Are people really surprised that after >1 million excess deaths across the country and a mass trauma event, people are not doing well? I know redditors don't want to talk about solutions that don't involve a cop on every corner, but that's probably what we should be looking at.

It's a classic ex post facto justification. The cop shot a bystander... but it's okay, because he had drugs on him! Of course, ignoring the fact that police lie literally all the time you can't just shoot someone and hope it works out later. That's not how the law works.

You know the situation is bad when even the Washington Post is having a hard time justifying the actions of a police officer.

We should hire more of them! People need to know if a crime happens, a cop will show up and shoot an unrelated person! That's how consequences work /s

Someone looked a little aggressive while I was walking home at night, this is why the city is declining and I'm moving to Arlington!

crime is trending up!!! when you only look at the last 2 years and not the previous 4 decades of data

I love when people cite this study because I get to gush over how notoriously flimsy it is! They estimate cops reduce between 0.06 and 0.1 homicides which is a huge variance that they just handwave away and hope no one notices, but everyone rolls with the 0.1 figure because it sounds better. The lower end of this figure means you have to spend over $1.1 million plus benefits and pensions to stop 1 homicide, which is absurd. The lower estimate of spending is only $664,000. Meanwhile they ignore the other finding of the working paper which says that adding more cops just leads to a bunch of bullshit arrests of minorities on low-level offenses.

Also it makes the mistake of assuming correlation = causation and ignores that murder rates have gone down as cities became more prosperous. It's a baaaaad study that people only trot out because it fits their narrative.

This passage

> the results imply that larger police forces are unlikely to be an important driver of lengthy prison sentences or mass incarceration, for both Black and white civilians

Should really disqualify the paper from ever being taken seriously. The authors even recognize that they didn't really find anything statistically significant, but second-hand reporting makes the data seem much more solid than it actually is:

> While we find that investments in law enforcement save Black lives, the number of averted homicides (1 per 10-17 officers hired) is modest and might even be zero in cities with large Black populations.

yep that's why I suggested some things that need to be addressed going forward rather than "post 10 fearmongering crime articles on the DC subreddit every week" which seems to be the strategy right now

Hm if only there was some way to explain this, perhaps a mass death event that negatively impacted the material conditions and mental health of people across the country.

Seriously, people are reading too much into a statistical outlier when crime is overall trending down. We've got to get some distance from the pandemic and get people the economic and mental health they need as opposed to the "cops on every street corner, tough on crime" narrative you see parroted endlessly.

Nextdoor post

We can only dream, sadly.

It's crazy that we spend so much time wringing our hands over every other type of crime or risk factor except cars when car injuries and fatalities are by far the easiest to identify and mitigate.

I wonder what scapegoat people will turn to once this goes into effect and the city stays basically the same