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> The scientists found that civilian complaints of major crimes dropped by about 3% to 6% during the slowdown. 1. Why call the cops if you know they won't do a
by nanis 5y ago
> The scientists found that civilian complaints of major crimes dropped by about 3% to 6% during the slowdown.
1. Why call the cops if you know they won't do anything?
2. Relatedly, why "snitch" when you know there won't be any cops around?
- kevingadd 5y agoI think you'll find many residents of many cities will call the cops even though they know the cops usually won't do anything.
- treeman79 5y agoAges ago when I was a kid, our house was constantly being robbed. No city police in a town of 50,000 County police who took an hour or more to show up finally told my dad to get a gun and explained how we should move the body to make it look like we were being attacked. So that we didn’t get arrested. So yea we moved promptly.
- WesolyKubeczek 5y agoAnd now I want a Youtube tutorial...
- vimy 5y agoWhy was there no police?
- BitwiseFool 5y agoMore importantly, why wasn't there a social worker to show up first? /s
- treeman79 5y agoA few years some parents left their kid home alone while on vacation. Neighbors knew family had gone vacation and saw movement at night. Jumpy cop, dark house, sudden movement, dead kid... Family got big payout, City dismantled the police department.
- actually_a_dog 5y agoPlenty of rural areas will only be serviced by a county sheriff, and there may not be that many officers. I grew up in a place like that. You could drive around forever where I grew up and never see a cop.
- CobrastanJorji 5y agoWell, sure, because the insurance company's first question will be "is there a police report."
- whatgoodisaroad 5y agoA police report != a 911 call from a legal standpoint (to my non lawyer knowledge).
- vanattab 5y agoBut it is the first step if you need a report written.
- kevin_thibedeau 5y agoYou can walk to a station and do it in person. That won't be logged in the 911 database.
- colechristensen 5y agoIt really isn’t. Where I am it is a form on a website.
- nanis 5y agoI don't know anything about NYC, but, normally, a police report actually involves the police writing down some names. So, one lives in a high crime area and one notices that the police are no longer around, one has strong incentives not to go on the record about this or that crime.
- teawrecks 5y agoI think their point is that it could explain the 3-6% drop. But yes, the other 94-97% of people still call.
- temp8964 5y agoThe title suggests a causation on this 4.5% change? Paywalled, I didn’t read the article.
- kevingadd 5y agoThe article does say the study attempted to control for those variables, yeah.
- nanis 5y ago> “While we cannot entirely rule out the effects of under-reporting,” the authors wrote, “our results show that crime complaints decreased, rather than increased, during a slowdown in proactive policing, contrary to deterrence theory.” Original research is here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-017-0211-5 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-017-0211-5 Both authors are political scientists who are highly unlikely to have a command of econometrics. I am not sure if they took into account the panel nature of the data and in those circumstances where authors focus solely on either the cross-section or the time-series nature of the process, it is not uncommon for "results" to be nonsense.
- tus89 5y agowhat does the word proactive mean to you?
- Aeolun 5y agoYou arrest people before they can commit the offence. I think there was a documentary about this a few years ago called Minority Report.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- bkirwi 5y agoFWIW, this is addressed in the article and the paper it covers: the slowdown involved reduced "proactive policing" -- "systematic and aggressive enforcement of low-level violations" -- but the observed drop is in major crimes like burglary and assault. The authors also do some work to control for the overall crime reporting rate.
- falcrist 5y agoI'm a bit confused... Everyone is assuming that the police wouldn't respond to calls during this period, but the article doesn't suggest that this was the case. Even looking through articles in 2014 and 2015 doesn't provide me with any evidence that police weren't showing up to crime scenes... just that they weren't doing the "proactive policing" thing. Am I missing something here?
- 5faulker 5y agoThe apathy is real
- jstrH 5y agoYeah exactly; the stats are made up since the state induces snitching over petty nonsense to meet quotas, and earn trust of snitches for the times they’re actually useful. Statistical achievement is a hollow basis for social organization.