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This depends on what I would view as a critical question:
Do you view 'violent crime' as a potentially rampant problem which can spread nearly unchecked unless we are constantly expending resources to reign it in?
Or do you think that violent crime is somewhat of a 'constant' in society which we can somewhat decrease by spending money on policing, but that the marginal dollar spent on policing very quickly becomes less and less effective, and even if we didn't spend any money things wouldn't collapse.
Take the example of the Netherland's famous dike system. We can argue "flooding causes hardly any damage on a yearly basis, why don't we focus on more important issues?" But if the system we have in place preventing the flooding were to fail (lack of maintenance, perhaps) then UNTOLD amounts of damage would result. So money spent on dike maintenance is good, actually. Even if currently the stats show that flooding is among the smallest risks we face, we'd still not want to cut funding there to increase it elsewhere.
Taking the absurd version of this, what is we cut off absolutely all the resources we currently spend policing violent crime and spent it all on mitigating air pollution instead? What would happen to the crime rate? Would is barely budge? Double? 10x?
Depending on the answer, I'd guess if you asked the average person "would you rather double your risk of being stabbed or shot in any given year, or would you rather add on three years to your lifespan? They'd probably think that being stabbed/shot and possibly killed before they get old is worse than dying of old age a few years sooner.
So the priority that people would express might not completely align with the 'objectively correct' answer that policymakers would adopt from a broad view.
This is, incidentally, why EAs try to use QALYs in evaluating their impact rather than just mere 'lives saved.'
Society would fragment into smaller units that would have their own ways of addressing crime. Probably with something like the Taliban demanding tribute, adjudicating disputes, and lynching wrongdoers. For violent conflicts between these units, society would reinvent a slavery/genocide choice for the conquered such as you saw in the classical world. There'd be very little violent crime as we think of it, but a whole lot of war.
More likely, the government would fall to a coup and start policing violent crime again.
Asking what would happen to the crime rate in a state with no police is like asking what would happen to interest rates in an economy that abolished money. A state with no police is not enforcing a monopoly on violence, and so is not a state.
Yes yes but I zeroed in on violent crime for a reason.
Assume that people are still being cited for speeding, property thefts are still investigated, and police still exist as an entity, and the state thus does exist and is capable of engaging in police action.
But police are no longer tasked with intervening in or capturing violent offenders who might fight back.
Would we expect to see some massive and sustained increase? If so, this would reveal that money spent on policing IS in fact valuable for saving lives, since it holds back the 'wave' of violence that would otherwise surge forth and thus a lot more lives hang in the balance than a naive review might assume. So being overly concerned about policing violence is in fact 'rational.'
I find it an interesting question in large part because there are clearly pockets of the country that have virtually ZERO violent crime already, and I expect that they don't need policing to keep it that way. But others would see massive surges if there weren't some countervailing force reigning in the violence. Not sure how this would ultimately interact in a world where police didn't stop violent crime.
the low crime areas would arm themselves, build fences and hire security guards to keep the high crime people out.
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The crime rate as a whole would go way down, because prisons aren't great at solving recidivism, whereas a vigilante's answer to "I can't afford to run a prison personally so what should I do with the criminal I caught instead?" is much more final, and in a world where nobody is afraid of cops or DAs or judges, the concept of law doesn't disappear, it just ends up in the hands of vigilantes.
The murder rate specifically might go up on net, though. Vigilante justice is not renowned for its high accuracy or respect for innocent-until-proven-guilty ethics.
Quoted for truth. You can't even calculate QALYs lost to murder by just summing up victims' remaining life expectancies, either. Everyone afraid to walk down a street at night because it might be dangerous is losing QALYs. Every transit line that gets voted down because people are afraid to make it easier for criminals to reach their suburb is an ongoing cost in QALYs. Every child stuck playing inside after their parents saw a news story of a free-range kid murdered on the other side of the country is losing QALYs. Air pollution deaths are calculated in a "well, we can't directly trace this lung cancer to that coal plant, but we can poke some statistics really hard with a stick" fashion; if you don't do the same with murder then it's not an apples-to-apples comparison.
Very impactful paragraph, thank you.
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It would spike for a few weeks and then go down drastically for several years.
Plus measuring the crime rate is currently part of the amount of money spent on managing crime, we would probably not get very good measures of it after that.
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