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Several years ago, when my oldest son had only been driving for around a year, he set out to take care of some things in an unfamiliar area about 30 minutes north of where we live. Of course he was using Google Maps, and as he neared his destination he realized he was about to miss his turn. Panicking, he immediately cranked the wheel of our van hard to the right, and actually ended up undershooting the turn, running into a curb and popping the front passenger side tire.
He texted me and I explained where the spare was, and then over several other texts I guided him in putting it on. When he was finally done I told him not to take the van on the freeway because the spare wasn’t designed to go over 55. An hour later when he wasn’t home I tried calling him thinking that if he was driving I didn’t want him trying to text. After a couple of rings it went to voicemail, which seemed weird, so after a few minutes I tried texting him. He responded with this message:
I just got in another accident with another driver I’m so so so sorry. I have his license plate number, what else do I need to do?
Obviously my first question was whether he was alright. He said he was and that the van was still drivable (as it turned out, just barely…) He had been trying to get home without using the freeway and had naturally ended up in a part of town he was unfamiliar with. Arriving at an intersection, and already flustered by the blown tire and by how long it was taking, he thought it was a four-way stop, but instead only the street he was on had a stop sign. In his defence, there was a railroad crossing right next to the intersection on the other street, and so everything necessary to stop cross traffic was there, it just wasn’t active. Nor did it act anything like a four way stop.
In any event, after determining that no one else was stopped at what he thought were the other stop signs he proceeded and immediately got hit on the passenger side by someone coming down the other street. As I said the van was drivable, but just barely, and the insurance didn’t end up totaling it, but once again just barely. As it turns out the other driver was in a rental car, and as a side note, being hit by a rental car with full coverage in an accident with no injuries led to the other driver being very chill and understanding about the whole thing, so that was nice. Though I imagine the rental car company got every dime out of our insurance, certainly our rates went up, by a lot.
Another story…
While I was on my LDS mission in the Netherlands, my Dad wrote to me and related the following incident. He had been called over to my Uncle’s house to help him repair a snowmobile (in those days snowmobiles spent at least as much time being fixed as being ridden). As part of the repair they ended up needing to do some welding, but my dad only had his oxy acetylene setup with him. What he really needed was his arc welder, but that would mean towing the snowmobile trailer all the way back to his house on the other side of town, which seemed like a lot of effort for a fairly simple weld. He just needed to reattach something to the bulkhead.
In order to do this with an oxy acetylene welder you had to put enough heat into the steel for it to start melting. Unfortunately on the other side of the bulkhead was the gas line to the carburetor, and as it started absorbing heat the line melted and gasoline poured out on to the hot steel immediately catching on fire.
With a continual stream of gasoline pouring onto the fire, panic ensued, but it quickly became apparent that they needed to get the snowmobile out of the garage to keep the house from catching on fire. So my Father and Uncle grabbed the trailer and began to drag it into the driveway. Unfortunately the welder was still on the trailer, and it was pulling on the welding cart which had, among other things, a tank full of pure oxygen. My Dad saw this and tried to get my Uncle to stop, but he was far too focused on the fire to pay attention to my Father’s warnings, and so the tank tipped over.
You may not initially understand why this is so bad. Well, when an oxygen tank falls over the valve can snap off. In fact when you’re not using them there’s a special attachment you screw on to cover the valve which doesn’t prevent it from snapping off, but prevents it from becoming a missile if it does. Because, that’s what happens, the pressurized gas turns the big metal cylinder into a giant and very dangerous missile. But beyond that it would have filled the garage they were working in, the garage that already had a significant gasoline fire going with pure oxygen. Whether the fuel air bomb thus created would have been worse or better than the missile which had been created at the same time is hard to say, but both would have been really bad.
Fortunately the valve didn’t snap off, and they were able to get the snowmobile out into the driveway where a man passing by jumped out of his car with a fire extinguisher and put out the blaze. At which point my Father towed the trailer with the snowmobile over to his house, got out his arc welder, and had the weld done in about 30 seconds of actual welding.
What do both of these stories have in common? The panic, haste, and unfamiliar situation caused by making one mistake directly led to making more mistakes, and in both cases the mistakes which followed ended up being worse than the original mistake. Anyone, upon surveying the current scene would agree that mistakes have been made recently. Mistakes that have led to panic, hasty decisions, and most of all put us in very unfamiliar situations. When this happens people are likely to make additional mistakes, and this is true not only for individuals at intersections, and small groups working in garages, but also true at the level of nations, whether those nations are battling pandemics or responding to a particularly egregious example of police brutality or both at the same time.
