crime-link...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/9790009/Was-lea...

> Crime is at an all-time low yet spending on police is near an all-time high.

Two words: public unions.

I'm not opposed to unions in general, but there are definitely some specific ones our labor relations dept. could point out that would correlate very well with your point.

Is it inconceivable that crime is lower due to more police on the streets and more criminals in jail?

I think that's true, but I also think it's true that it would be possible for police forces to demobilize a bit, instead of continuing their ramp-up. It's like invading Iraq. The police went in and broke the criminal gangs and organized crime. What's needed now is nation building, so to speak. The crime that's left is leaderless gangs of youths shooting each other up in turf wars, and SWAT teams aren't the answer to that.

Excellent point about nation building...

Too bad we're doing that nation building away from home.

Yes, because the same trend extends to places without massively expanded militarized police and ridiculous incarceration rates.

This is why tech workers need unions. When Facebook does something nasty, they can blame the unions; the billionaires and millionaires were merely cowering behind their desks.

We shouldn't contort ourselves to avoid the simplest answer: the state is getting what it paid for. The US incarcerates its population more than any known state on earth. That isn't unions' fault — other countries with more powerful unions don't jail themselves like this.

If any enemy nation did this, we wouldn't have any illusions. But we refuse to apply the same logic to ourselves, nor conclude as Chomsky did, "Remember, any state has a primary enemy: its own population."

Otherwise, it might be obvious why police are fighting a war, and who their enemy is.

> That isn't unions' fault

It is, in fact, the unions' fault. The prison unions and police unions are huge proponents of the drug war, longer sentences, etc. It isn't just there fault, of course, America's general Puritan streak helps, but the public unions have really capitalized on that.

> other countries with more powerful unions don't jail themselves like this.

What happens in other countries isn't a good model for the U.S. Sub-segments of the population don't viscerally hate each other in Frankfurt or London the way they do in L.A. or Detroit. It will be interesting to see what happens to the internal social cohesion European countries have enjoyed post-WWII as middle eastern immigration continues to rise. A few more muslim youths rioting in Paris and I think you'd be surprised by what kind of police escalation Parisians will be willing to put up with...

I'm sure they're protecting their turf, but they didn't start the drug war, and they're not at the forefront of promoting it.

Nixon declared the "War on Drugs". He also pioneered the "Southern Strategy", and many elements of his campaign are now well accepted to have been used as code words.

It wasn't a personal appeal to the puritan morality of drug users to stop, it was an appeal to the fears of scared whites.

The "War on Drugs" almost exclusively effects poor, minority communities and individuals.

http://www.npr.org/2009/08/13/111843426/folsom-embodies-cali...

In three decades, the California Correctional Peace Officers Association has become one of the most powerful political forces in California. The union has contributed millions of dollars to support "three strikes" and other laws that lengthen sentences and increase parole sanctions. It donated $1 million to Wilson after he backed the three strikes law.

It's not precisely what 'rayiner was saying, but the prison guard union is definitely pushing for more people in prison.

Millions????? OMG

Give me a break. Unions have a lot of problems but if they were so damned influential, maybe every public sector union except for federal security wouldn't have been losing jobs and hours for the last 10 years.

The only reason public sector unions exist is because they are so influential, despite FDR's warning against them and the conflict of interest that falls on the taxpayers representatives who often have their campaigns partially financed by unions. And I don't think you can look at the past 10 years of "belt tightening" at the state and local level (let's be real, that's where the cuts are), and say they aren't that influential. They still have tons of power.

The states are teetering on the verge of bankruptcy, and it's extremely telling that the public unions are the last things to feel the pain after states have been gutting things like higher education for decades. Many of the recent municipal bankruptcies have been driven by pension obligations for public employees: http://www.foxbusiness.com/government/2013/06/11/california-....

I agree with all of that. What I'm saying is that blaming the current security state on 'unions' is like saying NYC exists because of, I dunno, greenpoint. Not necessary and not even sufficient.

Of course certain unions see an interest in the security state. Other, bigger unions are generally opposed but don't have skin in the game. Whatever. The security state is much bigger than the police and prison guard unions.

