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Comment by alehul | Hacker News Reader

One of the most interesting points here is that people are looking at the United States, comparing it to Western Europe, and saying "we need to defund police" or "we need to disarm police."

The metric we should look at is not GDP per capita (which is how the U.S. bears similarity to Europe), it is crime.

If you look at intentional homicide rates among large countries (>1m population), the U.S. is comparable to countries like Ecuador, Argentina, Kenya, and Pakistan [1].

The U.S. intentional homicide rate is bigger than Western European countries by a factor of 4 or 5.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...

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What happens to the US homicide (or any violent crime) rate when you take the illegal drugs supply chain out of the equation?

I already know the answer. It makes the place look a hell of a lot like Western Europe.

The people not making their living outside the law don't need more police and they sure as shit don't need more militarized police. The largest group of people who are making their living outside of the law can easily be made to not be doing that by an act of congress.

General crime rate will decrease as you legalize recreational drug use, but there's no reason to believe that will resolve the many issues that lead to homicide in the United States.

It will reduce the profitability of the drug trade, which may result in less crimes or an increase in other crimes. It may also increase the number of people addicted to drugs, which, in the United States, leads to an exponential increase in both violent crime and property crime [1].

There's many other forms of crime and homicide than drug-related, and plenty of people need the police for reasons that are not related to drugs.

Separately, those people would not be making their living "not outside the law," they would be out of work. Drug legalization doesn't mean we allow existing supply chains from violent cartels.

[1] https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/DRRC.PDF

> The metric we should look at is not GDP per capita (which is how the U.S. bears similarity to Europe), it is crime.

A major contention of the defund/dismantle movement is that the US prioritization of paramilitary law enforcement for local funding exacerbates the social problems that create crime, even if you don't count crime-by-police.

Total U.S. police spending is around $100 billion, which is around $285/person/year.

Considering over 240 million 911 calls are placed in a given year, at a surface level this feels extremely efficient — certainly more so than other parts of our bureaucracy.

Crime occurs for social, cultural, and/or financial reasons — focusing on the financial, we have a giant bureaucratic and inefficient government, an incredibly large population, and a lot of waste. I don't think one could argue the $24/person/month we pay for police would make a substantial difference / stop a ton of crime.

https://www.urban.org/policy-centers/cross-center-initiative... has it at $115B for 2017 with another $79B for "corrections" (which you can debate whether it's "police spending".)

I should imagine it's gone up since then?

> Considering over 240 million 911 calls are placed in a given year

But if you cut the police spending by, say, 50% and used that money instead to providing social services, mental health services, etc., how many of those 911 calls go away?

Incidence of violent crime per capita in the United States is roughly on par with Western European nations.

Violent crime in the U.S. is just far more deadly.

It's a tough problem, but I suspect the actual solution probably has to do more with shifting our culture than with changing our laws.

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