If everyone acknowledges that mistakes have been made (which I think is indisputable) and further grants that the chaos caused by an initial mistake makes further mistakes more likely (less indisputable, but still largely unobjectionable I would assume). Where does that leave us? Saying that further mistakes are going to happen is straightforward enough, but it’s still a long way from that to identifying those mistakes before we make them, and farther still from identifying the mistakes to actually preventing them, since the power to prevent has to overlap with the insight to identify, which is, unfortunately, rarely the case.
As you might imagine, I am probably not in a position to do much to prevent further mistakes. But you might at least hope that I could lend a hand in identifying them. I will do some of that, but this post, including the two stories I led with, is going to be more about pointing out that such mistakes are almost certainly going to happen, and our best strategy might be to ensure that such mistakes are not catastrophic. If actions were obviously mistakes we wouldn’t take those actions, we only take them because in advance they seem like good ideas. Accordingly this post is about lessening the chance that seemingly good actions will end up being mistakes later, and if they do end up being mistakes, making sure that they’re manageable mistakes rather than catastrophic mistakes. How do we do that?
The first principle I want to put forward is identifying the unknowns. Another way of framing this is asking, “What’s the worst that could happen?” Let me offer two competing examples drawn from current events:
First, masks: Imagine, if, to take an example from a previous post, the US had had a 30 day stockpile of masks for everyone in America, and when the pandemic broke out it had made them available and strongly recommended that people wear them. What’s the worst that could have happened? I’m struggling to come up with anything. I imagine that we might have seen some reaction from hardcore libertarians despite the fact that it was a recommendation, not a requirement. But the worst case is at best mild social unrest, and probably nothing at all.
Next, defunding the police: Now imagine that Minneapolis goes ahead with it’s plan to defund the police, what’s the worst that could happen there? I pick on Steven Pinker a lot, but maybe I can make it up to him a little bit by including a quote of his that has been making the rounds recently:
As a young teenager in proudly peaceable Canada during the romantic 1960s, I was a true believer in Bakunin’s anarchism. I laughed off my parents’ argument that if the government ever laid down its arms all hell would break loose. Our competing predictions were put to the test at 8:00 a.m. on October 7, 1969, when the Montreal police went on strike. By 11:20 am, the first bank was robbed. By noon, most of the downtown stores were closed because of looting. Within a few more hours, taxi drivers burned down the garage of a limousine service that competed with them for airport customers, a rooftop sniper killed a provincial police officer, rioters broke into several hotels and restaurants, and a doctor slew a burglar in his suburban home. By the end of the day, six banks had been robbed, a hundred shops had been looted, twelve fires had been set, forty carloads of storefront glass had been broken, and three million dollars in property damage had been inflicted, before city authorities had to call in the army and, of course, the Mounties to restore order. This decisive empirical test left my politics in tatters (and offered a foretaste of life as a scientist).
Now recall this is just the worst case, I am not saying this is what will happen, in fact I would be surprised if it did, particularly over such a short period. Also, I am not even saying that I’m positive defunding the police is a bad idea. It’s definitely not what I would do, but there’s certainly some chance that it might be an improvement on what we’re currently doing. But just as there’s some chance it might be better, one has to acknowledge that there’s also some chance that it might be worse. Which takes me to the second point.
If something might be a mistake it would be good if we don’t end up all making the same mistake. I’m fine if Minneapolis wants to take the lead on figuring out what it means to defund the police. In fact from the perspective of social science I’m excited about the experiment. I would be far less excited if every municipality decides to do it at the same time. Accordingly my second point is, knowing some of the actions we’re going to take in the wake of an initial mistake are likely to be further mistakes we should avoid all taking the same actions, for fear we all land on an action which turns out to be a further mistake.
I’ve already made this point as far as police violence goes, but we can also see it with masks. For reasons that still leave me baffled the CDC had a policy minimizing masks going all the way back to 2009. But fortunately this was not the case in Southeast Asia, and during the pandemic we got to see how the countries where mask wearing was ubiquitous fared, as it turned out, pretty well. No imagine that the same bad advice had been the standard worldwide. Would it have taken us longer to figure out that masks worked well for protecting against COVID-19? Almost certainly.
