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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.")
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)...
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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