05-07-2023, 12:26 AM
Mr645 wrote:
From Portland to NYC, places that cut price funding and restricted their actions resulted in increases in crime
::: Sigh :::
Fact check: No evidence defunding police to blame for homicide increases, experts say
A March 2019 study published in the peer-reviewed journal Criminology & Public Policy analyzed the effect of de-policing on homicide rates. In 53 large cities from 2010-2015, researchers found "no evidence of an effect of arrest rates on city homicide rates for any offense category for any year in this period."
"The results of our analysis reveal that declining rates of arrest did not produce the rise in homicide levels," the study authors wrote.
Experts told USA TODAY there are several plausible explanations for the recent spike in homicide rates.
"The pandemic created significant strain, stress and uncertainty – especially in the most vulnerable neighborhoods," Novak said. "George Floyd – and other events – created a legitimacy crisis between people and the police."
During the coronavirus pandemic, more Americans purchased guns, which Kubrin said can escalate a non-lethal crime to a homicide. And police departments nationwide are understaffed – a problem that predates both the pandemic and recent calls to defund the police.
We Analyzed 29 Years of Police Spending in Hundreds of Cities
Here’s what we learned...
The purported goal of all this police spending is to reduce violent crime. New York City Mayor Eric Adams, for example, pledged to double the already considerable number of police patrolling the city’s subway stations following a shooting on the subway in Brooklyn. Earlier this year Adams said he planned to cut funding to most city departments except the NYPD.
But the crime-control benefits of additional policing are unclear. Some studies find that additional police officers—the lion share of any police budget—have no impact on violent crime, while others find they decrease it. Amid this uncertainty, some cities are exploring other, nonpolice efforts to reduce serious crime like violence interrupters, mental health responders, and cash transfers. These approaches are promising but have received only a fraction of the municipal and federal spending the criminal legal system has.
A new study out Thursday suggests all the new police budget growth is likely to do one thing: increase misdemeanor arrests.
For the study, my co-authors and I analyzed hundreds of U.S. cities and towns over 29 years, tracking how police spending and staffing correlated with misdemeanor arrests. We found the size of a city’s police budget and the size of its police force both strongly predicted how many arrests its officers made for things like loitering, trespassing, and drug possession.
The trend was clear: When cities decreased the size of their police departments, they saw fewer misdemeanor arrests and when they increased them, they saw more.
...Arrests for petty offenses are devastating for the people arrested and their communities. Even a single arrest makes a person less likely to stay in school school, be hired for a job, or obtain housing. The punishment of an arrest often cascades into fines, fees, and what legal scholar Issa Kohler-Hausmann calls “procedural hassles,” even in cases that do not result in jail time.
As with many policing outcomes, misdemeanor enforcement is concentrated in poor neighborhoods and in communities of color, exacerbating the racial inequity of their harms. In high-arrest neighborhoods, police officers also have a harder time investigating violent crimes because residents have grown distrustful of the criminal legal system and are less likely to cooperate in investigations.
If intense misdemeanor enforcement reduced crime, these costs might have to be balanced against the public safety benefits of low-level arrests, but study after study has found intense misdemeanor enforcement does not reduce crime...