So the two rules I have for avoiding the “second mistake” are:
- Consider the worst case scenario of an action before you take it. In particular try to consider the decision in the absence of the first mistake. Or what the decision might look like with the benefit of hindsight. (One clever mind hack I came across asks you to act as if you’ve been sent back in time to fix a horrible mistake, you just don’t know what the mistake was.)
- Avoid having everyone take the same response to the initial mistake. It’s easy in the panic and haste caused by the initial mistake for everyone to default to the same response, but that just makes the initial mistake that much worse if everyone panics into making the same wrong decision.
There are other guidelines as well, and I’ll be discussing some of them in my next post, but these two represent an easy starting point.
Finally, I know I’ve already provided a couple of examples, but there are obviously lots of other recent actions which could be taken or have been taken and you may be wondering what their mistake potential is. To be clear I’m not saying that any of these actions are a mistake, identifying mistakes in advance is really hard, I’m just going to look at them with respect to the standards above.
Let’s start with actions which have been taken or might be taken with respect to the pandemic.
- Rescue package: In response to the pandemic, the US passed a massive aid/spending bill. Adding quite a bit to a national debt that is already quite large. I have maintained for a while that the worst case scenario here is pretty bad. (The arguments around this are fairly deep, with the leading counter argument being that we don’t have to worry because such a failure is impossible.) Additionally while many governments did the same thing, I’m less worried here about doing the same thing everyone else did and more worried about doing the same thing we always do when panic ensues. That is, throw money at things.
- Closing things down/Opening them back up: Both actions seemed to happen quite suddenly and in near unison, with the majority of states doing both nearly simultaneously. I’ve already talked about how there seemed to be very little discussion of the economic effects in pre-pandemic planning and equally not much consideration for what to do in the event of a new outbreak after opening things back up. As far as everyone doing the same thing, as I’ve mentioned before I’m glad that Sweden didn’t shut things down, just like I’d be happy to see Minneapolis try a new path with the police.
- Social unrest: I first had the idea for this post before George Floyd’s death. And at the time it already seemed that people were using COVID as an excuse to further stoke political divisions. That rather than showing forth understanding to those who were harmed by the shutdown they were hurling criticisms. To be clear the worst case scenario on this tactic is a 2nd civil war. Also, not only is everyone making the same mistake of blaming the other side, but similar to spending it also seems to be our go-to tactic these days.
Moving on to the protests and the anger over police brutality:
- The protests themselves: This is another area where the worst case scenario is pretty bad. While we’ve had good luck recently with protests generally fizzling out before anything truly extreme happened, historically there have been lots of times where protests just kept getting bigger and bigger until governments were overthrown, cities burned and thousands died. Also while there have been some exceptions, it’s been remarkable how even worldwide everyone is doing the same thing, gathering downtown in big cities and protesting, and further how the protests all look very similar, with the police confrontations, the tearing down of statues, the yelling, etc.
- The pandemic: I try to be pretty even keeled about things, and it’s an open question whether I actually succeed, but the hypocrisy demonstrated by how quickly media and scientists changed their recommendations when the protests went from being anti-lockdown to anti police brutality was truly amazing both in how blatant and how partisan it was. Clearly there is a danger that the protests will contribute significantly to an increase in COVID cases, and it is difficult to see how arguments about the ability to do things virtually don’t apply here. Certainly whatever damage has been caused as a side effect of the protests would be far less if they had been conducted virtually…
- Defunding the police: While this has already been touched on, the worst case scenario not only appears to be pretty bad, but very likely to occur as well. In particular everything I’ve seen since things started seems to indicate that the solution is to spend more money on policing rather than less. And yet nearly in lock stop most large cities have put forward plans to spend less money on the police.
I confess that these observations are less hard and fast and certainly less scientific than I would have liked. But if it was easy to know how we would end up making the second mistake we wouldn’t make it. Certainly if my son had known the danger of that particular intersection he would have spent the time necessary to figure out it wasn’t a four way stop. Or if my father had known that using the oxy acetylene welder would catch the fuel on fire he would have taken the extra time to move things to his house so he could use the arc welder. And I am certain that when we look back on how we handled the pandemic and the protests that there will be things that turned out to be obvious mistakes. Mistakes which we wish we had avoided. But maybe, if we can be just a little bit wiser and a little less panicky, we can avoid making the second mistake.
