Comment on [Video] Cops not sure whether to arrest man with "Plasticine Action" shirt for supporting terrorism
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 month agoPolice 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 1 month 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 1 month 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?
FarraigePlaisteach@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Apologies if I sounded like I was lecturing there. I got very into the numbers.
I see the 82% figure you mention too. But I feel out of my depth now. An arrest requires probable cause (a low threshold), whereas courts require reasonable doubt (a high threshold). The gap between these two seems to be what should let police work function. Eg: attorneys examine or challenge the charges, plea deals, case dismissal / acquittal etc. But I’m skimming articles I don’t understand at this point.
82% does seem high to me too. But I also see too many cut-and-dry cases on TV. I don’t know what to think.
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 month ago
No worries about seeming to lecture me, you were more correct and precise, I was sloppy, any other person reading this convo would be well served by the precision and context.
So thus I will now nitpick you: ‘beyond a reasonable doubt’.
Hehe.
I definitely concur that basically all cop oriented or cop centric media is set up to make almost all cops and such look like extremely well intentioned and competent people, when factually, most cops are simply of average intelligence, and are uh, kind of well known for things like abusing their partners, being right wing authoritarians, also doing overtime fraud.
I would be curious to see if other countries have a substantially different arrest to conviction ratio.
I know that many other countries spend far less money on policing, have far lower rates of incarceration, and some even require something akin to, or an actual law degree of some kind before they can actually be various grades of police officer.
Further, obviously, almost all other countries police are significantly less highly armed, and the US is just rife with absolute bullshit practices being promoted as legitimate training and procedures… we still widely use ‘lie detectors’ that simply measure stress, and often give false positives snd false negatives, we have nonsensical ‘body language expert’ shit everywhere… and just generally, the police are taught that the general populace is basically an enemy combatant force, ala how we approached policing in the Iraq occupation… because a lot of the people and materiel from Iraq War 2 just got recycled into local Police Departments.
callouscomic@lemmy.zip 1 month ago
So what I’m reading is that police are wrong or bad at what they do ~82% of the time.
sukhmel@programming.dev 1 month ago
78%, but yes