Fundamentally, the issue here is political game theory where there's no upside to fixing things and a lot of upside to painting your opponent as 'soft on terror' or 'soft on crime'. So policy only moves in one direction, and that direction is often stupid. Unions' wishes are just drops in the bucket compared to that.

> "It will be interesting to see what happens to the internal social cohesion European countries have enjoyed post-WWII as middle eastern immigration continues to rise."

It's already here. Every time there is some discussion of Muslim extremism or immigration we have a few HN members saying things that, in even conservative parts of the US, would leave your jaw hanging.

In the US it's common for the more liberal folks to perceive Europe has some kind of bastion of social enlightenment. This view seems to fall apart once you actually inject some different skin colors into the population.

Social enlightenment is easy when your major cities aren't majority-minority and almost perfectly geographically segregated by race/ethnicity. From someone who lived in Chicago for several years: it's hard to empathize with people who look different than you, have dramatically different family backgrounds, etc. It's harder still to empathize with them when they're separated by a river.

"Sub-segments of the population don't viscerally hate each other in Frankfurt or London the way they do in L.A. or Detroit."

Belfast still has road barriers that are raised at night blocking roads between the Shankill Road and Falls Road areas - not to mention huge walls:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_lines

Edit: To be fair, I agree with your point, but there are some very noticeable dividing lines in European cities.

[NB. This is not intended as a criticism of Belfast, please go and visit - we went recently and had a great few days and I want to go back.]

Yeah, that's an extremely exceptional case and related to a centuries-old political conflict between nations. I'm Irish, you can't generalize from Belfast to anywhere else except maybe Israel/Palestine.

There are actually quite a few, and though I'm surely missing 10+, here goes. Serbia/Montenegro/Kosovo, Kashmir (though someone made civil war simpler by dividing those into countries) Sri Lanka, Syria, Iraq, The Sudan, Somalia, Congo, Timor, Cyprus, Afghanistan, Pakistan. None are the same, most are significantly more violent and have rather less western involvement in stabilizing rather than just supporting one side or totally ignoring it. This isn't minimizing the Irish situation, its just saying that the Irish one is generally appreciated as a complex mess, while the other myriad array of violent, messy historical problems are equally sad.

Well, for an even more extreme case of a divided European city there is always Nicosia...

[I agree that these cases are exceptional].

No. I am no lover of the police or prison officers' unions (which are very powerful here in CA), but they are only one part of the problem. The other part is that we have private corporations that operate prisons for profit, such as Correctional Corporation of America, who are well-documented as promoting the building of more prisons through forums such as ALEC. The incentives are a) huge and b) perverse.

I fully agree with your point, but there is a union that contributes significantly to the prison-industrial complex: the various prison guard unions. (Also culpable are privatized prisons, which are often little more than slave labor camps.)

> (Also culpable are privatized prisons, which are often little more than slave labor camps.)

As opposed to regular prisons which are just slave camps? What exactly is the moral difference between the state of living between public and private prisons? (I take it that you were implying a difference exists, but I could be mistaken.)

Don't get me wrong, they're both awful. Prisons as we know them are a travesty of both efficacy and human decency no matter who runs the show.

But whatever perverse incentives and moral hazards already exist for state prisons, they are double when there is a profit motive for maximizing headcount. Moreover, the taxpayer still ends up footing most of the bill for private prisons; in state-run institutions, they at least have a budgetary incentive to moderate sentences, rehabilitate, and reduce recidivism. In a private prison, an inmate who finds Jesus/Buddha/etc and becomes an honest citizen is a blow to the bottom line.

OK. I thought you were referring to the morality of working while in person as opposed to idling. Given your comment, it seems like you weren't---and yet your previous comment seems to imply it. So why refer to private prisons as "nothing more slave labor camps" while public prisons could just as easily be "nothing more than slave camps"?

I now understand that you were criticizing the incentive structure of prisons, but it didn't seem that way.

> Moreover, the taxpayer still ends up footing most of the bill for private prisons

I would therefore not call them private prisons. Perhaps, crony prisons or quasi-public prisons?

> In a private prison, an inmate who finds Jesus/Buddha/etc and becomes an honest citizen is a blow to the bottom line.

How can this be true while tax payers are simultaneously footing the bill? Moreover, isn't a large part of the comments in this thread about how there is an incentive structure in public prisons to keep more prisoners? (The correctional officer unions.)

