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Notes -
A twitter thread about a paper on policing: https://twitter.com/jnixy/status/1559568512485470209
The paper itself: https://t.co/sy6LHNMpph
Key points
The US doesn't have that many police officers given its level of serious crime (homicide), but it does have a lot of prisoners.
The US is unusually punitive for suspects who are arrested, but also unusually bad at arresting anyone.
Their main recommendation is to trade off more certainty of punishment against less severity. This is an idea with a good deal of support in criminology (e.g. https://www.ojp.gov/pdffiles1/nij/247350.pdf claims this, and it is consistent with what I learned when I studied the subject; https://www.jstor.org/stable/41638882 claims the opposite, but agrees this is contradictory to most of the literature). In particular, we could spend less money on incarceration and more on police officers. Interestingly, despite the suggestion to hire a lot more police, the paper takes a progressive stance ("The burdens of the status quo... fall more disproportionately on Black people and the poor, and especially the Black poor, than do the benefits.")
I remember this was discussed a few weeks ago on the reddit sub. I think some of this is attributable to America's police being more effective, better trained, better armed. The Italian police don't strike me as being that good at their jobs or intimidating compared to big, burly American cops with guns with those mushrooming bullets. Also, longer sentences, harsher recidivism laws means fewer criminals that would otherwise be on the streets, hence fewer police needed relative to population. Of course, there is the counterargument that Nordic countries have had success with less strict policing and more lenient sentencing, but this overlooks major differences such as demographics, unreported crime or differences in reporting crime, and population size. Regarding certainty of punishment vs. severity, I think the US strikes the optimal balance. I think high severity is better. Why do so many people get cancer screenings when the certainty is low, because cancer is so deadly. Criminals make a similar rationalization.
I suspect the outlook on risk is probably different between "the population of people who proactively screen themselves for cancer" and "the population of people who commit (violent) crime."
violent crime is just one subset of crime. the impulsive guy who kills a family member or drug dealer out of rage is different from a career criminal. I think the latter may be worse because it causes more widespread economic harm over longer period. The long sentences and harsh recidivism laws are to deter the non-impulsive, non violent criminals.
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Alternatively, it could be that cancer is scary and debilitating enough that a moment of inconvenience provides at least an ounce of protection, which can be worth a lot. While prison arguably drains your life force as much as cancer does, you can't exactly make cancer go away with a good enough lawyer (at least, not for yourself after the fact).
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ooh the animation extends to the mini avatars.
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Here is a study that suggests the US has among the lowest homicide resolution rates among the first-world countries at 65%, well behind Italy which went from 67% to 78%, though obviously there is a wall of confounders (some of which the referenced paper discusses itself).
By police, I don't mean investigators. homicides are not solved by police, at least not in America.
Then how your comment is relevant, because the statistics shown in the figure counts investigators (who are sworn officers, not civilians?)
Sanity check from a different source:
https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2018/crime-in-the-u.s.-2018/tables/table-74> 686,665 full time officers in 2018 -> 210 per 100,000, almost exactly the same number as in the linked paper graphs. Even if one included civilians, the US would be massive outlier, and according to data description, one ought not to, because:
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I would 100% be on board with increasing certainty, but I question the severity argument. The problem with it is what we've seen recently with the decarceration movement. There are lots of career criminals and repeat offenders. If they get an early parole (say 5 years) the critical component of prisons (seperating them from us) is lost, and they just go out and rape another person, and often they escalate from battery to kidnapping to murder-rape.
I suspect that there is a population of impulsive criminals who are in some sense *incapable *of not victimizing others; incapable of taking the risks of apprehension and incarceration into account, but that this shades into a population of more marginal criminals who are capable of taking the risks into account somewhat, and who tend to assume that the chances of getting caught are low enough that the severity of punishment conditional on being caught doesn't really factor into their decision on whether or not to commit a crime. Depending on how large these groups are relative to each other, it is conceivable that if certainty of punishment were raised, that would lower crime among the second group enough to more than cancel out the extra crime resulting from giving the first group shorter sentences. But I have no idea how the numbers would actually pan out on this.
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All of this data is well known and I would suggest not novel research. It’s data that’s ignored. Alex Tabarrok has been talking about these issues for at least a decade.
This is basically why I turned on BLM quite early before it was cool because non of the data fits their narrative. We’ve always had data that we are over-incarceration. I’ve never seen data that we are over policed or police are excessively violent. There’s a reason George Floyd was the front man for police violence whose death was no doubt heavily related to his own health decisions.
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This reminds me of what the criminologist Mark Kleiman proposed years ago, before he died.
But as we know policy is now dictated by social media which makes anything smart almost impossible to implement. It's about competing vibes. And the vibe around this still looks far too right wing, I'm sure.
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Sticking point: do these observations hold across the entire US in aggregate? It seems like they do in other countries, which I find interesting for other reasons, but I think the assumption that the US is a monolith rather than focusing on its trouble spots may be a mistake.
