Police in a Dies The Fire Scenario
When I was trying to figure out what would actually happen in a Dies The Fire situation, I wondered what the big municipal police departments would do. My initial reaction was that they would stay, try to maintain order in the cities, and get overwhelmed. The more I think about it, the more I question that. I would have to look it up again, but I seem to remember a very large percentage (supposedly around 15%) of New Orleans police basically disappearing for a while at the height of the chaos after Katrina, doing a 'me and my family first' routine. That's sort of understandable, especially in one case where a guy got his disabled wife out of town and ended up getting fired for it, but they were getting the big bucks to protect the public, not go away in a crisis
How the police reacted would make a big difference in how events played out in the big cities. These are rather large bodies of men with at least some cohesion and training at reacting to violence. I was surprised at how big some of the US police departments are. I believe that Chicago has something like 12,000 uniformed police officers, not counting administrative types. That's a substantial number. New York has just under 35,000 uniformed police officers, not counting a lot of auxiliaries and Los Angeles has over 10,000. British departments are pretty big too. It looks like London has over 30,000 officers.
As an aside, Detroit has just under 2800 police officers for 700,000 people, and accounts for two-thirds of the murders among Michigan’s 9.883 million people.
New Orleans is perhaps a special case in that the police department is among the most corrupt in the country, with officers getting caught, eventually, for murder, in one case robbing banks on a lunch hour, etc. It’s probably not an accident that New Orleans has one of the highest murder rates in the country, nearly ten times the national average and roughly four times the average for cities of that size. When police are extremely corrupt, residents are afraid to help with investigations, which makes crimes very hard to solve, even when the cops are actually trying to solve them.
On the other hand, about 85% of New Orleans cops apparently did stay on the job during Katrina, which isn’t bad given the level of corruption there.
The unfortunate reality is that the US has at least half a dozen cities with levels of government corruption that would be at home in the third world, and not surprisingly, the murder rates in those cities are in the third world range. In terms of murder rates, New Orleans ranks 21st in the world among major cities, with all the cities above them in Mexico or Central or South America. Detroit comes in at number 30, with St Louis and Baltimore also in the top 50. For what it is worth, Brazil has 14 cities in the top 50 for murder rates. Mexico has 12. Columbia has 5. The US and South Africa each have 4, and the rest are pretty scattered. Of course that assumes that the figures are comparable and honest, which I doubt. Russia appears to have around twice the homicide rate per hundred thousand people that the US does, even after a huge drop that seems statistically improbable, but no Russian cities are on the top 50 list.
I wonder if homicide rates, if they're roughly accurate, could be an indicator of how well a city would hang together in a crisis. High murder rates in ordinary times might indicate an extremely corrupt city government that would quickly fall apart in any crisis like Dies the Fire.
Mexico having so many cities with high murder rates isn’t a surprise, given the cartel activity there, but Brazil does surprise me. Their overall, countrywide homicide rate is higher than our rate for big, out of control cities.
By the way, if other US cities are like Chicago, the homicide rates are really quite low over most of the city, with a couple districts accounting for almost all the homicides--the traditional red light districts where the big drug deals happen and the police only go in force.
How accurate are homicide rate figures? Probably not very, even if the authorities are conscientious at recording it. Murder, of all crimes is probably the one people are most likely to work hard at covering up, more so in areas with good police forces than in areas with bad ones. How many deaths by natural causes are actually homicides? How many disappearances are really murders where the murderer has successful hidden or destroyed the body? I’m reasonably sure the actual murder rate in pretty much every country of the world where there is reasonable police presence is a fairly high multiple of the reported murder rate. Individuals who get away with murder are probably fairly common, and older, established criminal organizations disappear their enemies so they never show up in the murder rate if the organizations care to do so.
To be even more cynical, I suspect that wealthy families without obvious ties to the criminal side of things also have ways of making homicides disappear. That’s certainly true in South America, at least according to a friend of mine with a sister who married into a wealthy Columbian family with no ties, as far as he knew, to the drug trade. One of the teenagers in the family got drunk and ran down some kids, killing them. The family paid the right people and what would have been some kind of manslaughter quietly went away.
The Mexican cartels stand out partly because they flaunt their murders as an intimidation tactic.
The cynic in me wonders if some of the difference between urban and rural crime rates is that in rural areas there are less likely to be witnesses and there is far more room to hide bodies.
