On Policing effectiveness
Crime rates are way down. But despite a lighter work load clearance rates have crashed even further. So it's not the police solving crimes and putting criminals away that are lowering rates.
And jeesh if the work load drops but your ability or willingness to clear the cases despite ever rising budgets, as a taxpayer, I don't see a very effective use of the budget. In any other environment decreasing performance should result in a loss of revenue. Either the funds are being poorly allocated in departments hampering capacity, or the extra funds are a poor allocation.
Especially when considering, again, that actual crime fighting is a small part of the police budget.
Perhaps more of those functions should be allocated to other, unarmed parts of the bureaucracy (CSA's), allocated to alternative methods of enforcement (e.g., social workers and me talk health response for mental health crises), and the like to allow police to focus on the small crime portion of their activities, or less patrol and other officers funding (like all this militarized BS) with a shift to the investigation/detective force to clear cases. Since we see patrol isn't deterring or preventing crime, detective work needs to be a bigger share of personnel and budget.
And good grief, we're just getting shit for our money with the current model. 1000+ killed annually, far more than in any comparable developed country, cops who won't engage active shooters, abuse of protesters on top of poor protection and clearance rates.
" But another concerning statistic involves the fact that the nationwide “crime wave,” in both its real and imagined components, has been met with a similar nationwide collapse in “clearance rates,” the rate at which those crimes are “solved” via an arrest and a charge being brought (there are, of course, plenty of reasons to take issue with equating an arrest to a crime being solved-more on that later). According to the most recent data published by the FBI, the rates at which police forces are solving crimes have plunged to historic lows. In the case of murders and violent crime, clearance rates have dipped to just 50 percent, a startling decline from the 1980s, when police cleared 70 percent of all homicides.
More from Alexander Sammon
It’s not just murder. Manslaughter is down to 69 percent clearance from 90 percent forty years ago. Clearances in assault and rape cases have dropped to 47 percent and 30 percent, respectively. Nonviolent property crimes like burglary (which involves illegally entering a property), theft (which involves taking property from another person), and motor vehicle theft are getting solved at a microscopic 14 percent, 15 percent, and 12 percent, respectively. According to “Crime and the Mythology of Police,” a recent article published in the Washington University Law Review by University of Utah law professor Shima Baradaran Baughman, “on a good year, police solve less than a quarter of reported cases.” And we haven’t seen good years lately."