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This has sufficient public momentum to prove that a plurality believes the current system does the public more harm than good. Of course, removing cops will red

This has sufficient public momentum to prove that a plurality believes the current system does the public more harm than good. Of course, removing cops will reduce harm done by cops to the public. But it will also reduce harm done by cops to law breakers. Intuitively, I would expect the law breakers to benefit disproportionately, since the cops stated mission was to prevent law breaking and all. Statistics I've read suggest that US cities have been getting progressively safer over the past generation. It's interesting to wonder if our generation of safety has allowed us to forget that "order" and "justice" are not intrinsic qualities of humanity (nor any other animal group). Looking forward to seeing how Minneapolis will go about delivering consistent justice with no bad actors enforcing it. Will also be interesting to see which types of law breakers emerge as the winner from decimation of their traditional adversary.

fastball 6y ago
"Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times." – G. Michael Hopf
- nojvek 6y ago
  What are you trying to imply by Hard times create strong men. Hard times also create broken men. Weak is not always bad. I don’t want “supposedly strong men” being so trigger happy , their happy dropping nukes on civilian because they couldn’t let go of their “strong” ego.
  - fastball 6y ago
    My comment was intended to be an agreement with GC’s second paragraph, which postulated that maybe these problems are partially caused by what is effectively complacency. I did not come up with the phrasing of the quote. That being said, I'm fairly certain you are taking "weak" and "strong" more literally than the quotee intended.
elil17 6y ago
I think the point is that we need to go easier on “law breakers,” at least the kind of law breakers who most often get the police called on them. For instance, there is no reason for someone who committed petty theft to spend years in jail or, worse, to be treated violently by the police.
- agensaequivocum 6y ago
  > there is no reason for someone who committed petty theft to spend years in jail Not sure what you specifically mean by petty theft, but maybe the answer is to just not steal. People need to accept personal responsibility for their actions.
  - mjburgess 6y ago
    The same argument applies to the police. "Righteousness" has a way of blinding people to the abusiveness of their actions. "Let me invent some moral principle to be violated, and when violated, permits me to abuse another however I wish."
curryst 6y ago
I think it depends on how much crime was prevented by police, either through action (i.e. arresting someone) or by threat of action (i.e. police might show up). Statistically, the chances the police in Minneapolis were going to catch someone who committed a crime against you are low. Using the 2011-2013 data from the FBI's crime report [1] (not cherry picked, it was the first available I could find, would love more up to date data), about 36% of murders were cleared. Property crimes are far worse, about 13%. So for murder, there is a 1 in 3 chance you got caught. For property crimes, roughly 1 in 8. That's not a huge rate of getting criminals off the street. I don't know how criminals perceive the risk/benefit of those odds, and whether the drop will have a substantial impact. My wild ass guess is that it won't shift the crime rate by an order of magnitude. I would be surprised if it doubled. I would expect the murder rate to stay nearly constant, and for property crimes to increase 30-50%. Broadly speaking, I would expect the number of people committing crimes to stay close to the same (maybe a slight increase), but the number of crimes per criminal to go up. There's still a finite limit to the number of houses you can rob in a day, though. Your chances of getting caught before were 1 in 8, even if there is no police, it only has a few percent to drop before we start hitting the bottom in the form of the percentage of burglars shot by homeowners.

fastball 6y ago

"Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times." – G. Michael Hopf

nojvek 6y ago
What are you trying to imply by Hard times create strong men. Hard times also create broken men. Weak is not always bad. I don’t want “supposedly strong men” being so trigger happy , their happy dropping nukes on civilian because they couldn’t let go of their “strong” ego.
- fastball 6y ago
  My comment was intended to be an agreement with GC’s second paragraph, which postulated that maybe these problems are partially caused by what is effectively complacency. I did not come up with the phrasing of the quote. That being said, I'm fairly certain you are taking "weak" and "strong" more literally than the quotee intended.

elil17 6y ago

I think the point is that we need to go easier on “law breakers,” at least the kind of law breakers who most often get the police called on them. For instance, there is no reason for someone who committed petty theft to spend years in jail or, worse, to be treated violently by the police.

agensaequivocum 6y ago
> there is no reason for someone who committed petty theft to spend years in jail Not sure what you specifically mean by petty theft, but maybe the answer is to just not steal. People need to accept personal responsibility for their actions.
- mjburgess 6y ago
  The same argument applies to the police. "Righteousness" has a way of blinding people to the abusiveness of their actions. "Let me invent some moral principle to be violated, and when violated, permits me to abuse another however I wish."

curryst 6y ago

I think it depends on how much crime was prevented by police, either through action (i.e. arresting someone) or by threat of action (i.e. police might show up). Statistically, the chances the police in Minneapolis were going to catch someone who committed a crime against you are low. Using the 2011-2013 data from the FBI's crime report [1] (not cherry picked, it was the first available I could find, would love more up to date data), about 36% of murders were cleared. Property crimes are far worse, about 13%. So for murder, there is a 1 in 3 chance you got caught. For property crimes, roughly 1 in 8. That's not a huge rate of getting criminals off the street. I don't know how criminals perceive the risk/benefit of those odds, and whether the drop will have a substantial impact. My wild ass guess is that it won't shift the crime rate by an order of magnitude. I would be surprised if it doubled. I would expect the murder rate to stay nearly constant, and for property crimes to increase 30-50%. Broadly speaking, I would expect the number of people committing crimes to stay close to the same (maybe a slight increase), but the number of crimes per criminal to go up. There's still a finite limit to the number of houses you can rob in a day, though. Your chances of getting caught before were 1 in 8, even if there is no police, it only has a few percent to drop before we start hitting the bottom in the form of the percentage of burglars shot by homeowners.