> in state-run institutions, they at least have a budgetary incentive to moderate sentences, rehabilitate, and reduce recidivism.

That kind of makes sense. But when there are unions, and the jobs of union members depends on the number of prisoners, it becomes much less clear.

> Perhaps, crony prisons or quasi-public prisons?

Very true, and equally applicable to many other "private" companies (Lockheed-Martin comes to mind).

> How can this be true while tax payers are simultaneously footing the bill?

Private prisons (that include inmate labor) charge from both ends: per-head to the taxpayer (ostensibly at a lower rate than if the state handled it in-house), and per-hour to businesses seeking cheap labor. State prisons have only the first incentive, with the countervailing force of finite tax revenue.

Also, the prison guard unions have the same incentive to lobby (and/or support the lobbying of their parent corporation) regardless of who signs their checks. I would claim that union influence and lobbying is a constant in either case.

> But when there are unions, and the jobs of union members depends on the number of prisoners, it becomes much less clear.

Agreed. It is bad policy and a waste of taxes in either case.

>That isn't unions' fault — other countries with more powerful unions don't jail themselves like this.

Well, actually, prison guard unions did lobby for things like three-strikes laws to increase incarceration rates. [1] And yes, unions in general are weaker in the US, but public employees' unions haven't waned in power anything like their private sector counterparts.

[1] http://caprogressivemessage.com/2011/03/04/the-california-pr...

(I know, I know, "it's a left-wing California site!" But it's well-sourced and one of many articles saying the same thing when you google for who is lobbying for three-strikes laws and whatnot.)

> Two words: public unions.

Citation needed.

We have unions over here in Europe too. Even more respected actually. But they don't correlate with "police spending".

Perhaps the word you're looking for is "lobbyists" and "demagogues".

Indeed; the view I have of unions in Europe are worker organizations that protect and enforce the rights of employees, things like minimum wage, working conditions, fair treatment, and retaining of jobs; afaik, they don't do much to create jobs, let alone in an immoral way by paying lots of money to governments and organizations to, for example, increase the incarceration rate and duration.

"Today in the US, if you call 911 about an emergency medical condition, they will often send a fire engine along with an ambulance and a cop. It makes me wonder if firemen and firewomen are so underutilized they've ended up with mostly make-work."

One of the reasons for this is also that fire stations are often far closer to the scene of a call (fire suppression being something that benefits from being distributed vs. centralized hospitals) so the fire truck will often arrive there first, and can render aid until the ambulance arrives.

You also get a bill for $400 for the firetruck and $10 for each fireman

do americans get a bill if they call for a fire engine?

Depending on where you live, and what the incident is, yes. Since fire fighters usually serve paramedic roles, a fire truck will often be dispatched to a serious car accident. If you're lucky your car insurance will cover some or all of the bill.

What you don't want is the $10,000 bill if they send a helicopter out.

> What you don't want is the $10,000 bill if they send a helicopter out.

If you frequently find yourself in locations where a heli may be needed you may want to invest in a membership with your hospital or regional network (in the northwest US (ID, OR, WA) there is the life flight network, $60 a year covers any costs that your insurance don't pay).

I used to be a volunteer junior firefighter as a teen (many of Long Island's fire departments are volunteer based). Fire engines were sent out on emergency calls because many times the situation calls for tools and equipment that ambulances don't carry. I doubt it was budget-related, considering nobody was on payroll.

In response to a similar observation that I once made, a friend suggested that police at a non-law enforcement emergency act as ad hoc project managers. "You need what, Mr. EMT? I'll have it for you directly, and I'll have those cars blocking access towed too. ... You lot! Back away!"

> Crime is at an all-time low yet spending on police is near an all-time high.

Devil's advocate: that shows they are effective and crime would be even lower with increased budgets.

I'll take your extra firemen, thanks.

Please don't conflate police looking for make-crime, with generous responses to emregency situations risking irreversible damage to life and property.

Taking off on a tangent, the comment about firefighters and police reminded of Dennis Smith's 'Report from Engine Co. 82'. It described his life as a firefighter in New York City/South Bronx during the 1960s and early 1970s. What I recall most vividly from it was that locals would use the callbox to ring the fire department, in case of problem, because they didn't trust the police.

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