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Comment by tinco | Hacker News Reader

The solution to mass incarceration isn't less tough policing, it's a more effective justice system with reasonable punishment and thorough prevention and rehabilitation programmes. Part of prevention is more policing, not less. Being Reasonable or thorough never got anyone elected though.

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Chicago has the largest police budget in the country and it still has very high crime. We need smarter policing, not more.

They have the largest percentage of their budget but not the largest in absolute terms.

https://www.statista.com/chart/10593/how-much-do-us-cities-s...

The US is under policed compared to any Western European country. Its rate of murder per capita is above practically all European countries when excluding gun homicides.

It should at least have as many police per capita as Spain, 534/100k, not 239, which is less than even Taiwan.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_depend...

What circumstances do police prevent crime? If someone breaks into my house, what are the chances that police will get there in time to stop it? If someone is victim of crime committed by a family member (20%), how will the police help?

Then you have the case where the police were afraid to go into a school during an active shooter incident because they were “afraid of getting shot”

https://nypost.com/2022/05/26/texas-cops-feared-getting-shot...

The chances that they will be there in time to catch the perpetrator as they're fleeing, or to take care of you as you are processing the event is larger.

But more importantly, they will feel less stressed knowing backup is nearby, they will have more time to process and investigate and take care of the victims.

As the saying goes, happy police, happy polis.

How pervasive would police have to be for them to catch a person “fleeing” from a house in the middle of the night in a city of even 200K people?

The most police ever do is take a statement so you can file an insurance claim. Which isn’t bad. It is just stuff. But if I’m in the house, that’s a different story.

I’m much more concerned about police targeting me because I as Black person am “suspiciously” walking to the pool in my own neighborhood where the city is less than 4% Black.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/jul/28/ving-rhames-...

I’ve never once thought “I have an issue. Let me calm the police and have to deal with the ‘justice’ system”. Now I just have more problems

I'm sorry that's the way it is, and I would never suggest more police is the whole solution, just a small part of it. The kind of person who can't tell a dangerous person from a person walking to their neighborhood pool regardless of skin color should have never been allowed to be police in the first place.

A person in jail can't break into your house. People incompatible with society need to be removed from it.

There are more than enough police to arrest people after the fact.

The comment didn’t say “we need to spend more on policing” - it said “we need more policing.”

Connect how "more policing" does not logically equate to spending more money. Are people going to volunteer to be police officers now?

California paid a lifeguard over $500,000 last year.

https://nypost.com/2022/05/31/la-lifeguards-raked-in-up-to-5...

We don’t need to spend more - we need the state to fix how money is allocated.

It only logically equates if the police budgets are equally distributed. So you're right if Chicago also has the largest police force, and there are no other confounding factors such as a higher base rate of crime due to social/economic context of the city.

I am definitely suggesting spending more money on police though. Both in police employment and in police education. If I were king, I'd introduce a new rank of police officer, that gets paid 30% more and 10% more time off, that requires a year or two extra education, continuous education upkeep and extra scrutiny on their record of interactions (i.e. complaints). Too many complaints, or screw up in some bad way and you lose your rank for 1 to 5 years. Police departments would be required to gradually increase their ratio of the higher ranked officers to 30 to 50%. Just daydreaming though.

Reverse causality has entered the chat.

The solution is universal pre-k, socialized medicine, and massive federal investment in K-12 schooling. By the time you've reached the justice system, it's too late.

> massive federal investment in K-12 schooling

Only 3 countries in the world spend more per pupil than the US: https://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Education/Sp...

Furthermore, racial differences in per-pupil funding are negligible, with Black and Latinx funding slightly exceeding White:

on average, both Black and Latinx total per pupil expenditures exceed White total per pupil expenditures by $229.53 and $126.15, respectively - https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/23328584198724...

I suspect we spend so much per pupil because overall we spend so little on the rest of society. A school in a neighborhood with a lot of generational poverty is going to have a lot of social problems. Those social problems are going to negatively impact the lives of students, who will then bring those problems to the school with them. Dealing with those problems requires additional staff, which require additional salary.

I imagine those figures fail to exclude spending by the rich on private schools for rich kids. That spending obviously doesn't do anything to help 99% of students.

Anyway, we should be 1st. Not 4th. We're the richest country.

> I imagine those figures fail to exclude spending by the rich on private schools for rich kids.

Blacks are underrepresented among the rich, so if rich private school spending was relatively significant, one would expect the Black per-pupil spending to be the lowest, not the highest.

We already spend more money on K-12 schooling than nearly all European countries[1].

Throwing more money at a problem is very rarely the best solution.

[1] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd/education-exp...

And yet... That's 90% of what legislation is all about.

Legislation specifies more than "the amount of money allocated" to a problem.

Well funded schools in bad areas just churn out bad students. There is no easy solution to crime.

> massive federal investment in K-12 schooling

Because we aren't spending enough on K-12 education already? Throwing good money after bad is terrible policy.

(Medicine has lots of issues too, but it's an entirely separate issue from criminal justice.)

If you think schools don't have enough money, you're not looking hard enough.

>If you think schools don't have enough money, you're not looking hard enough.

Some schools do. White schools. Take a look at any high school in the south side of Chicago and tell me they are doing just fine.

Lincoln Park High doesn't get more funding than those south side schools.

I mean, no we aren’t spending enough on it haha. Isn’t that apparent?

https://educationdata.org/public-education-spending-statisti...

You can see in the inflation-adjusted graph it has been flat except for after Covid.

If you aren’t getting the result you want, you will have to increase inflation-adjusted spending to see a change.

> In the United States, education spending falls short of benchmarks set by international organizations such as UNESCO, of which the U.S. is a member. The nation puts 11.6% of public funding toward education, well below the international standard 15.00%.

US reading, Math and Science scores have been flat since 1970 while inflation adjusted spending per student is up more than 200%.

Spending night be misallocated but a bigger budget won’t do anything by itself. There are no big, obvious wins out there.

https://www.cato.org/blog/addressing-critics-purportedly-no-...

Oh if we are talking since the 1970's like most issues, I've got a site for you. That's when the money printing backed by nothing started.

https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/

>In August 1971, Nixon severed the direct convertibility of U.S. dollars into gold.

>Because we aren't spending enough on K-12 education already?

At the federal level? Not really. The Department of Education is something like less than 1% of the federal budget.

Furthermore the problem comes down to how schools are actually funded. In the US, it's almost entirely through local property taxes. Which means that racial and socioeconomic segregation cause children to be doomed to an underfunded school district, perpetuating the cycle.

It doesn’t matter where the budget comes from. The US funds primary education very well - as well as many of our European counterparts (despite our worse outcomes).

Police literally don’t prevent crimes. Both officially and unofficially their job is not to prevent crime.

Maybe officially and unofficially, but the state monopoly on violence (of which the police is a part) absolutely reduces violence and prevents crime. See “Better Angels” for a discussion of why. Or go right back to Leviathan.

That's bogus. Police presence most certainly deters crime.

Yeah man the Police in Parkland and Uvalde sure did deter any potential school shooters…

https://communityresourcehub.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeShaney_v._Winnebago_County

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Town_of_Castle_Rock_v._Gonza...

They managed to deter concerned parents though, gotta give the some credit.

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