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Comment by o0-0o | Hacker News Reader

There are already too many cops, and they have to keep going back to the same trough to feed themselves. Solving murders, rapes, and robberies doesn't pay. Ticketing people for jaywalking, curfew, and traffic violations does. Also, to further the problem, the police have cash bonuses paid to them for exceeding their quotas with these tickets.

The police are there to preserve disorder, but they have lost sight of this. Now, there are two types of cops; the protect and serve kind, and the us against them kind. Sadly, the latter seems to be taking over. I'm afraid this doesn't end well. The nightmare scenario is some kid walking up to a cop on the 4th of July and asking for baseball cards with a toy in his hand that is mistaken for a gun.

The real question here is what are we going to do about it?

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Empirical research disputes your assertion that there are too many cops:

http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2012/12/pol...

NYPD is 10x too big. NYC is really a special case of infinite budget, powerful union, and external events (1970s/1980s crime wave, followed by 9/11) to justify it.

Other places have too few (Oakland PD should be at least 2x and really 5x what it has). The fundamental problem is poor places have less budget and also higher need for policing.

Various transit agencies, universities, etc. should probably not operate their own substandard police forces, but use non-sworn security and have a decent working relationship with the local PD.

It looks like NYC has ~40 police officers per 10k people(1). If you cut that by 90% to ~4 per 10k then NYC would have, by far, the smallest per capita police force for any American city. So really you're asserting that police forces are too large almost everywhere in the US?

EDIT: ~4 officers per 10k would also be lower than essentially any other country in the world(2).

1. http://www.governing.com/gov-data/safety-justice/law-enforce...

2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of_...

Oh, I think you're correct; I was using the population of Manhattan only. Oops.

But how many do they have per square mile?

35k officers / 468 square miles ~= 75 officers per square mile.

Just as a comparison, Albuquerque has ~8 police per sq. mile, and Tucson has ~4.5 police per sq. mile. However, New York has ~27000 people/sq. mile, while Tucson has ~2800 and Albuquerque about ~3000. So NY has about ~9x the population density, but ~12x the police.

Now what I'm also curious about - would you expect high population density to increase or decrease the number of police needed per capita? Off hand, I would be inclined to think lower population density would need higher police per capita, but here it seems to be the reverse (possibly reflecting the coffers rather than the needs, though).

I also have your intuition but after thinking about a couple of the police's jobs I do understand how it could easily go the other way.

You have the somewhat obvious want of a visible police officer ranging an area to deter criminal activity such as shoplifting/vandalism/mugging.

But you also want the police in an area to deal with domestic dispute type crimes which you'd expect to increase at least linearly with density, possibly more so as the closer you are to your neighbors the more you may see them and the more their behavior may impact you. Which may mean that you need several more cops to respond to concurrent incidents even if the average rate of incidents is lower than what a single cop could deal with.

That's without getting in to any other issues such as bureaucracy needs/wants of larger departments. Or the odds of more dense areas being more culturally diverse/allowing higher differentials in income against distance.

So after that I think it would be quite hard to judge what would be required.

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