It’s possible that you think it was a mistake to read this post, hopefully not, but if it was then I’m going to engage in my own hypocrisy and ask you to, this one time, make a second mistake and donate. To be fair the worst case scenario is not too bad, and everyone is definitely not doing it.
“Within a few more hours, taxi drivers burned down the garage of a limousine service that competed with them for airport customers, a rooftop sniper killed a provincial police officer, rioters broke into several hotels and restaurants, and a doctor slew a burglar in his suburban home. By the end of the day, six banks had been robbed, a hundred shops had been looted, twelve fires had been set, forty carloads of storefront glass had been broken, and three million dollars in property damage had been inflicted, before city authorities had to call in the army and, of course, the Mounties to restore order”
Hmmm. Ok so I’m imaging what I would say if the fire department went on strike for a day and by noon three huge fires had started. I would say it smelled like the fire department set them in order to press their demands.
I mean let’s really think about the alternative here. Are there 6 aspiring bank robberies every day that are thwarted by cops in the city? Or did 6 different bank robbers decide to rob banks on a day that happened to also be the day the police strike started? Or did robbers as well as snipers really read the paper each morning to keep track of police labor negotiations? Or was ‘word’ passed to criminal elements that a certain day would be a good time for them to ‘have their fun’?
I think the argument is that opportunists took advantage of the situation. Not that they would have attempted all this but were stopped, but that the existence of a police department acts as a deterrent. There’s a lot of research on the effects of credible deterrence. For example, when Lojack first came out it had a big deterrence effect on auto theft, with even small numbers of people getting it reducing they because the thieves couldn’t know in advance whether they were taking a car with a built in taking device.
I don’t think that precludes your assertion that the striking police were encouraging criminal activity. I don’t know the cops involved, but I could easily see that happening in a smaller scale.
In order to believe they were involved in arson and other major crimes I’d need some solid evidence. I certainly wouldn’t go so far as to assert that all (or most) of the crime during the strike was initiated by the strikers. That would be an extraordinary claim.
I think the ‘experiment’ strongly supports the idea that a baseline function of police is their deterrence effect.
Let me make sure I’m understanding you correctly. You are positing three theories for what happened in Montreal?
1- The crimes Pinker witnessed represent an average day of crime, only normally such crimes are stopped by the police, who didn’t do it on this day because they were striking.
2- Criminals were aware of the strike and decided to take advantage of it to commit crimes.
3- The police encouraged the criminals to commit crimes on the day of the strike to improve their negotiating position.
If that’s not an accurate restatement of your comment let me know. If it is, then I assumed that Pinker was arguing for #2, I doubt anyone is saying it’s #1 (certainly I wasn’t) and while I imagine that #3 is possible it still seems far less likely than #2.
You seem to be implying that it was unlikely the criminals were reading the paper each morning, or tracking labor negotiations closely enough to know about the strike. I think you’re imagining more effort than would actually have been required. My sense of big labor negotiations in the public sector are that they’re big deals which are heavily reported. With deadlines advanced days in advance. “If the city has not met our demands in the next 48 hours the police will go on strike.”
I imagine a press conference where the union head announces the strike and his regret that an agreement couldn’t be reached that get’s broadcast on all three channels, and a special edition of the morning newspaper with the headline “Police Strike!!!” visible on every street corner.
A more sophisticated argument might be to relate the police budget or police power to the Laffer Curve, or the democracy curve I mentioned in my book review post. Is it possible that minimum crime does not come either with maximum police or minimum police, but somewhere in between. All I was trying to do with the Pinker quote is point out that it definitely doesn’t occur at minimum police.
The whole thing does all seem a bit simplistic for all versions. There was a time when uniformed police were not a thing. In Sherlock Holmes stories the police are seen as bumbling because they were literally a new thing in London and people didn’t like the idea at all. But it isn’t like every day before was non-stop bank robberies!
Now that being said there’s another uncomfortable fact, the police and criminals are essentially coworkers. They hang out with each other all day, they chat with each other, they communicate and even coordinate. It’s not surprising you sometimes hear about guards who fall in love with prisoners and help them escape (which I think happened in upstate NY a few years ago). I don’t know then if purposeful coordination is the right idea but maybe unintentional coordination….with a bit of intention tossed in. We do know there are cases where police retaliate for things like budget cuts by ‘taking their time’ responding to districts whose council people voted the wrong way.
