8 ms·

Police are not primarily crime fighters, according to the data

129 points by wahnfrieden 3y ago

rolph 3y ago
these numbers[data] came from the article : [In 2019, 88% of the time L.A. County sheriff’s officers spent on stops was for officer-initiated stops rather than in response to calls. The overwhelming majority of that time – 79% – was spent on traffic violations. By contrast, just 11% of those hours was spent on stops based on reasonable suspicion of a crime. In Riverside, about 83% of deputies’ time spent on officer-initiated stops went toward traffic violations, and just 7% on stops based on reasonable suspicion. Moreover, most of the stops are pointless, other than inconveniencing citizens, or worse – “a routine practice of pretextual stops,” researchers wrote. Roughly three out of every four hours that Sacramento sheriff’s officers spent investigating traffic violations were for stops that ended in warnings, or no action]. [0] The report was published Oct. 25 by advocacy group Catalyst California and the ACLU of Southern California. It relies on county budgets' numbers and new policing data provided under the state’s Racial and Identity Profiling Act, which took effect in 2019. [1] Report https://catalyst-ca.cdn.prismic.io/catalyst-ca/126c30a8-852c-416a-b8a7-55a90c77a04e_APCA+ACLU+REIMAGINING+COMMUNITY+SAFETY+2022_5.pdf https://catalyst-ca.cdn.prismic.io/catalyst-ca/126c30a8-852c... [PDF]
- throwaway33381 3y ago
  I feel as though this isn't that surprising when you realize that for most municipalities police forces are revenue generators. Meaning that their main job is in increasing the funding of the precincts they belong to by issuing tickets to traffic violators. You could go a step forward and say they are systemically incentivized to target specific groups due to them being perceived as outsiders but I think a lot of police precincts still enforce broken window theory.
  - wahnfrieden 3y ago
    Pretext stops don’t generate ticketing revenue. They’re used in the hopes of finding more serious (by law anyway) crimes once they’re able to get a closer look.
    - ceejayoz 3y ago
      > Pretext stops don’t generate ticketing revenue. Sure they do. They’re still getting the broken taillight fine after the cop searches the car.
      - wahnfrieden 3y ago
        3/4 end with warnings or no action. They’re not pursuing dangerous drivers or fines, they’re pursuing targets they think they can escalate to more serious charges (such as weed possession, in other states anyway)
  - nxx788 3y ago
    [dead]
- tremon 3y ago
  most of the stops are pointless, other than inconveniencing citizens [..] that ended in warnings Such actions are most emphatically NOT pointless, they are preventative: informing someone that their bad behaviour is noticed is often enough to keep well-meaning citizens on the right side of the law. What's your proposed alternative? That every interaction with the police must result in a fine?
  - deepfriedchokes 3y ago
    Isn’t that really just harassment and intimidation?
    - kentt 3y ago
      Totally depends. It's easy to imagine a situation where responding to a noise complaint would ideally finish with a warning.
      - llbeansandrice 3y ago
        The data is specifically referring to officer initiated traffic stops. Noise complaints are often reported by neighbors and then responded to. So cops are just stopping drivers and giving them warnings. It sounds like harassment to me.
    - rolph 3y ago
      in the case of a stop that quickly becomes a terry stop. in the case of i stopped you because -rear lights, i see noone else has a notation on your marker, go get it repaired, right now...then your free to go, thats how i generally see a traffic stop actually being a traffic stop.
    - rocqua 3y ago
      "Hey, your tail light is out. Won't give you a ticket this time, but please do get it fixed". Is neither harassement nor intimidation. But it does remind people that these things are noticed, and that failing to fix a taillight might actually earn you a fine.
- bluepizza 3y ago
  Aren't accidents something like the third largest cause of death in the US? Sounds quite logical to me that they'd spend the largest amount of time and resources on that.
  - wahnfrieden 3y ago
    These are pretext stops. They target people they aim to escalate charges with, not dangerous drivers. That’s why they end with minor warnings.
    - the_lego 3y ago
      How does the data distinguish between a pretext stop, and a stop for a genuine traffic infraction, like minor speeding or a broken light, that a cop uses their discretion on and issues only a warning? Naively, forcing cops to apply the law even more strictly and always issue fines for minor violations, is not something we want, is it?
- ldoughty 3y ago
  The source material makes it sound like the traffic stops are like.... profiling people and wasting their time... The 79% on traffic stops is an officer acting on what they classified to be a traffic violation -- it's not 79% of them are pretextual stops & warnings, and 11% are catching speeders/reckless drivers... it's 79% pulling over speeders/reckless/etc. drivers and 11% "reasonable suspicion of a crime that is not traffic related" If you think about it that way... People CONSANTLY violate traffic laws... So it's not terribly surprising. I certainly hope calls for help are promptly answered, but that source doesn't seem to include data other than the fact that responding to calls for help takes twice as long as a traffic stop for an officer's time. Edit: removed attribution to parent post
  - rolph 3y ago
    actually the entire block of text, is from the article, none are my comments, i posted this for convenience so people would have it righthere. so please take this into account.
  - rolph 3y ago
