I appreciate that cost adjustment 
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I’m not sure that is correct. It would be a hard statistic to establish. The hypothesis that police presence has an effect on crime isn’t outlandish.
Cops dont’ have to pursue petty offenses to be be effective at reducing crime. They just have to deal with said petty crime when it occurs. Consider the problem Off road bikes and quad runners in inner cities and no-pursuit policies. It is not a stretch to link the proliferation of the dangerous and illegal operation of such vehicles on city streets and sidewalks etc with the policy that rewards this behavior by lax enforcement of basic traffic laws.
When I was a cop (in the Stone Age), our supervisors used to stand up at every line up and chide us if we did not write at least 10 tickets in a 10 day shift. The law enforcement theory was that traffic tickets made people safer drivers. So, what happened was that cops wrote parking tickets for vehicles with expired safety inspection stickers, expired plates and cars parked on the wrong side of the street. “Broken windows” enforcement for minor offenses. All it did was piss the public off and alienate them from the cops who patrolled their neighborhoods and raise peoples’ insurance premiums when the traffic offenses hit their motor vehicle records. From my perspective it had no impact on crime.
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“The democrats do it better!” “No, the republicans do!” Heck, these days they both suck! 
. Dang, no beer nuts!!
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I disagree with that. Just the presence of law enforcement prevents and deters a lot of crimes from happening, crimes that we’ll never know about. Case in point: the summer of 2020. Places that defunded and downsized their police forces saw a large increase in crime, and more brazen crime, than those who kept their law enforcement or even increased the number of officers.
Do police prevent every crime? No. But things would be exponentially worse if the thin blue line didn’t exist to keep back a good portion of the evil from completely overwhelming society.
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To me it seems kind of silly to think that parking tickets make people better drivers.
Seems logical and reasonable to me that moving violations would incentivize safer driving
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Spending on police is relevant to population also. A police officer expects to make considerably more in Chicago than in rural areas. Partially due to higher risk, but also higher cost of living. Viscious circle. Demanding higher wages raises prices for everybody. Check the price of new vehicles over the next three years after UAW contracts and fast food as $15 minimum wage, for what use to be part time high school jobs, never meant to support your family, kicks in full gear.
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Thanks for the insider’s perspective!
I am not doubting your perspective and experience and it might not have felt like it did much to deter crime but there does seem to be some data that supports the hypothesis that “broken windows” policing works.
No one likes getting a ticket so I am sure it did piss people off!
On different more serious note, what caliber was the duty issue club in the Stone Age?
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I don’t buy into the “thin blue line” thesis. The typical workday of a uniformed cop is overwhelming spent responding to family fights, writing traffic/parking tickets and taking reports that document events after the fact (usually for insurance purposes), not investigating or chasing down evil doers. There were many days I felt like a 22-year-old marriage (and alcohol) counselor for people who were old enough to have been my parents.
My partner and I founded the department’s first DUI team and all we did was process drunk drivers and go to court. Literally half of all cases in County and District courts in our community of about 500,000 were our cases. We had a closet at the courthouse filled with 15 minute video tapes of grown men (average age around 35) trying to recite the alphabet, often while throwing up. They were not evil doers, just alcoholics (average BAC 0.22). I was an alcohol counselor with a gun.
One of the guys I worked with pasted this logo on the outside of his briefcase (filled with accident report forms, tickets and accident investigation drawing templates). Hardly the “thin blue line” between good and evil. I suggest spending time in a civilian ride along program if you really believe police are the “thin blue line” that protects society.
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I have four relatives who are cops and one sheriff deputy in the family, (and an uncle who’s a prosecutor,) spread across four cities and three states. Yes, they spend way too much time on paperwork. But in all the different places that they work, the higher-ups prefer them to actually spend time enforcing the law and only write tickets when there’s a down time in activity. Some days are relatively quiet. Others are hopping. It’s rare that a week goes by without each of them getting at least one good story.
Mark, thank you for your service. I’m sorry that you feel your career in law enforcement was by and large not worth it. I read your post and understand why you feel the way you do. But I’m sorry, you’re not going to change my mind. I’ve seen firsthand (and also watched on the news multiple times) what happens when a society becomes truly lawless. Maybe it’s just repeating marketing, but that thin blue line does make a difference.