This leads to a 4th possibility, miscommunication from a tabloid press. Perhaps weeks of giant ‘Police Strike!!!’ headlines produced the impression to criminals that day would be a ‘free day’. Perhaps the criminals *didn’t* read the papers and didn’t read the fine print that might have said something like “state police will fill in”. They started doing lots of crime that day , overwhelmed the substitute police. Perhaps the police didn’t want it to happen, but were a little happy that the day they take off everything goes to hell (who isn’t secretly flattered to be ‘essential’?).
SO maybe misleading headlines are an explanation. Let’s pin that.
https://nyti.ms/2YBa4UG is interesting. It has the explosive headline “Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police Because reform won’t happen.”. But then it has this:
“I’ve been advocating the abolition of the police for years. Regardless of your view on police power — whether you want to get rid of the police or simply to make them less violent — here’s an immediate demand we can all make: Cut the number of police in half and cut their budget in half. Fewer police officers equals fewer opportunities for them to brutalize and kill people. The idea is gaining traction in Minneapolis, Dallas, Los Angeles and other cities.”
But a 50% reduction is not abolishing. Of course, the reality is in a world of police unions and politics even if this idea has overwhelming support the actual implementation would be unlikely to end up being more than a 25% cut.
Where I think it could go to a helpful place would be changing the focus of policing in black communities from one of confrontation (lots of stops, lots of tickets, lots of searches etc.) to minimal confrontation. If no one is causing any real trouble, don’t go looking for trouble. Stops, like in white community, are for safer roads only and not for raising revenue or used as a pretext for mass searches for drugs, guns etc.
I’ve heard figures like 5% is the time the average officer spends directly responding to 911 calls or things like chasing down someone he just saw commit a crime. Even if that’s true, I doubt you could just reduce 95% and still have 911 well covered. But I do think we’ve been following a pattern of escalation and it has not worked. Or maybe it did work at one time but has not stopped working and become a problem. Hence we should try deescalation. In other words, if your mental model here is Robocop, that’s what got us here.
Two other considerations:
The shutdowns have caused massive decreases in sales taxes collected. States are primed for either massive revenue increases from somewhere else or to start cutting. Many people don’t realize this but there is a perverse incentive to fire cops and teachers for cause. Both are underpaid early in their careers and overpaid in the end. If you can find an excuse to fire a veteran, you’ve swapped out a large salary for a rooky salary. If you just downsize, then you’ve eliminated both.
The black community may, on some level, be signalling that they are not going to be the patsies that are going to replenish the coffers of the state with massive police crackdowns that will jam them up with various fines and fees. NYC’s notorious stop and frisk policy, for example, was supposedly about getting drugs off the street but the reality was for every gun found nearly a thousand people were frisked and if you have pot on you well there’s a few hundred to a thousand at least in fines and fees.
I definitely think the scramble for a shrinking municipal budget is an under emphasized element of this whole thing. And as you say, cops and teachers are expensive, particularly if they make it all the way to retirement. To say that lavish pensions in the days of milk and honey are directly leading to racial tension now, is not the whole story, but it’s definitely part of it.
So it’s possible that the money is not there regardless of what we decide to do it, and the police are going to receive less funding regardless of how the current unrest plays out, but let’s assume that we have the money. I thought you were one of those people who believes that the federal government at least has nearly unlimited money. 😉
In that case it might actually be worth looking at what the data says. I don’t think I’ve shared these links in this forum, but there’s been lots of discussion over on Marginal Revolution about whether police need more or less money and the consensus of the data seems to come down on the side of more money:
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2020/06/revisiting-camden.html
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2020/06/underpoliced-and-overprisoned-revisited.html
Europe seems to have better outcomes and they certainly spend more money. Police budgets have been flat relative to other municipal spending, and then behind it all there’s the example past attempts at police reform.
Taking the murder rate in New York as an example, through the 70s and into the 80s the murder rate was WAY worse than it is now, peaking at 2245 murders in 1990, on, presumably a lower population. Under Giuliani and Bloomberg they steadily decreased bottoming out at 289 in 2018. I’m guessing it would be hard to find two people more hated by the current protesters than Giuliani and Bloomberg, and yet it looks like their draconian policing measures worked. Or they just got really lucky.
None of this is to say that policing doesn’t need reforming, and that we couldn’t do it better, but halving the police, seems far more similar to 70’s and 80s NY. than 2018 NY.
