If you look at the most apples-to-apples comparison of crime rate between the countries, the homicide rate, it is beyond clear that the disparity between US and

If you look at the most apples-to-apples comparison of crime rate between the countries, the homicide rate, it is beyond clear that the disparity between US and Europe is very much real, and not just an artifact of differing reporting rates. France or Germany very much do not have issues with underreporting homicides. You would have to have something like 2-3 unreported homicides for every reported homicide in Germany to equalize the homicide rates. It is abundantly clear that this is not the case. Now, given that the homicide rate gap is real and not just reporting artifact, what about other crime? It stands to reason that the disparities there are also real, but there still might be differences in reporting, which could either exaggerate or diminish the reported gap. Which is it? In my view, the latter is true: the gap between US and Europe is even worse than it seems. This whole thread is a great example: Americans don’t even bother reporting a lot of crime, because it is a common knowledge that it won’t do much. In Europe, people report much more petty crime, because the cops will actually follow up on a lot of it, and the justice system will actually punish the offenders. This means that the real crime gap is even bigger than the reported one. This is also clear to anyone who actually has experience living in both places. I grew up in Poland, I live in relatively safe US city (Seattle), and the amount of crime I observe here is probably a whole order of magnitude higher than I did back in Poland. > And secondly because there are absolutely detrimental effects of policing, and this would lead into a conversation more about what the goals of policing should be Yes, I agree that there is a trade off here. However, in US, the balance is completely lopsided towards the costs of crime. Criminals impose massive burden on everyone around them, including their families. Crime has enormous costs to victims, but also huge negative externalities. For example, if you own a house in a crime ridden neighborhood, then even if you are never a victim of crime yourself, just the fact that people avoid your neighborhood costs you probably tens of thousands of dollars in terms of lost property values. Businesses avoid crime ridden locations, resulting in fewer jobs and services for residents. Really, the negatives of increased policing would have to be quite enormous to make up for the benefits. For a real world example, look at how much more flourishing NYC has become after Giuliani and Bloomberg cleaned it up. Do you thing that NYC residents would prefer to go back to 1985 era? > Does incarcerating people too much lead to higher crime rates in the future when they're released? Compared to what? Even if you ignore deterrence role, incarceration reduces crime purely by incapacitating criminal’s ability to do crime. Hard to victimize people when you’re locked up. Crime is young men’s game, and most of it is committed by very small fraction of population. They commit most of their crime between 16 and 35, with crime activity sharply tapering thereafter. If you incarcerate those repeat offenders for many years, and release them only once they are older and cooled off, than increase in criminality induced by incarceration will be more than made up by reduction in criminality during prime crime years. We need to incarcerate more people, and do it for longer. That’s exactly how we achieved long decrease in crime, starting in mid 90s. People understood that. Senator Joe Biden was major sponsor of crime reform bill that was designed to do exactly that, put more criminals in jail for longer. It’s a shame that we were made to forget that, and now we reap the fruit of reduced policing and increased criminal exuberance, with crime rates hugely spiking starting from June 2020.