• Sheridan@lemmy.world
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    4 days ago

    Can we determine from statistics if on average getting the police involved in any situation improves the outcome of the situation? Genuine question.

    • whotookkarl@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      3 days ago

      Yes, there was a really good time to study this in New York 2014/2015 during a police work slowdown (equivalent of a strike when protected by police unions but can’t technically strike). They saw a significant decrease in major crimes during that time.

      https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-017-0211-5

      One study on one event doesn’t support a trend, but it is interesting and directly counters traditional appeals to more police or police funding means more community safety often espoused by wealthy politicians and police organizations. It’s possible you just need a small group of dedicated people to work on serious crimes, the rest of the ticketing and quotas may just be security theatre and making the problem worse not better.

      • Gaja0@lemmy.zip
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        3 days ago

        Doesn’t this imply they just saw less crimes with less officers? Like less covid cases when we stopped reporting on it?

        • MinnesotaGoddam@lemmy.world
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          3 days ago

          crimes would still get reported, they just wouldn’t have the officers working on them to clear the cases so the clearance percentages would go down instead. like, how many crimes are really prosecuted because they happened in front of the police

          • whotookkarl@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            3 days ago

            Yeah people were still reporting crime, the police just slow rolled their job to let major crime go up but it didn’t

            “The results challenge prevailing scholarship as well as conventional wisdom on authority and legal compliance, as they imply that aggressively enforcing minor legal statutes incites more severe criminal acts.”

            Where the contradicting conventional wisdom was more aggressively policing the smaller things led to less crime overall, ala broken windows, they found the opposite actually happens.

    • BillyClark@piefed.social
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      3 days ago

      I don’t think you can find the statistical answer you’re asking about because it is hard to find data for events where people don’t call the police.

      Like, police may keep records of how many street fights they break up, but if police are not called, then there is no organization to make the record of the street fight.