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Comment by nervousvarun | Hacker News Reader

It's all relative I guess. Here in the Nola we desperately, DESPERATELY need more cops.

I'm from STL, about 3 miles from where Michael Brown was shot, closer to where Martin was shot at the mobile station....If NYC wants less police we'll take them.

Our police forces around here are so busy with 911 calls they barely have any time for proactive policing. There's very little patrols and fewer proactive citizen engagements that aren't because crime has flared up in that sector.

New Orleans has had quite a history of corruption in its police force. Are you sure?

Sadly yes so it's sortof a damned if you do damned if you don't scenario.

Just lately we've had serious issues recruiting police (largely due to antiquated policies like 'no visible tattoos' or 'they must live in Jefferson Parish (expensive on a cop's salary)'. The murder rate (always a problem in Nola) is actually currently down but violent crime is up significantly and the nature of the crime seems to be getting more and more brazen (http://www.theneworleansadvocate.com/news/11266753-123/buffa...). It's obviously a complicated issue that requires a lot more than just "more feet on the ground" but we certainly seem to not have enough at the moment.

Here's a link but there's probably a million more available via Google: http://www.nola.com/crime/index.ssf/2014/05/nopd_understaffi...

I am pretty sure that nobody who says "we desperately need more cops" means "we desperately need more corrupt cops".

I take your point but in fairness OP is definitely correct regarding a corrupt Nola police force. Definitely not a simple issue.

If you don't deal with the problems that lead to the existing cops being corrupt before trying to add new cops, that's what you get. So if you say "we desperately need more cops" without including "we first desperately need to deal with police corruption", when your present police department is noted for corruption, you are implicitly saying you need more corrupt cops.

Or, at least, that you need more cops even if they are as corrupt as the existing ones.

Yeah sadly, it's the latter.

Arbitrary numbers but if your cops are 50% corrupt and you suddenly have twice as many total cops you still then double the number of non-corrupt cops. Obviously that's wasteful but... Fixing deep-routed cultural corruption is obviously extremely difficult.

So yeah, at this point I (and a lot of others who live here) would say we just need more cops because violent crime is increasing and the number of street cops out there is decreasing and that's just a bad combination.

So many lesser of two evils at play here :(

I don't think that's just wasteful. Depending on the nature of the corruption, one corrupt cop might do more harm than one honest cop can prevent.

Why is nervousvarun's post downvoted? Is Hacker News also a cesspool of over-sensitive, ultra politically correct liberals?

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