"Defund the police" may be a rallying cry for some, but what's happened in real life? Just the opposite:
The data for 2021-22 represents my best estimate put together from a variety of sources. The number of police officers does seem to have been cut back in 2021, but not because of George Floyd. It was due instead to budget tightening as a response to the fiscal squeeze of the pandemic. The feds stepped in shortly after that with assistance to local governments, and police department staffing rebounded in 2022.
As for crime, we have a pretty good idea of what happened over the past couple of years: homicides went up and nearly everything else went down a bit. The total number of incidents continued its long-term decline.
Bottom line: Crime has plummeted since 1990 but policing hasn't. The number of police officers per crime has more than doubled over the past 30 years.
But with police logic you would plot their numbers on the x-axis and crime reduction on the y-axis. Crank the number of police up 75% higher than in 1990 and halve the amount of crime!
Exactement ! The wails of "It's working, it's working," will be blaring from every device once they retire the, "Crime is everywhere, crime is everywhere" chant.
I despair when I see things like this last beating.
The Rodney King beating was in 1991.
George Floyd was killed in 2020.
With many others in between....
And what happens? There have been backlash against reforms, including the "warrior policing" model. And when another outrage happens, it's treated as lone wolf or "bad apples"...and blame the victim.
Memphis is taking the right steps now--but how it got to this point really has to be studied. The problems have to be understood and rooted out.
Start making more money weekly. This is valuable part time work for everyone. The best part ,work from the comfort of your house and get paid from $10k-$20k each week . Start today and have your first cash at the end of this week. Visit this article
for more details.. https://createmaxwealth.blogspot.com
And clearance rates?
On TV the cops always seem to catch the bad guys. And it's the right person and it's all done in an hour.
If the amount of crime is down by half, shouldn't the amount of police required to respond and maintain order go down as well? Way too many cops; everywhere. Overlapping police jurisdictions (from local and institutional security services to local, county, state, and federal forces) provide a ridiculous level of redundancy of police officers to serve and protect. Police end up doing work that should be provided by social workers but where is the funding and public support for that? And with so many cop jobs available is it any wonder that so many of them hired are utterly wrong for the job? Is it any wonder so much of the police force has been militarized against its own citizenry? It's long since we've known that police cause more crime than they prevent on the whole. Long past time to defund the police.
Like +15!
People don’t report crimes anymore. What would be the point? I’ve been a “crime victim” probably 5 or 6 times over the years. The only one reported was when my friend’s car had all 4 tires slashed. We needed a tow. A stolen bike. Pushed around by some teenage thugs. 20 years ago I was pushed… today they would have shot. Etc.
Once again, Mr Drum is fooled by his charts. Bad data, Mr. Drum. I will stipulate that the chaos and mayhem in some urban areas is better than in 1990, but this doesn’t make our current situation good… it only means 1990 was a shit show. The war ended so violence dropped from its peak.
A 2 year old in Baltimore was killed last night. But hey… that’s better than it was 30 years ago. Only one kid was killed last night. 30 years ago, it would have have been 4 or 5. Yippee!
I know why crime dropped. Some things stopped being a crime or stopped being enforced. For example….
“Up until 2003, consensual sex between two people of the same gender was explicitly illegal in the state under the Texas Homosexual Conduct Law. The United States Supreme Court invalidated the law in its 2003 ruling in Lawrence v. Texas.”
That law is still on the books but I’m guessing there are lots of unreported and unenforced sex crimes in Texas.
Property crimes moved online. Credit card fraud. Identity theft. Scams galore via Facebook and phishing. I got a call this past week from “Amazon customer service” telling me I needed to give them info so they would ship an iPad I didn’t order. That was a crime. Unreported and definitely not solved.
The data set is BS.
Sodomy laws were very, very rarely enforced well before 2003.
How many people were arrested under that Texas Homosexual Conduct Law prior to 2003? I'm guessing not many.
This guy… his chances of getting robbed were lower than in 1990, but he still hit the jackpot.
https://www.cnn.com/videos/us/2023/01/27/delivery-driver-robbed-gunpoint-florida-cprog-orig-aw.cnn
Tell them you don’t care. Crime is down!
"Crime can't possibly be down, because a crime was committed yesterday" is not the biting rejoinder you think it is.