Been a long time since I read it but I recall Freakonomics, the book, looked deeply for the mysterious decline in crime after the mid 90’s. The aggressive ‘quality of life’ policing in NYC was one of the things they looked at but it didn’t explain the nationwide drop. Ultimately they hypothesized abortion in 1973 was likely the cause. The crime drop was strange as criminologists were sure we were going to see a huge rise in the late 90’s as crack combined with a mini-baby boom generation coming into their late teens and early 20’s.
Needless to say, conservatives were not enthused for this but the mechanism was actually pretty conservative. The premise is that women, being the ones who have kids, have a better sense of when the time is right or wrong. Increased ability to control child birth meant fewer kids raised in bad circumstances which shows up two decades later as less crime.
Malcolm Gladwell’s Talking to Strangers is another critical book here. Basically the original idea with ‘broken windows’ policing was to target a niche of high criminal activity and basically stop everyone there and search just about everyone you can come up with an excuse to justify a search. By niche, though, we are not talking about entire neighborhoods but single blocks, or even just one side of one street on a block. This type of saturation policing is very effective at stopping areas of intense street crime (drug dealing, street level prostitution). It got morphed, though, into larger and larger areas where entire neighborhoods are subjected to it and cops are put under quota systems to generate so many stops, searches and arrests per day.
In some ways this makes things worse than the stereotype of the racist cop from the 80’s or before. That cop might have been racist and prone to using unjustified force but he was also somewhat lazy and would rather not hassle people if nothing was going on.
1. I’m on the side of them getting really lucky. Their state was more on trend of a lower overall murder rate across the board, not an anomaly of decline while everywhere else stayed the same. If they were doing something different and got different results that would be something. Instead, they were doing something different and got the same results as everyone else. They were good results, but that doesn’t mean the policy was working. More likely other factors were in play.
2. As to money, I remember reading a long time ago about research into third world police departments and one of the biggest factors in police corruption was whether police are paid above or below the median income for a country. If police aren’t paid enough, it seems, there’s a much higher incentive to take bribes. Who is going to put their life on the line to enforce a law when they’re making as much as they could at McDonald’s flipping burgers? Better to just extract a bribe and let it slide. You can’t do that at McDonald’s Meanwhile, if you’re part of a respected career where you’re making good money you don’t want to jeopardize that with a bad mark on your record. Good pay for police doesn’t eliminate corruption, but it shifts the incentive against corruption.
3. I’m seeing a weak consensus around the idea that the tone of policing needs to change, even if we don’t go so far as to eliminate police funding. I think returning to the emphasis of ‘protect and serve’ and away from ‘strict enforcement against the people’ would go a long way toward mending relationships with communities.
3a. On that note, I think it’s time we revisited the War on Drugs. Wherever you stand on meth labs, opioid epidemics, and the like; it seems clear to me that one casualty of this War has been the relationship of the police with the people they’ve been hired to serve. Militarization of the police was certainly spurred on in large part by trying to go after organized crime – and specifically crime organized to peddle narcotics. That militarization seems to directly contribute to an ‘us vs. them’ mentality both for police and for the people.
Personally, I think the overall effect of drugs on society is a significant harm. Addicts often commit crimes in order to secure funding for their next hit, and it’s not likely this would be ‘fixed’ by across the board legalization. Even legal drugs would still have to be purchased for money, and an addict who has been reduced to living on the street isn’t going to have the cash. They’ll have to support their habit through crime. So legalization is still going to miss a lot of drug-related crime.
The big difference legalization would bring is that we wouldn’t be able to go after suppliers anymore. And that’s a major part of how controlled substances are policed. I know there has been a lot of talk about how many people in prison are in there for non-violent offences. Narcotics officers I’ve talked to point out that they don’t focus on individual users. Normally, they don’t care about getting people for possession. But when they find someone they suspect is trafficking, they’ll parlay the charge down to possession to get them to roll over on their colleagues up the distribution chain. The implication is that many people in prison for possession are really guilty of other crimes.
I don’t know how many of the people doing time for possession fit this description. Anecdotally, it seems police also use possession as a catch-all for ‘I suspect you of something else, but this is the charge I can support’. I think that’s not what we want police to be able to do. They need to be able to support specific charges against someone. A blanket ability to throw people in jail for suspicions they can’t prove is bad police policy. To the extent drug laws allow this practice it’s harming community relationships with police, and granting the police power far beyond Constitutional limits.
