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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.")
Reminds of a graham factor article arguing something similar, that the US is ineffective at catching criminals because of civil rights/due process protection and thus needs more severe punishments.
Thanks for the link. I actually thought about that as I was writing, but thought including it would be going too far afield, and I wasn't sure where to get actual data on the question. But, I was under the impression that certain rights are much more limited in other countries.
It's not obvious to me that civil rights are the only knob that could be tuned to make policing more efficient. Some of what the Warren Court decided was certainly conjured from thin air, but I do like having the 4th Amendment around. There is an enormous amount of process that could probably be streamlined, or at least sped up, by hiring more judges and lawyers (with the savings coming from having shorter prison sentences, like the original article mentions for police).
Police training seems to be sorely lacking. Your article mentions this, and for some reason finding good numbers seems to be hard, but I believe American police tend to have much shorter training periods than in other countries.
Ending the war on drugs would free up a bunch of police resources directly and indirectly reduce the number of homicides.
Non-police could do some of the things we currently have police do, like giving traffic tickets. Safety rules are generally enforced by other means (think of building inspections, or restaurant sanitation).
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