Take Baltimore, for example- population 600,000ish, with 4000ish police, so a rate of 600 police per 100,000 people (disclaimer: I'm assuming the homicide and police population only for the official city itself, not its metro area). That's 3 times the national average of police to population... with a homicide rate that's consistently 7 to 10 times the national average.
Detroit, by contrast, happens to have the same murder rate, but with only 380 police to 100,000 people, so merely twice the stated national average.
So if the places that have most of the homicides also have more police than average, why do they also have murder rates (and infamy for police brutality) far in excess of the trend instead of the opposite like we'd expect? It'd be interesting to see an intra-state comparison as well as the national trend, and based on the above I'm not convinced it'd support the conclusions as strongly.
That said, adding 500,000 people to government payroll (in other words, making 1 in roughly 300 US workforce participants a cop) might arguably be intensive enough of a welfare program to have a non-trivial effect in crime reduction by itself (i.e. they do nothing but eat donuts all day)...
A within-US comparison would be interesting, although I suspect that data points like Baltimore are mostly causal in the other direction (more murder -> hire more police). Clearly neither such an analysis, nor this analysis, would be definitively causal (although you would need more than 1 or 2 data points to draw the conclusion that you drew here).
The linked thread actually points to a section in the paper which gives a possible explanation for why underpolicing (few police per homicide) could cause police brutality.
That much I doubt, since the people who are most likely to commit crime are not going to become police.
edit: The Graham Factor post linked above includes some state-level data.
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I would estimate that more police(which everyone except the far left and libertarian right agrees on) is probably contributed to by higher homicide rates- that is, the consensus is that the correct response to crime is to hire more police, so when crime becomes a particularly salient issue, cities hire more cops.
I would estimate police brutality is also a side effect of more crime.
Now as for why ‘more police’ doesn’t make a major impact, I would guess that it’s because the incentive structure for big city prosecutors is to offer criminals a slap on the wrist and near immediate release in exchange for a guilty plea, and the incentive for criminals is to plead guilty and be on their merry way with far less- or even no- punishment than would be expected. TLDR moloch operates in prosecutors offices to reduce the certainty of punishment.
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The population of the US is at least 300M. Thus .5M represents only 1/600 of the total, so unless the demographics of cops are particularly crime-prone (most are probably men and this certainly increases the likelihood), the expected reduction would only be .17%.
Well, if you assume disproportionately many will come from the "young men" demographic (which does most of the crime) I would predict a considerably larger reduction.
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The proposal makes sense based on my understanding of the criminology. But massively increasing the number of cops makes me nervous. There would have to be a real reform in the departments to go along with it, and I certainly do not trust police departments to manage a massive influx of money themselves. I’m a defense attorney (not the guy who often posts here), and here are some things I see cops doing at my day job:
Running plates at parking lots to find someone with a suspended license and then arresting them
Showing up to a domestic and arresting the victim
Showing up to an attempted stranger rape and arresting the guy who tried to stop it for assault
Arresting people for drug residue on a straw
Arresting people for pills they have a prescription for
Arresting people for violating a no contact order when the contact is plainly consensual (they are in car/house together) and the protected party is asking the police not to arrest
Arresting a homeless guy for passing false checks when that guy was kidnapped and driven around at gun point to different banks by three actual criminals who forged the checks (and not investigating the guys who forged the checks because they covered their tracks and are from out of state).
Obviously the above list is cherry-picked, and you may feel differently about some of them then I do. But my point is that if we’re going to have a lot more police, the culture of policing has to change so they focus more time on getting serious crime right rather than nailing people for stupid misdemeanors. I have no confidence in police departments to self-direct a surge in funding — from what I see, many departments will use that money to hire more guys to run to plates and write speeding tickets rather than dealing with serious crime. There is an institutional culture in American policing of sloth and of valuing “good arrests” over actually solving and preventing serious crime.
I agree with you. I would personally ban unions for all government employees, since it leads to the same results whether in police or teaching: 0 accountability and promotion/pay based entirely on seniority rather than competence. Thus the incentives are just to avoid committing the most egregious offenses (and even then the bar is apparently incredibly high), to follow rules as written even if they don't make sense, and do whatever is easy/safe/satisfies metrics. Obviously not everyone behaves this way, but there are plenty of examples.
I also see no benefit to allowing the police to lie about evidence in interrogations. Ending the war on drugs and having a separate non-police traffic enforcement bureau would reduce the number of chances for mischief. Qualified Immunity was wrong the moment it was conceived and must go. Improved legal training would also help (it's completely absurd to me that "ignorance of the law is no excuse" but police can act based on not knowing the law at all, like trying to stop bystanders from filming in public, and not be punished in any way). Police need body cams with teeth (they shouldn't have an on/off switch, footage should automatically be backed up to multiple 3rd party servers in real time, anything preventing the camera from working as intended like taping over it is presumptive evidence of wrongdoing on part of the officer until proven otherwise, etc.)
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Having had a car get hit by someone with a suspended license, I'm fully in support of this. People whose licenses get suspended are frequently habitual drunk drivers and they probably shouldn't be behind the wheel.
