Comment on [Video] Cops not sure whether to arrest man with "Plasticine Action" shirt for supporting terrorism
Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day agoThe poor copper lost all that time arresting a guy with Plasticine Action on his t-shirt when he could’ve been arresting an old lady with the words “Palestine Action” written down on a piece of paper.
It’s making it hard for him to make his quota of arrests for that week.
callouscomic@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
This is why I always imagine it’d be funny to ask a cop “so how many murders got solved this week?” whenever they’re wasting time on mundane shit.
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
Police solve something like less than 2% of reported crimes.
Even a libertarian can see this is fucking stupid, imagine a restaurant that gets 2% of its orders correct and served in a timely manner.
Police do not primarily exist to solve crimes.
They primarily exist as a goon/thug class to protect property and capital, all other behaviors and effects are ancillary.
If Police wanted to actually lessen crime, they’d either attack its root causes and use significant parts of their budgets to fund affordable housing and public schools, or massively reorient toward pursuing white collar crime, which is often of such a huge financial scale that it basically directly impoverishes society at a large scale.
FarraigePlaisteach@lemmy.world 23 hours ago
That figure is a little misleading, but I understand how you picked it up because it’s everywhere.
Police “clear” crimes to be progressed for prosecution.
Prosecutors “prosecute” crimes. It’s this that the 2% figure is aimed at. The clearance rates (the job done by the police) is higher.
According to this article[1], 22% of reported serious crimes led to arrests. 4% (of reported serious crimes) led to convictions. They then halve both of those numbers to account for unreported crimes. The article still uses the 2% figure in the headline despite the nuance in the article.
That might sound academic given the overall point you make still stands. I just thought it was worth mentioning.
1: theconversation.com/police-solve-just-2-of-all-ma…
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 19 hours ago
Ok then, so more technically, and more generously to police from a purely reactionary perspective of ‘they can only respond to reports’… they do an adequate job of clearing 4% of what actually gets reported to them.
I know that cops dont actually prosecute, I made that post before falling asleep, I was a bit loose with language.
Their role in the prosecution process is basically to be witnesses, to gather evidence for the trial.
And, unless I am misunderstanding this… ~82% of the arrests they do actually make … don’t result in convictions, and are thus ‘overarrests’ in some sense… as … you went to all the effort to make an arrest, and it turns out that no actual crime was committed?
Cops have an ~18% chance of making an arrest for a serious crime that actually sticks?
They have an ~82% likelihood that they are overpolicing, like by definition, when it comes to serious crimes?
callouscomic@lemmy.zip 19 hours ago
So what I’m reading is that police are wrong or bad at what they do ~82% of the time.
Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
Their job is not to solve crimes, their job is to get people convicted, the subtle difference being that they’ll turn non-crimes into crimes (for example, they’ll chose to legally interpret things which can go both ways as crimes which require prosecution, which is why one often sees kids criminalized for childish bullshit) and it doesn’t matter if the person convicted is innocent, all that matters is that somebody got convicted (so, for example, they won’t try and find exonerating evidence).
This partly explains their tendency to take an adversarial posture towards people who aren’t from their group, also partly because that posture indirectly feeds back on them (people don’t treat them as they treat other people) and partly because they do tend to get exposed far more than most people to the seedy side of humanity.