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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.
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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