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For many of the cities with high crime it has been decades of Democrats in office as mayor, council members and district or circuit attorney. Crimes have not been prosecuted and, as someone already mentioned, there is catch and release even after multiple serious crimes.
I only know of two prosecutors being removed by a governor or state attorney general. Ron Desantis removed one in Florida and Andrew Bailey, Attorney General for the State of Missouri, removed the City of St. Louis Circuit Attorney.
I understand the problems go much deeper than just lock 'em up. I may be wrong, but I believe the deterioration of these cities was purposely orchestrated to create and maintain a large under-educated and very poor and angry group of people in order to divide American Citizens. The Balkanization of America pitting all the groups against each other.
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It’s been 2 days since this post… it’s now $.07
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True, I was raised in a poor family in a poor area, but, as a kid, always had fresh seafood to eat, shelter and clothes.
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Interesting, I live in Eastern TN but travel a great deal in my business life, I’ve spent a great deal of time in Kansas City, Memphis, and Philly this last year on business, and all of those cities seemed to have areas that were not terrible. However I was in Portland OR as well and could find no area I would consider safe enough to visit with my family!
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Interesting discussion off the original post…
Getting good crime data is always tricky business. It’s really hard to compare apples to apples. Some places maybe a per capita number is useful, other places maybe a straight up total number is more indicative of a problem. Root causes vary. And then it’s always important to know “what” you are measuring like murders vs homicides vs “gun violence” (which includes suicides etc) vs violent crime (which includes assaults, rapes, etc).
There are lies, damn lies, and then there’s statistics…
State vs State can give some interesting info, but you have to always put a lot of caveats. Wyoming vs California for example… Totally different demographics and geography. WY’s population is so low a few murders (or lack of) here and there and there per-capita skews a lot. CA on the other hand can absorb a lot of murders without their rate changing.
If you measure “gun violence” Red states usually come out on top (not in a good way), but if you look at only murders the list gets totally tossed around. Why is that? Well, suicides account for 2/3rds of “gun violence” and those Red states typically have more suicides. Well, why is that? Red states have more veterans and veteran suicides are a big problem (at one point 22/day which was ~8k/year which was about 1/3 of all suicides). Red states are generally less prosperous and poverty/lack of future leads to a lot of despair which ends up either in drug use or suicide. Suicides are a whole different topic.
So when you look at a list of states by murder (count or per-capita) that’s when you start to see the significance of looking at the issue on the city-level. Jackson Mississippi just crushes that state for murders. So does Chicago for Illinios, Baltimore for Maryland, Houston & Dallas for Texas, etc. Some cities might not have a super high murder rate (SanFrancisco, Seattle, Portland come to mind) but have a high crime rate for property, assaults, etc.
And to expand on that further, as mentioned above, it’s not the whole city that is a problem. It’s always a certain part or area that is known for crime. East LA, Southside Chicago, etc. I don’t recall the exact stat but something like 25% of all murders come from like 5 zipcodes.
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I don’t remember where I saw this recently, but it was a chart showing that America had one of the highest murder rates in the world — in certain areas. If you took out the dangerous sections of Chicago, NYC, L.A., Boston (?), and Portland (?), the rest of the entire United States has almost the lowest murder rate in the world. It was literally five cities that gave the entire US a bad reputation on the subject.
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You cannot tell me that in Democratic run cities that believe in defunding the police, no cash bail policies are not contributing factors. We see time in time again in NYC where someone who tried to murder someone is let out and then they eventually succeed. Under Giuliani NYC was safe and now it’s returning to the bad old days
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Interesting that my city made the safest list.
Most likely because we are small in comparison to the major cities.
The biggest danger around here are other drivers IMHO.
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“Smaller, more economically homogeneous populations dominate these communities.”
So, with the MILLIONS of illegals that have poured over the border on Biden’s watch, we should all be fearing for our lives then. We become WAY more populous, and WAY more economically HETEROGENEOUS with each day the Destroyer in Chief is in the office.
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Knowing what you know about California, can you even rely on their reported crime stats with a straight face? EVERYTHING they do is to retain and amass more power. Newsome can sit on a debate stage all day and tell people that California is doing great. If it looks like $hit and smells like $hit, it is probably San Fran or LA.
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