I guess we could decide that the drug war is worth it, but I’m leaning against that conclusion. We need the police for more than just the drug war, as current events make clear. But our experience suggests that pursuing the drug war sucks a lot of police attention toward that one focus. If it’s a choice between rampant addiction*, or race riots and civil war I think we’ve been making the wrong decision. Probably because we didn’t realize that’s what we were doing.
I’d like to get back to the point where the image of a policeman on the corner inspired trust and comfort – for everyone. For some communities, that may not be a ‘return to’, but a wholly novel situation, which should make us sad. Police should wear a uniform that looks like a business suit, more so than a uniform that looks like they are going into combat. The People are not the enemy, and should not be treated that way. That’s the relationship that needs to change.
*It’s not clear we’d get rampant addiction with decriminalization, but I’m using it as the counterfactual as a hypothetical sop to the pro-Drug War crowd
I have read Freakanomics, and I doubt that even they think that the decline in crime is entirely due to abortion. And you yourself seem to be indicating that if it’s not carried to excess that heightened policing makes a difference. Another piece of evidence would be the Ferguson effect (that when police come under lot’s of scrutiny they withdraw to “donut shops” and murders go up). Where does that fit into your model?
This kind of feels like time for another bet. Clearly some municipalities out there are going to try cutting police budgets or defunding them to some extent. With municipalities where real spending goes down do you predict murder rates to go up, down or stay flat? I would suggest comparing 2021 Minneapolis murders vs. 2019. If you think they’ll go up or stay flat (not up by more than 5%) then I think I’d take that bet.
@Boonton, I’ve seen many different analyses of why the violent crime/murder rates went down over the past half-century. Abortion is an interesting candidate. I’ve also seen the elimination of lead from gasoline and paint invoked. Proponents of the lead theory point to neighborhood and even street-level analysis of lead levels in the soil linked to levels of crime. There was one story of a bridge that was scraped of its old lead-based paint and refinished. The surrounding neighborhood saw a spike in crime that had a 20-year lag time.
The lead story is interesting, as is the abortion story, but in the end they’re all correlational studies. I find lead more convincing, since you can drill down to a neighborhood level and see consistent results. Still, the world is multi-causal, so abortion could still be involved in its own right.
Even so, it’s correlation so none of these explanations rise above the level of hypothesis. That includes the ‘aggressive policing tactics’ hypothesis, though I personally don’t give that one much credence, as I think the evidence in favor of aggressive policing to be much weaker than other factors.
The lead paint bridge story could be easily tested. I’m sure there were towns that had no bridges repainted 20 years ago. Did they experience higher crime or no higher crime? Did other towns with lead bridges that did their repainting a few years later or earlier see crime go up at the same time? If all these tests are passed I think that would make lead paint a serious factor. Oddly abortion does pass that test with state that legalized abortion before Roe seeing their crime drop a few years before everyone else.
I’m skeptical of the Ferguson effect. This seems to assume the majority of what cops do is ‘prevent murder’. This seems a bit surprising especially considering murder has a solve rate that is scarily low, even lower in Black communities. Does a vicious regime of ‘death by a 1000 jaywalking tickets’ stop murders? I don’t know. NYC’s stop and frisk was an absurd policy to get illegal guns of the street. Something like 659,000 stops and searches (more like partial strip searches in the street) got something like 650 guns. So 999 people had to be hassled to get a single gun…of course since you’re searching someone you can get them for other things like having pot or if they get angry at you ‘resisting arrest’. We were promised by the police union a surge in murder and crime when this program was abolished.
Looking at http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/nycrime.htm NYC went from double digit murder rates in the early 90’s to less than 3 in 2018. At this rate it could go negative and people who were murdered in the past will end up being resurrected, but then as they say past performance is not a guarantee of future performance.
Like I said, the world is multicausal, so I’m sure there is more than one good explanation for why we’re seeing an across-the-board decline in murder rates.
The reason you measure murder is because it’s an easily-measured hard endpoint. You don’t have to solve a murder to know that it has happened. Sure, you’re not going to find every dead body, but on net if you measure the murder rate you can get a sense for how a policy affected serious crimes we care about. You could measure how much people deal marijuana, but how do you compare that with other states, like Colorado, or nations where legal standards are different? The simplest across-the-board measure is murder. Not as much variance in whether extra people end up dead or not.