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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.")
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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