You don’t think the LAPD is better today than it was in the eighties?
It might be. LA Sheriff’s Department may well be worse and there may be cause and effect there. It’s not clearly better though and it’s just one part of the system.
What I would say about abolition is that I would prefer the Zapatista/Rojava plan to Norway’s. They are both fantasy-land for the US, though the Norway fantasy is more harmful because people are suckers, they fall for it, and they increase police budgets to try to achieve it.
What alternative do you suggest?
No, dropping the grizzly bear metaphor.
Are you referring to the abolish movement, and the status quo, or just the latter?
You see, that’s what I don’t get. Yglesias is a nice well meaning liberal who wants more police who are better trained and more accountable. And who points to research that shows that more and better funded police actually leads to less crime and fewer arrests, including for violent crime. Looks sensible to me.
That’s absolutely a fair and good faith description of how police operate around the world.
The leading example of parameter uncertainty in this literature is the police elasticity of murder. Two prominent papers using U.S. data are Levitt (1997, murder elasticity
of −3.05 ± 4.06) and Evans and Owens (2007, elasticity of −0.84 ± 0.94).4 Both confidence intervals are wide enough to incorporate very large elasticities (e.g., −1.5) as well as 0.
Meanwhile, another prominent study estimates a police elasticity of violent crime of 0 and argues that it is implausible that police affect the incidence of murder (Klick & Tabarrok,
2005).
Pretty meh at best and just one part of the criminal justice system.
I don’t know a single person that was helped by a cop where only a cop could help. I’ve been helped by lawyers that know law, doctors that know medicine, but never by a cop.
I had a car stolen a few years ago. Cops were basically “
, what ya gonna do? We’ll let you know if anything turns up.” I’m still waiting. Maybe one day, they’ll find my car and I’ll change my mind. But til then, cops are a useless blight on society as far as I’m concerned.
5 Likes
Did they have any promising leads?
3 Likes
You kinda getting at what I mean. If I had a lead to give to someone, I would have given it to a private investigator, not a cop.
Give me an example of something you specifically need a cop for that someone else cannot do.
1 Like
Arresting violent criminals for violent crimes.
The FBI can do that.
1 Like
The FBI are cops!
So Joe Cop in rural Idaho has the same training as an FBI agent?
Why do we have both? Get rid of Joe Cop.
And replace him with a better trained, more accountable, more professional cop? Sounds good to me.
1 Like
But we won’t do that. So get rid of it. It’s not working as is.
I’d rather increase the number of detectives and slash a shit load of patrolmen.