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I think about this sketch a lot.
As highlighted by Freddie deBoer, there's so much inconsistency in the standard progressive narrative about what the police are for and what they should do. Cops don't do enough to protect black people, but it's also bad that police allocate disproportionate amount of resources to high-crime (i.e. black and Hispanic) neighbourhoods. Cops don't do enough to protect female victims of crime. Therefore we should defund the police while criticising the police for not doing enough with their already limited budgets.
So much of the debate seems stymied by the availability heuristic. Consumers of true crime content focus on fascinating cases which happened to relatable victims: in other words, bizarre unsolved murders in which the victim was an (A)WF(L)*. Consumers of this content are then bound to come away with the misconception that it's exceedingly common for a man to murder a strange woman and get away with it, which is wrong in almost every way: the overwhelming majority of murder victims are men, most murder victims are killed by someone known to them (although admittedly the American murder clearance rate has plummeted in recent decades, although I suspect that most of the unsolved murders in recent decades were gang violence rather than Ted Bundy copycats). True crime consumers then apply this misconception to their expectations for a functional police force, clamouring for police to Do More to solve murder cases with female victims (but without increasing police budgets in any way, of course).
And sure, maybe if we raised police budgets by 10% every year we might improve the marginal return on murder clearance, solving that 1% of murder cases every year which don't neatly fall into a) gang violence b) domestic violence or c) drunken bar fight. Whereupon the narrative will shift on a dime: "$State spent $10 million sending this Black man with learning disabilities and an underprivileged upbringing who raped and murdered three women to the electric chair! Imagine if that money had been spent on education so that children from similar backgrounds don't follow him down that path." There's no winning.
I think I agree with you that I'm satisfied with a police force that can solve most of the banal murders in a timely fashion, accepting that a small number of really weird cases will go unsolved every year as the price of a free society. I'm not persuaded that increasing police budgets by 10% to catch these weird cases passes a cost-benefit analysis, much like it would be a misallocation of resources to invest millions trying to find a treatment for a disease which only kills 100 people a year.
*"Affluent" and "liberal" are preferred but optional.
The entire industry seems to focus on like the same 50-odd cases, though, since those are the ones that fit the heuristics of interest
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I think you’re on to something. Blindly increasing the budget won’t work though. To me this comes down to a very simple question of what would give maximum results — what would lower the crime rate the fastest (obviously within the bounds of the law and with respect to civil rights). It seems to me that were I a police chief, I’d focus on getting more best cops, getting them trained to handle the situations that they’re more likely to actually see, and putting them on the beat. The reason being that the response time decreasing would likely both clear the crimes actually being committed, but also serve as a deterrent. If you know that you have 3-5 minutes before the cops show up, you might be deterred from robbery. It’s probably going to be tough to rob a place and get away within that timeframe. And having more cops driving around would also deter crime simply because you are more likely to get caught than if there are no cops around.
The other thing I would do has to do with criminal laws. I want a consistent and sure punishment for the crime. If you use a gun in a crime, you will go to prison for three years. No I don’t care about your background. No I don’t care that you’re poor. You pulled out a gun you go to jail. Obviously if you fire the gun the time goes up, and would double or more if you kill somebody. And this again should deter crime, because now not only are you getting caught, but you’re ruining your life for the stuff you’ve decided to rob from a cash register.
Doing those things: showing up quickly, having a show of force on the beat, and having a sure and known punishment for every crime that actually sticks should lower crime rates by quite a bit.
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