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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.")
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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