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user_joined_just_now t1_ivffp8s wrote

Reply to comment by brownredgreen in Left Unmonitored In His Cell, He Etched His Suicide Note Into a Wall On Rikers Island by hau5keeping

> Cops? Cops dont reduce crime.

FACT CHECK: False.

In an article from the Washington Post about alternatives to policing, even they acknowledge that this is false:

> Those who argue that the police have no role in maintaining safe streets are arguing against lots of strong evidence. One of the most robust, most uncomfortable findings in criminology is that putting more officers on the street leads to less violent crime. We know this from randomized experiments involving “hot spots policing” and natural experiments in which more officers were brought to the streets because of something other than crime — a shift in the terror alert level or the timing of a federal grant — and violent crime fell. After the unrest around the deaths of Freddie Gray in Baltimore and Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., police officers stepped back from their duty to protect and serve; arrests for all kinds of low-level offenses dropped, and violence rose. This shouldn’t be interpreted to mean that protests against violent policing lead to more violence; rather, it means that when police don’t do their jobs, violence often results.

Here's another article from Vox regarding the same thing.

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sokpuppet1 t1_ivfpwfa wrote

> This shouldn’t be interpreted to mean that protests against violent policing lead to more violence; rather, it means that when police don’t do their jobs, violence often results.

Police aren't doing their jobs so we should... pay them more?

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tuberosum t1_ivfs4wr wrote

Oh, I see you're not familiar with how policing budgets work:

  1. When crime is low, you increase the budget to keep the crime low.

  2. When crime is rising, you increase the budget to slow and reverse the rise.

  3. When crime is high, you increase the budget to attempt to lower the crime.

  4. And finally, when crime is going down, you increase the budget to make sure it keeps going down.

And you just repeat the cycle as appropriate, year by year.

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user_joined_just_now t1_ivfs76l wrote

I, the excerpt I quoted, and the comment I replied to didn't say anything about paying them more.

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Murdercorn t1_ivgh0bf wrote

Cops do not prevent crime. The police will stand on the next car of a train and just watch through the door while you get stabbed.

In fact, they also do not solve crime. 98% of major crimes go unsolved.

The police already have a fuckload of funding and they choose to use it on militarizing themselves and defending murderers-in-blue.

They do not choose to use the nearly $200 billion they get every year for better training to make them a humane organization of peacekeepers; the training they choose is called "Warrior Training", which encourages cops to see every interaction as though they are a warrior engaging with an enemy combatant.

Police have killed more than 100 children since 2015 in US, data shows

The police have proven they cannot be trusted.

They do not serve the people, they only serve the interests of capital.

The institution of the police department in America is rotten from its origins as the Slave Patrol all the way to up to present day.

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brownredgreen t1_ivfhciv wrote

Now show me the stats on cops committing crimes but the cops wont arrest and charge and/or the DA wont prosecute so they dont show up on crime stats.

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user_joined_just_now t1_ivfld20 wrote

I'm sure it's a huge issue, but like you said, we need to address the root causes of cops committing crime by providing them with more social services and housing.

After all, punitive justice is NOT the solution to crime!

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brownredgreen t1_ivfoeko wrote

Education.

Cops need education.

Maybe like, on the laws they supposedly enforce.

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omgwtfbbq7 t1_ivg1me6 wrote

There’s more to it than even that. You have to make law enforcement an attractive career to get people who are well adjusted and empathetic to consider it. I don’t know what all that entails, but more work needs to be done to figure that out. You also need people in the profession that are capable of absorbing education. For the most part, I don’t think that is the case as it stands today. There’s so many cultural factors about policing as well. It’s really naive to think more education is the answer. There’s so much more to it than that.

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