That same cynic also wonders if a big part of the difference between low homicide cities and countries versus high homicide ones is how hard murderers work to conceal their crime, which is probably mainly a function of how much they fear the police. Fear of the police and better concealment of the crime probably doesn’t account for all the difference. I’m guessing that murder is kind of a Rubicon, where once a person crosses it, they are far more likely to cross it again if they don’t get caught the first time. So a big part of low homicide rates is catching a murderer the first time, or at least early in their career.
And if there is political pressure to keep official homicide rates low, I can see police departments not reporting doubtful cases as homicides. Guy has an apparent heart attack with no risk factors. There is no obvious suspect. Do you push an investigation and screen for the less obvious drugs that might have induced a heart attack? If the promotion incentives say that unsolved homicides are a very bad thing that can keep you a beat cop or bust you back down there, I’m guessing that a substantial percentage of police decide not to pursue the cases where there is nagging suspicion but no solid evidence yet of homicide.
To a certain extent, at the margins, a police department can decide how many homicides they had in a year (within limits) by looking harder at the doubtful cases or not doing so. So the cynic in me comes out again and says that high homicide rates actually far understate the problem and falling homicide rates are likely to be the result of a police department getting quietly signaled not to pursue borderline cases.
A friend of mine who has spent his summers in Japan the last several years and is married to a Japanese lady claims that the police there have an unwritten policy that what happens inside the large semi-official red light districts there doesn’t officially happen unless something forces the police to respond. The crime families can kill each other all they want as long as they don’t leave bodies laying around, generally avoid killing tourists, and restrict their activities to the designated areas. The police clamp down hard when the local crime bosses step out of line, as they did a few years ago when a wild sword battle spilled out into a business district, and Japanese police can be very intimidating when they need to be.
And this has ventured a long way from Dies the Fire. Back to police in a Dies The Fire scenario. In a DTF scenario the public in big cities is not really not protectable, at least not in the long run, so I could see the police trying to protect their families and get them to safety as opposed to trying to fight back the general tide of chaos. I suspect it would depend partly on political and police department leadership. If the leadership started trying to use the police to get their own families out, the result would probably be the police deciding that if families are going to be gotten out it will be their own families, not the families of their leaders.
In some areas, the police might have enough cohesion to break out into the suburbs as coherent bodies of several hundred men, along with their families. Groups like that would be more formidable challenges than random refugees for the suburbs. Based on the people I see around me, most city types who haven’t been camping or hiking would be little threat to anyone after walking twenty plus miles through the cold, except that a lot of locals would take pity on them and share stuff that they didn’t have enough of.
How the police reacted would make a big difference in how events played out in the big cities. These are rather large bodies of men with at least some cohesion and training at reacting to violence. I was surprised at how big some of the US police departments are. I believe that Chicago has something like 12,000 uniformed police officers, not counting administrative types. That's a substantial number. New York has just under 35,000 uniformed police officers, not counting a lot of auxiliaries and Los Angeles has over 10,000. British departments are pretty big too. It looks like London has over 30,000 officers.
As an aside, Detroit has just under 2800 police officers for 700,000 people, and accounts for two-thirds of the murders among Michigan’s 9.883 million people.
New Orleans is perhaps a special case in that the police department is among the most corrupt in the country, with officers getting caught, eventually, for murder, in one case robbing banks on a lunch hour, etc. It’s probably not an accident that New Orleans has one of the highest murder rates in the country, nearly ten times the national average and roughly four times the average for cities of that size. When police are extremely corrupt, residents are afraid to help with investigations, which makes crimes very hard to solve, even when the cops are actually trying to solve them.
On the other hand, about 85% of New Orleans cops apparently did stay on the job during Katrina, which isn’t bad given the level of corruption there.
The unfortunate reality is that the US has at least half a dozen cities with levels of government corruption that would be at home in the third world, and not surprisingly, the murder rates in those cities are in the third world range. In terms of murder rates, New Orleans ranks 21st in the world among major cities, with all the cities above them in Mexico or Central or South America. Detroit comes in at number 30, with St Louis and Baltimore also in the top 50. For what it is worth, Brazil has 14 cities in the top 50 for murder rates. Mexico has 12. Columbia has 5. The US and South Africa each have 4, and the rest are pretty scattered. Of course that assumes that the figures are comparable and honest, which I doubt. Russia appears to have around twice the homicide rate per hundred thousand people that the US does, even after a huge drop that seems statistically improbable, but no Russian cities are on the top 50 list.