    >>ldoughty I get it, its an honest mistake, in response to a muddy quotation style. cheers
mschuster91 3y ago
Who would have guessed... the problem is that police and especially police unions became behemoths in themselves, effectively being ungovernable and unauditable. And you can't even change that because police can simply refuse to do their job without any repercussions and have done so multiple times [1]. Under the current set of rules, ACAB until proven otherwise. Police, in terms of the institution police, the theories behind policing, and its staff, need to be torn down completely and replaced by something entirely new, based on an actual legally defined purpose which was democratically decided and with clear metrics, transparency and accountability on all levels. No charlatans like Dave Grossman ("Killology") and his ilk should be allowed anywhere near a police precinct. [1] https://www.propublica.org/article/what-can-mayors-do-when-the-police-stop-doing-their-jobs https://www.propublica.org/article/what-can-mayors-do-when-t...
- inamberclad 3y ago
  I find it amazing that the police of a given city will protest anything they think is unfair refusing to work. How is this not armed mutiny?
- influx 3y ago
  I was with you until you used the inflammatory ACAB term. It’s incredibly offensive and doesn’t help your argument.
  - kacesensitive 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - gruez 3y ago
      So? How is that relevant to this discussion? You're the first person bringing the phrase up.
  - mschuster91 3y ago
    Of course it is offensive. But so are all the "cops" who follow the Korpsgeist and keep their mouths shut when they see their colleagues openly break the law. Or those that spend 80% of their work time on "traffic stops" aka harassing Black people and other minorities. Remember George Floyd or all the others who died under suspicious circumstances without a bystander live-streaming their deaths.
slibhb 3y ago
California should pursue a "reimagination of community safety". The rest of the country can watch the results play out. Either way we'll learn something.
- ceejayoz 3y ago
  https://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-proactive-policing-crime-20170925-story.html https://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-proacti... > When New York police officers temporarily reduced their “proactive policing” efforts on low-level offenses, major-crime reports in the city actually fell, according to a study based on New York Police Department crime statistics.
  - gruez 3y ago
    This doesn't pass the sniff test >[...] the NYPD held a work “slowdown” for about seven weeks [...] >[...] The scientists found that civilian complaints of major crimes dropped by about 3% to 6% during the slowdown. [...] If we assume that "complaints of major crimes" is a reliable proxy of actual major crimes being committed, as the article suggests, what are we supposed to conclude from this? That within weeks of the police not catching people for minor crimes, that criminals called an armistice stopped committing crimes? Or 3-6% of "major crimes" were only committed because police were doing stop and frisk? I'm aware of arguments about how aggressive policing creates a cycle of broken families and thereby creating future criminals, but that can't explain the effect materializing within weeks.
    - ceejayoz 3y ago
      The cops had more time to spend on more significant issues seems to be the fairly obvious conclusion.
- ddq 3y ago
  I think the reimagining should start at the community level and grow. Town, city, county, up to state level. Hell, start at both ends and meet in the middle. Top-down change seems like it’d benefit a lot from bottom-up support.
idlewords 3y ago
This is the same logic as arguing cats are bad at rodent control because they spend very little time each day catching mice.
- tycho-newman 3y ago
  The cats that are good at rodent control, almost by definition, will not need to spend a lot of time chasing mice. They are efficient mouse catchers. Considering the abysmal clearance rates while violent crime rates have gone down, it is clear these cats are not good at catching mice. There is some other factor at work.
  - idlewords 3y ago
    The smell of even the most inept cat still scares off mice.
  - User23 3y ago
    Why would the police bother to catch criminals in the big left wing cities? Carjackers are being let off without even an agreement. The electorate has clearly communicated that they don't want the laws enforced if they have disparate impact. This is democracy in action, doing the will of the people. Where is the problem? Edit: It's not a rhetorical question. If you disagree please tell me where the problem is. I don't agree with the policy decisions in question, but I respect democracy so I live with being in the minority whose policy preferences aren't enacted. That is how the system is meant to work, right?
- wahnfrieden 3y ago
  No it’s not.
  - idlewords 3y ago
    I'm afraid to say that it is, too.
    - Rury 3y ago
KennyBlanken 3y ago
> Roughly three out of every four hours that Sacramento sheriff’s officers spent investigating traffic violations were for stops that ended in warnings, or no action, for example. And we wonder why our roadways are among the most dangerous in the world, especially for people not in enclosed motor vehicles. On rare occasion when people are stopped it's for racist reasons, they're not ticketed (because the cops were looking for drugs and guns, you know Real Police Stuff) so motorists learn there's no consequences to dangerous behavior. Things aren't much better on the other coast, with NYPD issuing the vast majority of bicycling tickets to non-white riders: https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2022/01/04/nypds-racial-bias-in-ticketing-cyclists-continued-last-year https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2022/01/04/nypds-racial-bias-in-... This is the real icing on the cake: > The new data follows similar reporting by Streetsblog, which revealed that police issued a whopping 99 percent of tickets for jaywalking to Black and Hispanic New Yorkers during the first quarter of 2020 — a stat that worsened after Streetsblog's initial expose. A City Council bill to decriminalize jaywalking was held up in committee, and would have to be resubmitted by a new council member.
