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Comment by toxik | Hacker News Reader

What you want is to maximize the utility of the police, but then the policy question is how do you define utility. The people in power will of course tend to define it with a bias towards them and theirs.

Perhaps the crime should be looked at in context. Stealing $100 from a homeless person is equivalent to stealing $1,000 from an averagely salaried person.

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The police doesn't care about you, they want promotions like most people do. Solving cases with big values helps, imagine trying to get promoted by solving petty crimes.

I think its more a case of the public not being aware of this non-investigation habit and not pressuring enough. At the same time I understand, there are so many issues on the table its a wonder anything gets done at all. Priorities and all that.

Man, this shit is depressing to read as someone who just joined LE and sees mostly people who really want to help victims.

Better get used to it; the police receive a lot of flak, left and right. Sometimes warranted, sometimes not. The are also people in who's interest it is that the population distrusts the police. Crooks, obviously. But also conspiracy theorists, foreign agents, etc. The trick is to still listen to constructive criticism while listening and empathizing to negative criticism.

As you said, limited manpower, expertise, time, and budget are an issue for law enforcement. Not just for US law enforcement. For law enforcement world-wide.

Police departments in major American cities have bigger budgets than almost every other country's military.

Police officers earnings often rank in the top 1% of their communities.

Compare your city's police budget with their investments in communities and education and services - things that can actually make lives better and prevent the economic desperation that leads to crime.

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, and police are the very inefficient, violent cure.

Problem is, the truth of the matter varies a lot by country, region, city, precinct and by the people themselves.

There are police departments out there that are a valued contributor to the community, and there are some departments that seem to exist wholly to extract money and pain from the citizenry.

One bad apple spoils the bunch, unfortunately.

I think an order of magnitude (or three) increase in independent accountability of police across the board is the only way you'll see the trust start to rebuild, but certain organizations seem dead set against letting that ever happen.

You can argue in the opposite direction that stealing $1,000 should be prioritized because it gives more buying power to those criminal gangs and it finances more criminal activity than the $100.

Right, which is the current state of affairs. The problem is well known in OS scheduling. If you have jobs that are prioritized over others, and there is more work than workers as is the case with the police, you'll have lower-prioritized jobs that are NEVER executed.

I don't know how OSes solve these problems.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Round-robin_scheduling

Round robin is one of the algorithms that may be employed by an OS to handle scheduling. The problem you're talking about is known as 'starvation'.

The frequent context switching is a source of inefficiency here- if you interrupt one job to switch to another, you've got to ditch everything in memory from job 1 and load a bunch of new data from disk for job 2. And then when you switch back to job 1- same deal. I'd imagine the same would apply, maybe even more so, for people

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