Re: People don’t report crimes anymore. What would be the point?
Minor crimes? Maybe not. But of you want to file an insurance claim for a major theft you will need a police report. Also, it's generally required by law that healthcare institutions report all gunshot injuries. And while rape is certainly still underreported the whole #MeToo business has created social pressure to report rapes.
Wow, talk about cherry picking data. If you choose the right numbers and the right time periods, you will always be able to prove yourself right.
While there was a 23% increase in police funding from 1992, there was also a 32% increase in the U.S. population, and that was heavily skewed to larger cities where more crime occurs.
I wonder how the graphic was created/the underlying math. Does it measure funding or does it track the number of in the field police officers. I SUSPECT the graphic is capturing a material rise in administrative costs in all police departments.
I have seen a similar graphic for university costs. The number of professors, per student, is not that dissimilar over the last 30 years. In contrast, university's have a huge increase in administration and other, non direct teaching, roles.
I sometimes wonder if there is a posse of commenters targeting Kevin.
trolls gotta troll....
You will never convince the FOX audience or any of their FOX adjacent friends or family members. For them it is a fact beyond debate that woke leftist liberals - led by the entire Democratic Party - have defunded police all over America. And the direct result is that American cities have become crime infested hell-holes.
A few weeks ago, a relative from Ohio advised me to "stay safe" in my home in Los Angeles. I thought it was an earthquake or weather warning, so I asked, what? He replied "Gascon." It took me a minute because I was surprised that he not on knew the name of the Los Angeles county district attorney, but apparently believed this person was responsible for life in the city being dangerous.
from,
https://twitter.com/Bram_R/status/1619819125525848065
and charts,
https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/1619817656575737856
Well, that's an eye opener. Six tines less training hours compared to a hair stylist and they carry guns? Really bad.
It's important to note that police funding does not always mean police officers. The police force in my former municipality shifted that new funding from re-hiring for vacant police officer positions to hiring mental health professionals as crisis response, for example.
I wish I lived in Drum's statistical America. Unfortunately, I live in one of the second-tier cities that has seen a big increase in murders (record-breaking numbers for a couple years) and reductions in the number of police officers. The clearance rates for murder have typically been very high (90% or better), but those have also dropped recently.
The really big cities known for lots of murders in the early 90s are still below peak, but a lot of lower tier cities have seen big increases. For example, here is a map of some of the cities that broke homicide records recently: https://abcnews.go.com/US/12-major-us-cities-top-annual-homicide-records/story?id=81466453
They tend to be medium-sized and not previously known as places with a lot of crime. Chicagoans know they live in a historically high crime city, but I bet the people of Indianapolis or Portland are surprised by their new records. Those changing perceptions of murder risk will hit a lot of people hard - both in the cities and in the surrounding suburbs and rural areas that are part of the same media market.
That’s all very nice, but Kevin’s point was that the Dems aren’t defunding the police. I’m sure you could go to any of those cities and none of them will have decreased their police budgets, let alone made serious cuts. In fact, I bet many or all will have increased budgets.
Last I checked no one, anywhere, wanted police to focus less on murder. No exceptions to that. But none of what you or anyone else has said changes the fact that every other crime is way down and is not spiking. Moreover, since there is so much less crime overall you shouldn’t need the same number of cops, but the number of cops is still higher than in the past. I can’t help but notice that no matter what the crime rate, police always seem to concentrate on giving out citations more than anything else. And I bet few people in the cities you were talking about will demand that change.
You mentioned Chicago. I happen to know that the police budget has gotten nice increases every year and that the number of cops has gone down. I believe the reason is that they can’t hire enough new cops. Nothing to do with “Defund the Police”. So Kevin's point stands.
What's the orange line? It isn't labelled. And what do you mean by "Police"? Spending, number of officers, number of employees?
Nazi homeschool network in Ohio,
https://www.vice.com/en/article/z34ane/neo-nazi-homeschool-ohio
They're not just banal psychos, they're uber-banal psychos.
Re: People don’t report crimes anymore.
Or people actually commit far less property crimes now and we know it because high-quality digital surveillance is available to fit every conceivable price point and application.
Being on camera is now just an accepted fact of life.