smallstepforman 3y ago
The primary purpose of law enforcement officers is to maintain the authority of the state. Preventing crime is an indirect activity. However, in thousands of years of organised goverment, its the best system we currently have.
- justnotworthit 3y ago
  you may be interested in James C. Scott's books. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Not_Being_Governed https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Not_Being_Governe... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_C._Scott#Major_works https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_C._Scott#Major_works
- Super_Jambo 3y ago
  America's varied policing systems seem to be wildly worse than average for the developed west.
  - ekam 3y ago
    In what ways?
  - polski-g 3y ago
    That is because America is largely under-policed: https://twitter.com/SwannMarcus89/status/1675570458069028866 https://twitter.com/SwannMarcus89/status/1675570458069028866 Increasing police staff by 10% reduces violent crime by 13%: https://twitter.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1650723590306689026 https://twitter.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/16507235903066890...
- konschubert 3y ago
  Those are the same things.
  - wahnfrieden 3y ago
    If it were true, wage theft would be the priority over shoplifting as it’s by far the largest category of theft
thuridas 3y ago
We should measure a police department response to reporting a stolen mobile device with active localization. How eager is the police to fight a real crime. I have a personal hypothesis that that some small locations depend too much on traffic fines and pay for productivity pluses. Most of those fines will be from outsiders. Probably it all started with an unexpected income, a proud politician announcing tax reductions and traffic fines become a real need for this location
- wahnfrieden 3y ago
  These are primarily pretext stops, not revenue generating ones. They profile based on their perceived likelihood of escalating to a more severe crime - that is, the crimes they're interested in pursuing with the people they're interested in. (If they actually prioritized crime severity, they would prioritize visibly rich business owners over the poverty-stricken or marginalized populations given that wage theft is by far the largest category of theft)
  - halostatue 3y ago
    In the U.S., they mostly profile based on skin colour, even if they claim otherwise. (In Canada, it’s also mostly on skin colour, but depending on the region, they’re probably looking far more for Indigenous peoples, and it’s just as wrong as American policing.)
- quickthrower2 3y ago
  I remember someone on HN said (and I believe it) that in SF they wont come out for a burglary. Because there is too much more problematic crime than that.
- drewbug01 3y ago
  > I have a personal hypothesis that that some small locations depend too much on traffic fines Your personal hypothesis has substantial basis in fact: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/31/us/police-ticket-quotas-money-funding.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/31/us/police-ticket-quotas-m...
cantrevealname 3y ago
> fruitless traffic stops than responses to service calls As a counterargument, I read somewhere that the number one way that serious criminals are caught is due to motor vehicle violations. The theory being that someone who doesn't care about laws against serious acts cares even less about traffic laws. Timothy McVeigh was caught because he was stopped for driving without a license plate on his car. Law enforcement perhaps would never have solved one of the biggest crimes in U.S. history if the police had not made a minor traffic stop.
- prepend 3y ago
  Yes of course if you stop lots of people you will find criminals. If you go door to door you will as well. Stop and frisk reduced crime as well. It’s like the fact that the greater the number of people in jail, the lower the crime rate. It’s true because a certain percentage of people commit crimes and if they’re in jail, they won’t. That doesn’t mean we should go these things. We need to evaluate net impact. Or just not do things that are wrong even if they have utilitarian benefit.
  - lamontcg 3y ago
    > Yes of course if you stop lots of people you will find criminals. If you go door to door you will as well. "papers, please"
- Eisenstein 3y ago
  That is like saying 'we need to cure heart attacks because most people die of heart attacks'. Something has to kill you -- when your heart stops that's a heart attack. Someone had to catch McVeigh -- it just so happened it was cop that pulled him over. If we focused resources on the community instead of punitive 'catch the offenders (if it is convenient, like, you already stopped them)' maybe McVeigh wouldn't have wanted to blow up a Federal building because the FBI was involved in a string of mis-advised deadly interactions where they shot first and asked questions later (Waco, Ruby Ridge -- this is what McVeigh was specifically pissed about).
  - 3y ago
mabbo 3y ago
My brother is law is a British police officer. He laughs at how much effort we spend in the US and Canada policing traffic. "We just have cameras. They do the same work for free." His job is to investigate violent and serious crimes, rather than to bother motorists.
