Submitted by thinkcontext t3_11bqoiw in washingtondc
Loki-Don t1_ja25uww wrote
Reply to comment by BrightThru2014 in Chief: DC Police Staffing at Its Lowest in Decades by thinkcontext
Back in 2011, MPD had roughly 3,900 officers and the city recorded over 7,000 violent crimes and made 44,000 arrests. Last year, though, MPD had about 300 fewer officers — and there were just over 4,100 violent crimes and 16,900 arrests.
Draw your own conclusions but the numbers say your conclusions are highly selective, immaterial and nearly identical to the increased murder rate across the nation, not just DC.
DC has 25% more cops per capita than NYC (whose cops also patrol their transit system).
20% more than Chicago, 30% more than Boston and Detroit, twice as many cops per capita as LA.
And again, this doesn’t include all the other adjacent police agencies in DC that reduce MPDs overall responsibility.
Evening_Chemist_2367 t1_ja3ahjw wrote
It's kind of amazing how for example I see Park Police, Secret Service and other agencies pulling cars over for traffic violations than I do MPD. And it's not like MPD isn't there, the violations happen right in front of their cruisers but they just sit there and do nothing.
qpdbun t1_ja3d5t2 wrote
It’s amazing that those agencies have literally nothing else to do but traffic. A park, capitol, or secret service officer will very regularly go an entire shift without one call for service.
thebarkingdog t1_ja5xh1l wrote
Those agencies don't have to respond to 911 calls for service.
Evening_Chemist_2367 t1_ja6o1yg wrote
Uhhh right. So it's fine for MPD to sit around ignoring crime in front of their face all day long just because they *might* get a 911 call. And let's face it, they try not to respond to a big chunk of the 911 calls they get, either.
BrightThru2014 t1_ja2r6kv wrote
Yeah the violent crime statistics can easily be juked (as is supported by the numbers re: actual arrests) year over year and suffer from reporting bias. Now do the same analysis with murders — you can’t fake a murder rate or hide a body. That’s your best proxy for overarching crime trends. And the correlation with the number of officers employed is crystal clear.
Loki-Don t1_ja2tpzp wrote
Lol…talking about “juking the numbers” that’s exactly what you did, no?
You used 2013, probably because it was a highly anomalous year that sold the story you wanted to tell with the second lowest number of homicides on record. A number that immediate shot up in the year and second year following when there were the same number of cops.
In 2010 when the number of DC cops was higher by 38,there were 30% more homicides than in 2013. How is that possible if your correlation to the number of cops and murders is supposedly true?
In 2008, when the number of DC cops was higher by 50, the number of murders was 83% higher than in 2013? How is that possible?
You are only right if correlation = causation, which simply is t true.
DC literally has more cops per capita than any other US city, by a margin, despite our coos having fewer responsibilities.
BrightThru2014 t1_ja359r5 wrote
Now do three year rolling average trends of murder rates correlated to number of police officers. The data is very obviously there to prove my point as much as you’d like to pretend otherwise.
Loki-Don t1_ja3eeyq wrote
No it doesn’t. Full stop. Also, quit moving the goal lines. You’ve lost this argument, admit it like an adult and move on. DC is the most overpoliced City in the nation despite adjacent LE agencies taking enormous responsibility from MPD
BrightThru2014 t1_ja3j7k2 wrote
Huh? I’m sorry you can’t do data analysis? Numbers are all there.
DC also has a much higher base line policing requirement due to staffing protests and protecting soft targets. So the comparison of police officers to other U.S. cities is just sort of sadly ignorant of the underlying arguments here.
More cops = less murders. Sorry that makes you upset.
Loki-Don t1_ja3jrlj wrote
Link your data.
Also, what’s your excuse for both significantly more cops, significantly lower population and 2X the number of murders through the 1990s?
That can’t be explained if more cops = less murder.
BrightThru2014 t1_ja3l4yw wrote
You just said the data doesn’t show a correlation — soo don’t you have the data in front of you?
More cops = less crime in the long-run compared to baseline existing crime rate (caused by external social factors). The 90s were the height of the crack epidemic, the baseline crime rate was far higher — and over time, the police were able to bring the crime rate down.
Loki-Don t1_ja40hbu wrote
I have my data from MPDs website. You are the one making the outlandish claims that aren’t supported by DC or any other cities data (more cops = less murder” so you must have some other source of data. Link it here.
BrightThru2014 t1_ja46ay7 wrote
Great then you can clearly see that murders nearly double from 2013-2022 while the number of MPD officers declined by 20%~ during that same period.
So where’s the controversy here? The numbers speak for themselves.
Loki-Don t1_ja4gdvt wrote
Lol…you aren’t equipped for this.
Peak DC cop numbers were 1999. It’s been slowly declining since.
Yet murders steadily declined for the next 13 years despite MPD losing hundreds of cops.
Less cops yet fewer murders for 13 years. Explain.
Then 2015-2019, the number of murders stayed statistically static, despite MPD losing hundreds more. Explain.
Your argument is juvenile and o Lu works if you exclude decades of data precovid and data showing the murder rate increase in DC for that 2 year Covid period was mirrored exactly across the cities in the rest of the nation. It was a national trend, not a local anomaly.
Back to the kids table son, the adults are speaking.
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BrightThru2014 t1_ja4htra wrote
“Then 2015-2019, the number of murders stayed statistically static” — LOL, do a three year rolling average please. You’ll see exactly what I’m describing, murders go up while the number of cops go down.
Also I’m going to assume the “actually murders went down after the crack epidemic of the 90s subsided” argument is trolling so I won’t bother to address it (for your sake I hope you’re not actually making this argument).
Loki-Don t1_ja4ojkl wrote
Dude, you can’t dismiss 16 years of both declining cop counts and murders because “muh, crack in the 1990s”, yet then think 2 years during Covid when murders were increasing nationally( and is now declining) is “finally” indicative of DCs declining cop counts showing up in the murder rate?
You can’t possibly be that daft. Or you must be a cop, and not a bright one at that.
Cheers mate, go on believing DC isn’t the most policied city in America.
BrightThru2014 t1_ja5uhw4 wrote
Again, if you take a rolling three-year average of murder rates for each year from 2013-2022, they consistently increase over the last decade, mirroring the decline in employed police officers. Are you able to understand what I’m saying?* We are talking numbers here so there’s not really room for interpretation.
*So the rolling murder rate in 2013 would be the average from 2011-2013, for 2014 it would be the average of 2012-2014, etc. This helps flatten the otherwise moderately noisy year-over-year data to generate longer term trend lines.
brodies t1_ja3603u wrote
I want one specific data point on violent crime: how much of the reduction is due to a reduction in snatch and grab robberies of phones? It’s a violent crime as defined by DC (and most jurisdictions), and due to that, when you looked at crime maps in the early 2010s, many of the most “violent” places were near popular metro stations like Dupont Circle. With Apple and Google increasingly making phones worth less and less to steal (by locking them down, etc, such that a theft now is good only for conning someone into buying a useless phone or parting it out), those crimes have seemed to drop precipitously.
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