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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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