- fsckboy 3y ago
  does he suggest that if we put police cameras in people's homes that would eliminate a lot of domestic incidents? The issue is a bit more nuanced than he's making out.
  - edu 3y ago
    The difference between public and private space is pretty clear.
    - 8organicbits 3y ago
      There's also pretty clear ways to protect privacy in public. Cameras should only collect photos when they detect a violation.
      - edu 3y ago
        Yes, totally agree on that.
- mjevans 3y ago
  Traffic cameras are not a safety encouragement device. I'd classify them as a 'revenue generating device' or a regressive tax. I would feel much safer if the majority of police resources were allocated to the 'worst' violations of the laws (hardest crimes) first.
  - 8organicbits 3y ago
    Why do you believe they don't provide safety? Some countries apply fines proportional to income, so there's no inherent need for them to be regressive. Having driven in places where some roads are dotted with cameras and others are bare, the driving behavior is clearly altered. With cameras present, most drivers don't speed. Others speed just below the ticket threshold (+5mph?), or speed only between the cameras. On the roads without cameras drivers are often 10-15mph over the limit with some even faster.
worik 3y ago
Backwards. What we want is the police to prevent crime, not stop it. Their role in that project is not to solve every crime but catch every criminal. I imagine they do not do well from that metric either. In too many places the police are the army of the rich controlling the plebians
- mschuster91 3y ago
  > What we want is the police to prevent crime, not stop it. Police aren't a hammer, that is the first problem. A lot of crime comes from poverty, drug usage and mental health issues. Fix that and crime goes down, without the followup costs of throwing people into jail where nothing improves in their lives.
- quickthrower2 3y ago
  You need to solve most crimes to catch every criminal, because of justice. And the simple problem of knowing who the criminals are.
- nxx788 3y ago
  [dead]
shmde 3y ago
I was shocked to see how absolutely callous american police was while browsing this youtube channel [1]. Many of these are incidents where death was EASILY avoidable. There are videos where the "Police" openly shoots at a group of people because one of them was the suspect. Maybe this callousness is a direct result of lax gun laws ? [1] https://youtube.com/@PoliceActivity https://youtube.com/@PoliceActivity
cratermoon 3y ago
It's been a long time since I believed that police fight crime. I read an article a long while back in which policemen described themselves as humanity's janitors. They felt their job was about going to places and dealing with situations and events most people would prefer to believe don't exist. If a crime happened to be the cause, they'd take a report, but mostly they were just picking up the pieces of people's lives after they'd been destroyed by poverty, addiction, greed, or hate.
neonate 3y ago
http://web.archive.org/web/20230729211626/https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/police-are-not-primarily-crime-fighters-according-data-2022-11-02/ http://web.archive.org/web/20230729211626/https://www.reuter...
oatmeal1 3y ago
In Seattle at least, this wouldn't be surprising. Criminals with 34 cases since 2014 including allegations of attempted rape out on the streets. Why book someone when the cases go nowhere? https://youtu.be/bpAi70WWBlw?t=493 https://youtu.be/bpAi70WWBlw?t=493 Another highlight: https://youtu.be/bpAi70WWBlw?t=981 https://youtu.be/bpAi70WWBlw?t=981 They finally created a program last year to address repeat offenders: https://www.fox13seattle.com/news/seattle-crime-118-repeat-offenders-to-get-special-treatment-in-effort-to-protect-public-safety https://www.fox13seattle.com/news/seattle-crime-118-repeat-o...
cannabis_sam 3y ago
https://pastebin.com/qc35SG1G https://pastebin.com/qc35SG1G (if anybody else got blocked through the web archive link. If not allowed please delete)
leeroyjenkins11 3y ago
Wow, amazing, the policies of LA and CA aren't effective, even in 2019? Maybe the article should be titled police in LA and Riverside have stopped putting themselves in high risk situations, and focus on traffic violations. Maybe it has something to do with DAs not prosecuting crimes or reclassifing crimes.
- wahnfrieden 3y ago
  You have contrary stats on police elsewhere in America? If not please take your parroted culture war talking points somewhere else
- ecf 3y ago
  [flagged]
ooterness 3y ago
I'm not sure that "time spent directly addressing violent crimes" is the best heuristic. By that metric, Judge Dredd is the best officer of all time. Mega City One is not a nice place to live.
- wahnfrieden 3y ago
  well article says "serious or violent crime". it doesn't propose "time spent on violent crime" as a measure of effectiveness. it says that they don't accomplish much with the violent crime that does occur already. presumably because they are more fussed over pretext stops.
ecf 3y ago
Police spending most of their time enforcing traffic? That’s a shock to me because I’d count half a dozen easy tickets for cars parked in protected bike lanes while commuting to work in Oakland.
- wahnfrieden 3y ago
  The article talks about how their traffic focus is generally for pretext stops. Parking violations aren’t helpful for pretext stops.
deterministic 3y ago
The primary objective of police around the world is to maintain order and status quo. Solving crimes indirectly helps with that by reducing the number of people who choose to enforce the laws themselves. Less disruptive shootings in the streets.