I wonder if homicide rates, if they're roughly accurate, could be an indicator of how well a city would hang together in a crisis. High murder rates in ordinary times might indicate an extremely corrupt city government that would quickly fall apart in any crisis like Dies the Fire.
Mexico having so many cities with high murder rates isn’t a surprise, given the cartel activity there, but Brazil does surprise me. Their overall, countrywide homicide rate is higher than our rate for big, out of control cities.
By the way, if other US cities are like Chicago, the homicide rates are really quite low over most of the city, with a couple districts accounting for almost all the homicides--the traditional red light districts where the big drug deals happen and the police only go in force.
How accurate are homicide rate figures? Probably not very, even if the authorities are conscientious at recording it. Murder, of all crimes is probably the one people are most likely to work hard at covering up, more so in areas with good police forces than in areas with bad ones. How many deaths by natural causes are actually homicides? How many disappearances are really murders where the murderer has successful hidden or destroyed the body? I’m reasonably sure the actual murder rate in pretty much every country of the world where there is reasonable police presence is a fairly high multiple of the reported murder rate. Individuals who get away with murder are probably fairly common, and older, established criminal organizations disappear their enemies so they never show up in the murder rate if the organizations care to do so.
To be even more cynical, I suspect that wealthy families without obvious ties to the criminal side of things also have ways of making homicides disappear. That’s certainly true in South America, at least according to a friend of mine with a sister who married into a wealthy Columbian family with no ties, as far as he knew, to the drug trade. One of the teenagers in the family got drunk and ran down some kids, killing them. The family paid the right people and what would have been some kind of manslaughter quietly went away.
The Mexican cartels stand out partly because they flaunt their murders as an intimidation tactic.
The cynic in me wonders if some of the difference between urban and rural crime rates is that in rural areas there are less likely to be witnesses and there is far more room to hide bodies.
That same cynic also wonders if a big part of the difference between low homicide cities and countries versus high homicide ones is how hard murderers work to conceal their crime, which is probably mainly a function of how much they fear the police. Fear of the police and better concealment of the crime probably doesn’t account for all the difference. I’m guessing that murder is kind of a Rubicon, where once a person crosses it, they are far more likely to cross it again if they don’t get caught the first time. So a big part of low homicide rates is catching a murderer the first time, or at least early in their career.
And if there is political pressure to keep official homicide rates low, I can see police departments not reporting doubtful cases as homicides. Guy has an apparent heart attack with no risk factors. There is no obvious suspect. Do you push an investigation and screen for the less obvious drugs that might have induced a heart attack? If the promotion incentives say that unsolved homicides are a very bad thing that can keep you a beat cop or bust you back down there, I’m guessing that a substantial percentage of police decide not to pursue the cases where there is nagging suspicion but no solid evidence yet of homicide.
To a certain extent, at the margins, a police department can decide how many homicides they had in a year (within limits) by looking harder at the doubtful cases or not doing so. So the cynic in me comes out again and says that high homicide rates actually far understate the problem and falling homicide rates are likely to be the result of a police department getting quietly signaled not to pursue borderline cases.
A friend of mine who has spent his summers in Japan the last several years and is married to a Japanese lady claims that the police there have an unwritten policy that what happens inside the large semi-official red light districts there doesn’t officially happen unless something forces the police to respond. The crime families can kill each other all they want as long as they don’t leave bodies laying around, generally avoid killing tourists, and restrict their activities to the designated areas. The police clamp down hard when the local crime bosses step out of line, as they did a few years ago when a wild sword battle spilled out into a business district, and Japanese police can be very intimidating when they need to be.
And this has ventured a long way from Dies the Fire. Back to police in a Dies The Fire scenario. In a DTF scenario the public in big cities is not really not protectable, at least not in the long run, so I could see the police trying to protect their families and get them to safety as opposed to trying to fight back the general tide of chaos. I suspect it would depend partly on political and police department leadership. If the leadership started trying to use the police to get their own families out, the result would probably be the police deciding that if families are going to be gotten out it will be their own families, not the families of their leaders.
In some areas, the police might have enough cohesion to break out into the suburbs as coherent bodies of several hundred men, along with their families. Groups like that would be more formidable challenges than random refugees for the suburbs. Based on the people I see around me, most city types who haven’t been camping or hiking would be little threat to anyone after walking twenty plus miles through the cold, except that a lot of locals would take pity on them and share stuff that they didn’t have enough of.