Yes, we are not incarcerating enough people, as clearly evidenced by the fact that we have a lot of repeat criminals, who commit a lot more crime than Germans.
> You are also ignoring how the unprofessional nature of police contribute to the problem. Their behavior creates an adversarial relationship with the public. (…)
This is a problem, but it’s not what’s causing criminals to rob stores, carjack random people, or do drive by shootings. If we made US cops as professional as German cops, we’d still have huge crime problem. In fact, having grown up in Poland (which is very low crime society), my experience tells me that prosecuting and jailing criminals is significantly more important than professionalism of police force, as Polish cops are significantly less professional than American ones.
> Simply hiring more cops and throwing more people in jail isn't going to fix things. That should be obvious because that is all we ever seem to attempt in the US and the situation isn't getting better.
I strongly disagree. We did start mass incarceration around early-to-mid 1990, and it did, in fact, solve a lot of crime problems. As the percentage of population in prison steadily went up, the crime rate steadily went down. As we started reducing incarceration rates in early 2010s, the crime rate started going back up again, and this greatly accelerated starting from 2020, with the growth of anti-policing and anti-prosecution movements.
Just to emphasize this: the incarceration rate is down a lot from its peak in ~2010 or so. It’s down by more than a third. We no longer just throw people in jail, we do quite the opposite in fact, and the situation is getting worse than when we just jailed criminals.