129 points by wahnfrieden 3y ago

these numbers[data] came from the article : [In 2019, 88% of the time L.A. County sheriff’s officers spent on stops was for officer-initiated stops rather than in response to calls. The overwhelming majority of that time – 79% – was spent on traffic violations. By contrast, just 11% of those hours was spent on stops based on reasonable suspicion of a crime. In Riverside, about 83% of deputies’ time spent on officer-initiated stops went toward traffic violations, and just 7% on stops based on reasonable suspicion. Moreover, most of the stops are pointless, other than inconveniencing citizens, or worse – “a routine practice of pretextual stops,” researchers wrote. Roughly three out of every four hours that Sacramento sheriff’s officers spent investigating traffic violations were for stops that ended in warnings, or no action]. [0] The report was published Oct. 25 by advocacy group Catalyst California and the ACLU of Southern California. It relies on county budgets' numbers and new policing data provided under the state’s Racial and Identity Profiling Act, which took effect in 2019. [1] Report https://catalyst-ca.cdn.prismic.io/catalyst-ca/126c30a8-852c-416a-b8a7-55a90c77a04e_APCA+ACLU+REIMAGINING+COMMUNITY+SAFETY+2022_5.pdf https://catalyst-ca.cdn.prismic.io/catalyst-ca/126c30a8-852c... [PDF]

throwaway33381 3y ago
I feel as though this isn't that surprising when you realize that for most municipalities police forces are revenue generators. Meaning that their main job is in increasing the funding of the precincts they belong to by issuing tickets to traffic violators. You could go a step forward and say they are systemically incentivized to target specific groups due to them being perceived as outsiders but I think a lot of police precincts still enforce broken window theory.
- wahnfrieden 3y ago
  Pretext stops don’t generate ticketing revenue. They’re used in the hopes of finding more serious (by law anyway) crimes once they’re able to get a closer look.
  - ceejayoz 3y ago
    > Pretext stops don’t generate ticketing revenue. Sure they do. They’re still getting the broken taillight fine after the cop searches the car.
    - wahnfrieden 3y ago
      3/4 end with warnings or no action. They’re not pursuing dangerous drivers or fines, they’re pursuing targets they think they can escalate to more serious charges (such as weed possession, in other states anyway)
- nxx788 3y ago
  [dead]
tremon 3y ago
most of the stops are pointless, other than inconveniencing citizens [..] that ended in warnings Such actions are most emphatically NOT pointless, they are preventative: informing someone that their bad behaviour is noticed is often enough to keep well-meaning citizens on the right side of the law. What's your proposed alternative? That every interaction with the police must result in a fine?
- deepfriedchokes 3y ago
  Isn’t that really just harassment and intimidation?
  - kentt 3y ago
    Totally depends. It's easy to imagine a situation where responding to a noise complaint would ideally finish with a warning.
    - llbeansandrice 3y ago
      The data is specifically referring to officer initiated traffic stops. Noise complaints are often reported by neighbors and then responded to. So cops are just stopping drivers and giving them warnings. It sounds like harassment to me.
  - rolph 3y ago
    in the case of a stop that quickly becomes a terry stop. in the case of i stopped you because -rear lights, i see noone else has a notation on your marker, go get it repaired, right now...then your free to go, thats how i generally see a traffic stop actually being a traffic stop.
  - rocqua 3y ago
    "Hey, your tail light is out. Won't give you a ticket this time, but please do get it fixed". Is neither harassement nor intimidation. But it does remind people that these things are noticed, and that failing to fix a taillight might actually earn you a fine.
bluepizza 3y ago
Aren't accidents something like the third largest cause of death in the US? Sounds quite logical to me that they'd spend the largest amount of time and resources on that.
- wahnfrieden 3y ago
  These are pretext stops. They target people they aim to escalate charges with, not dangerous drivers. That’s why they end with minor warnings.
  - the_lego 3y ago
    How does the data distinguish between a pretext stop, and a stop for a genuine traffic infraction, like minor speeding or a broken light, that a cop uses their discretion on and issues only a warning? Naively, forcing cops to apply the law even more strictly and always issue fines for minor violations, is not something we want, is it?
ldoughty 3y ago
The source material makes it sound like the traffic stops are like.... profiling people and wasting their time... The 79% on traffic stops is an officer acting on what they classified to be a traffic violation -- it's not 79% of them are pretextual stops & warnings, and 11% are catching speeders/reckless drivers... it's 79% pulling over speeders/reckless/etc. drivers and 11% "reasonable suspicion of a crime that is not traffic related" If you think about it that way... People CONSANTLY violate traffic laws... So it's not terribly surprising. I certainly hope calls for help are promptly answered, but that source doesn't seem to include data other than the fact that responding to calls for help takes twice as long as a traffic stop for an officer's time. Edit: removed attribution to parent post
- rolph 3y ago
  actually the entire block of text, is from the article, none are my comments, i posted this for convenience so people would have it righthere. so please take this into account.
- rolph 3y ago
  >>ldoughty I get it, its an honest mistake, in response to a muddy quotation style. cheers