Or they didn’t pay a fine. Or child support. Or they were convicted of one DUI and were never able to pay for the class or counseling they were supposed to do. I can’t speak for every state but where I practice, it is simply not the case that only “habitual drunk drivers” have their licenses suspended.
To my point, I also think that it’s an inefficient use of police resources in terms of preventing crime — it’s fishing for arrests, not fighting crime. Yes, theoretically you could prevent a drunk driver…. But much more likely you just ruin a poor person’s day, with no real public safety benefit.
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I don't see the problem with arresting someone for driving with a suspended license. Is there something else to this that bothers you?
I think suspended licenses are one of those "disproportionate impact" things--low-income people are most likely to be the ones driving around with suspended licenses, IIRC.
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Some people argue that, in areas where public transportation is poor or nonexistent (i. e., much of the USA), the suspension of drivers' licenses is an excessively harsh penalty, because it makes keeping a job difficult or impossible. The issue is compounded when a driver's license is suspended as penalty for an offense that has nothing to do with driving. For example (these people argue), revoking the driver's license of a person who has failed to fulfill his child-support obligations only makes it less likely that he will pay in the future. See the "findings" section of this Senate bill (which died after passing the committee) for some more information (e. g., "In the United States, 40 percent of all driver’s license suspensions are issued for conduct that was unrelated to driving").
Obviously, however, complaints on this topic should be directed toward the legislature, not toward the police department.
My point is that having the police go to gas station parking lots and run plates all day is an enforcement decision by the police department, and I think it’s a poor use of police resources. Squandering resources chasing easy arrests instead of trying to focus on maximizing public safety is squarely the fault of the police departments.
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Perhaps underpolicing may be one reason why bad policies like some of those can flourish. If legal consequences for any given act feel as rare and arbitrary as lightning strikes, most people will never care enough about making sure that they strike where they should. Additionally, calculations like "we only catch one in [bignum] offenders, so we need to make the punishment [bignum] times harsher to keep the deterrent effect up" (though it's probably never done so naïvely) can produce injustice in every individual case, with most people getting away with it and the few who don't getting annihilated.
A near-certain but proportionate punishment is probably a more effective deterrent than a rare but overwhelming one; I suspect that harshness saturates pretty quickly, especially for the impulsive. Now, can we manage either "near-certain" or "proportionate?" Well, that's the hard part, of course...
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a lot of these seem like drug related crimes, blame politicians for that.
Why should we blame politicians, when the departments themselves could alter course right now if they so saw fit?
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Reminds of a graham factor article arguing something similar, that the US is ineffective at catching criminals because of civil rights/due process protection and thus needs more severe punishments.
Thanks for the link. I actually thought about that as I was writing, but thought including it would be going too far afield, and I wasn't sure where to get actual data on the question. But, I was under the impression that certain rights are much more limited in other countries.
It's not obvious to me that civil rights are the only knob that could be tuned to make policing more efficient. Some of what the Warren Court decided was certainly conjured from thin air, but I do like having the 4th Amendment around. There is an enormous amount of process that could probably be streamlined, or at least sped up, by hiring more judges and lawyers (with the savings coming from having shorter prison sentences, like the original article mentions for police).
Police training seems to be sorely lacking. Your article mentions this, and for some reason finding good numbers seems to be hard, but I believe American police tend to have much shorter training periods than in other countries.
Ending the war on drugs would free up a bunch of police resources directly and indirectly reduce the number of homicides.
Non-police could do some of the things we currently have police do, like giving traffic tickets. Safety rules are generally enforced by other means (think of building inspections, or restaurant sanitation).
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See also, previous discussion about more/better police. (This was mid-2020, when the issue was particularly salient.) Another thing that came up was Jill Leovy's Ghettoside (review/summary here), which argues that black Americans are particularly subject to simultaneous over- and under-policing, where the cops hassle and intimidate them for minor infractions but allow murders to go unsolved.
In fairness to the police, the main reason murders go unsolved in the ghettos is that no one from the ghetto is usually willing to talk to the cops. Which is only partly the result of the cops hastling the residents over minor infractions, and some of the hastling is pretextual to try to solve those bigger crimes.
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I have little reason to believe the US is worse at solving murders or has a worse clearance rate compared to other countries. I think there are major factors at play here https://www.criminallegalnews.org/news/2018/feb/16/us-murder-clearance-rates-among-lowest-world/
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So the black man is also getting shafted by anarcho-tyranny. Seems to check out.
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Isn't the usual leftist response to observing the disparity in FBI sourced per-capita murder rates by race, that white murderers, not Black ones aren't prosecuted?
I have never heard anyone say that. So it can't be that usual of a response.
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I think there might be some mix-up here:
at the level of "here's a dead body with signs of obvious violent death" no investigation or prosecution is needed. A homicide case is opened and percolates into various crime statistics that say the Blacks are getting killed at a higher rate than the Whites
then there's the investigation and that's where many tougher cases are quietly dropped and go cold. The victim's family and friends often know the perpetrator, but won't cooperate either because they don't talk to cops as a rule or because they are afraid of retaliation
finally, there's the trial and that's where the Blacks finally get harsher conviction rates and sentences
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