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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.")
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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