mschuster91 3y ago

Who would have guessed... the problem is that police and especially police unions became behemoths in themselves, effectively being ungovernable and unauditable. And you can't even change that because police can simply refuse to do their job without any repercussions and have done so multiple times [1]. Under the current set of rules, ACAB until proven otherwise. Police, in terms of the institution police, the theories behind policing, and its staff, need to be torn down completely and replaced by something entirely new, based on an actual legally defined purpose which was democratically decided and with clear metrics, transparency and accountability on all levels. No charlatans like Dave Grossman ("Killology") and his ilk should be allowed anywhere near a police precinct. [1] https://www.propublica.org/article/what-can-mayors-do-when-the-police-stop-doing-their-jobs https://www.propublica.org/article/what-can-mayors-do-when-t...

inamberclad 3y ago
I find it amazing that the police of a given city will protest anything they think is unfair refusing to work. How is this not armed mutiny?
influx 3y ago
I was with you until you used the inflammatory ACAB term. It’s incredibly offensive and doesn’t help your argument.
- kacesensitive 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - gruez 3y ago
    So? How is that relevant to this discussion? You're the first person bringing the phrase up.
- mschuster91 3y ago
  Of course it is offensive. But so are all the "cops" who follow the Korpsgeist and keep their mouths shut when they see their colleagues openly break the law. Or those that spend 80% of their work time on "traffic stops" aka harassing Black people and other minorities. Remember George Floyd or all the others who died under suspicious circumstances without a bystander live-streaming their deaths.

slibhb 3y ago

California should pursue a "reimagination of community safety". The rest of the country can watch the results play out. Either way we'll learn something.

ceejayoz 3y ago
https://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-proactive-policing-crime-20170925-story.html https://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-proacti... > When New York police officers temporarily reduced their “proactive policing” efforts on low-level offenses, major-crime reports in the city actually fell, according to a study based on New York Police Department crime statistics.
- gruez 3y ago
  This doesn't pass the sniff test >[...] the NYPD held a work “slowdown” for about seven weeks [...] >[...] The scientists found that civilian complaints of major crimes dropped by about 3% to 6% during the slowdown. [...] If we assume that "complaints of major crimes" is a reliable proxy of actual major crimes being committed, as the article suggests, what are we supposed to conclude from this? That within weeks of the police not catching people for minor crimes, that criminals called an armistice stopped committing crimes? Or 3-6% of "major crimes" were only committed because police were doing stop and frisk? I'm aware of arguments about how aggressive policing creates a cycle of broken families and thereby creating future criminals, but that can't explain the effect materializing within weeks.
  - ceejayoz 3y ago
    The cops had more time to spend on more significant issues seems to be the fairly obvious conclusion.
ddq 3y ago
I think the reimagining should start at the community level and grow. Town, city, county, up to state level. Hell, start at both ends and meet in the middle. Top-down change seems like it’d benefit a lot from bottom-up support.

idlewords 3y ago

This is the same logic as arguing cats are bad at rodent control because they spend very little time each day catching mice.

tycho-newman 3y ago
The cats that are good at rodent control, almost by definition, will not need to spend a lot of time chasing mice. They are efficient mouse catchers. Considering the abysmal clearance rates while violent crime rates have gone down, it is clear these cats are not good at catching mice. There is some other factor at work.
- idlewords 3y ago
  The smell of even the most inept cat still scares off mice.
- User23 3y ago
  Why would the police bother to catch criminals in the big left wing cities? Carjackers are being let off without even an agreement. The electorate has clearly communicated that they don't want the laws enforced if they have disparate impact. This is democracy in action, doing the will of the people. Where is the problem? Edit: It's not a rhetorical question. If you disagree please tell me where the problem is. I don't agree with the policy decisions in question, but I respect democracy so I live with being in the minority whose policy preferences aren't enacted. That is how the system is meant to work, right?
wahnfrieden 3y ago
No it’s not.
- idlewords 3y ago
  I'm afraid to say that it is, too.
  - Rury 3y ago

KennyBlanken 3y ago

> Roughly three out of every four hours that Sacramento sheriff’s officers spent investigating traffic violations were for stops that ended in warnings, or no action, for example. And we wonder why our roadways are among the most dangerous in the world, especially for people not in enclosed motor vehicles. On rare occasion when people are stopped it's for racist reasons, they're not ticketed (because the cops were looking for drugs and guns, you know Real Police Stuff) so motorists learn there's no consequences to dangerous behavior. Things aren't much better on the other coast, with NYPD issuing the vast majority of bicycling tickets to non-white riders: https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2022/01/04/nypds-racial-bias-in-ticketing-cyclists-continued-last-year https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2022/01/04/nypds-racial-bias-in-... This is the real icing on the cake: > The new data follows similar reporting by Streetsblog, which revealed that police issued a whopping 99 percent of tickets for jaywalking to Black and Hispanic New Yorkers during the first quarter of 2020 — a stat that worsened after Streetsblog's initial expose. A City Council bill to decriminalize jaywalking was held up in committee, and would have to be resubmitted by a new council member.

smallstepforman 3y ago

The primary purpose of law enforcement officers is to maintain the authority of the state. Preventing crime is an indirect activity. However, in thousands of years of organised goverment, its the best system we currently have.

justnotworthit 3y ago
you may be interested in James C. Scott's books. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Not_Being_Governed https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Not_Being_Governe... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_C._Scott#Major_works https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_C._Scott#Major_works
Super_Jambo 3y ago
America's varied policing systems seem to be wildly worse than average for the developed west.
- ekam 3y ago
  In what ways?
- polski-g 3y ago
  That is because America is largely under-policed: https://twitter.com/SwannMarcus89/status/1675570458069028866 https://twitter.com/SwannMarcus89/status/1675570458069028866 Increasing police staff by 10% reduces violent crime by 13%: https://twitter.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1650723590306689026 https://twitter.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/16507235903066890...
konschubert 3y ago
Those are the same things.
- wahnfrieden 3y ago
  If it were true, wage theft would be the priority over shoplifting as it’s by far the largest category of theft

thuridas 3y ago

We should measure a police department response to reporting a stolen mobile device with active localization. How eager is the police to fight a real crime. I have a personal hypothesis that that some small locations depend too much on traffic fines and pay for productivity pluses. Most of those fines will be from outsiders. Probably it all started with an unexpected income, a proud politician announcing tax reductions and traffic fines become a real need for this location

wahnfrieden 3y ago
These are primarily pretext stops, not revenue generating ones. They profile based on their perceived likelihood of escalating to a more severe crime - that is, the crimes they're interested in pursuing with the people they're interested in. (If they actually prioritized crime severity, they would prioritize visibly rich business owners over the poverty-stricken or marginalized populations given that wage theft is by far the largest category of theft)
- halostatue 3y ago
  In the U.S., they mostly profile based on skin colour, even if they claim otherwise. (In Canada, it’s also mostly on skin colour, but depending on the region, they’re probably looking far more for Indigenous peoples, and it’s just as wrong as American policing.)
quickthrower2 3y ago
I remember someone on HN said (and I believe it) that in SF they wont come out for a burglary. Because there is too much more problematic crime than that.
drewbug01 3y ago
> I have a personal hypothesis that that some small locations depend too much on traffic fines Your personal hypothesis has substantial basis in fact: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/31/us/police-ticket-quotas-money-funding.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/31/us/police-ticket-quotas-m...

cantrevealname 3y ago

> fruitless traffic stops than responses to service calls As a counterargument, I read somewhere that the number one way that serious criminals are caught is due to motor vehicle violations. The theory being that someone who doesn't care about laws against serious acts cares even less about traffic laws. Timothy McVeigh was caught because he was stopped for driving without a license plate on his car. Law enforcement perhaps would never have solved one of the biggest crimes in U.S. history if the police had not made a minor traffic stop.

prepend 3y ago
Yes of course if you stop lots of people you will find criminals. If you go door to door you will as well. Stop and frisk reduced crime as well. It’s like the fact that the greater the number of people in jail, the lower the crime rate. It’s true because a certain percentage of people commit crimes and if they’re in jail, they won’t. That doesn’t mean we should go these things. We need to evaluate net impact. Or just not do things that are wrong even if they have utilitarian benefit.
- lamontcg 3y ago
  > Yes of course if you stop lots of people you will find criminals. If you go door to door you will as well. "papers, please"
Eisenstein 3y ago
That is like saying 'we need to cure heart attacks because most people die of heart attacks'. Something has to kill you -- when your heart stops that's a heart attack. Someone had to catch McVeigh -- it just so happened it was cop that pulled him over. If we focused resources on the community instead of punitive 'catch the offenders (if it is convenient, like, you already stopped them)' maybe McVeigh wouldn't have wanted to blow up a Federal building because the FBI was involved in a string of mis-advised deadly interactions where they shot first and asked questions later (Waco, Ruby Ridge -- this is what McVeigh was specifically pissed about).
- 3y ago

mabbo 3y ago

My brother is law is a British police officer. He laughs at how much effort we spend in the US and Canada policing traffic. "We just have cameras. They do the same work for free." His job is to investigate violent and serious crimes, rather than to bother motorists.

fsckboy 3y ago
does he suggest that if we put police cameras in people's homes that would eliminate a lot of domestic incidents? The issue is a bit more nuanced than he's making out.
- edu 3y ago
  The difference between public and private space is pretty clear.
  - 8organicbits 3y ago
    There's also pretty clear ways to protect privacy in public. Cameras should only collect photos when they detect a violation.
    - edu 3y ago
      Yes, totally agree on that.
mjevans 3y ago
Traffic cameras are not a safety encouragement device. I'd classify them as a 'revenue generating device' or a regressive tax. I would feel much safer if the majority of police resources were allocated to the 'worst' violations of the laws (hardest crimes) first.
- 8organicbits 3y ago
  Why do you believe they don't provide safety? Some countries apply fines proportional to income, so there's no inherent need for them to be regressive. Having driven in places where some roads are dotted with cameras and others are bare, the driving behavior is clearly altered. With cameras present, most drivers don't speed. Others speed just below the ticket threshold (+5mph?), or speed only between the cameras. On the roads without cameras drivers are often 10-15mph over the limit with some even faster.

worik 3y ago

Backwards. What we want is the police to prevent crime, not stop it. Their role in that project is not to solve every crime but catch every criminal. I imagine they do not do well from that metric either. In too many places the police are the army of the rich controlling the plebians

mschuster91 3y ago
> What we want is the police to prevent crime, not stop it. Police aren't a hammer, that is the first problem. A lot of crime comes from poverty, drug usage and mental health issues. Fix that and crime goes down, without the followup costs of throwing people into jail where nothing improves in their lives.
quickthrower2 3y ago
You need to solve most crimes to catch every criminal, because of justice. And the simple problem of knowing who the criminals are.
nxx788 3y ago
[dead]

shmde 3y ago

I was shocked to see how absolutely callous american police was while browsing this youtube channel [1]. Many of these are incidents where death was EASILY avoidable. There are videos where the "Police" openly shoots at a group of people because one of them was the suspect. Maybe this callousness is a direct result of lax gun laws ? [1] https://youtube.com/@PoliceActivity https://youtube.com/@PoliceActivity

cratermoon 3y ago

It's been a long time since I believed that police fight crime. I read an article a long while back in which policemen described themselves as humanity's janitors. They felt their job was about going to places and dealing with situations and events most people would prefer to believe don't exist. If a crime happened to be the cause, they'd take a report, but mostly they were just picking up the pieces of people's lives after they'd been destroyed by poverty, addiction, greed, or hate.

neonate 3y ago

http://web.archive.org/web/20230729211626/https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/police-are-not-primarily-crime-fighters-according-data-2022-11-02/ http://web.archive.org/web/20230729211626/https://www.reuter...

oatmeal1 3y ago

In Seattle at least, this wouldn't be surprising. Criminals with 34 cases since 2014 including allegations of attempted rape out on the streets. Why book someone when the cases go nowhere? https://youtu.be/bpAi70WWBlw?t=493 https://youtu.be/bpAi70WWBlw?t=493 Another highlight: https://youtu.be/bpAi70WWBlw?t=981 https://youtu.be/bpAi70WWBlw?t=981 They finally created a program last year to address repeat offenders: https://www.fox13seattle.com/news/seattle-crime-118-repeat-offenders-to-get-special-treatment-in-effort-to-protect-public-safety https://www.fox13seattle.com/news/seattle-crime-118-repeat-o...

cannabis_sam 3y ago

https://pastebin.com/qc35SG1G https://pastebin.com/qc35SG1G (if anybody else got blocked through the web archive link. If not allowed please delete)

leeroyjenkins11 3y ago

Wow, amazing, the policies of LA and CA aren't effective, even in 2019? Maybe the article should be titled police in LA and Riverside have stopped putting themselves in high risk situations, and focus on traffic violations. Maybe it has something to do with DAs not prosecuting crimes or reclassifing crimes.

wahnfrieden 3y ago
You have contrary stats on police elsewhere in America? If not please take your parroted culture war talking points somewhere else
ecf 3y ago
[flagged]

ooterness 3y ago

I'm not sure that "time spent directly addressing violent crimes" is the best heuristic. By that metric, Judge Dredd is the best officer of all time. Mega City One is not a nice place to live.

wahnfrieden 3y ago
well article says "serious or violent crime". it doesn't propose "time spent on violent crime" as a measure of effectiveness. it says that they don't accomplish much with the violent crime that does occur already. presumably because they are more fussed over pretext stops.

ecf 3y ago

Police spending most of their time enforcing traffic? That’s a shock to me because I’d count half a dozen easy tickets for cars parked in protected bike lanes while commuting to work in Oakland.

wahnfrieden 3y ago
The article talks about how their traffic focus is generally for pretext stops. Parking violations aren’t helpful for pretext stops.

deterministic 3y ago

The primary objective of police around the world is to maintain order and status quo. Solving crimes indirectly helps with that by reducing the number of people who choose to enforce the laws themselves. Less disruptive shootings in the streets.