'No consistent association' between police funding and crime rates in Canada, study indicates
'No consistent association' between police funding and crime rates in Canada, study indicates
There's "no consistent association" between police funding and crime rates across the country, according to a published study by University of Toronto researchers.
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That's literally impossible to be true. Maybe if their dataset was only police depts where they are receiving between 200% and 300% of what they need to maintain operations. But there's no way a community with literally no police at all wouldn't have a higher crime rate than a basic minimal police force operating at like 80% funding.
The crime rate probably wouldn't change, just the reporting of crime. It's not like law enforcement really prevents much crime.
If people know a community has literally no law enforcement, they would flock to that place to do crimes. A certain minimum level acts as a deterrent. I think what the study really showed is that there are diminishing returns past a certain threshold amount of funding. And that most or all police depts are well past that threshold.
This isn’t true at all. I grew up in a place with no full time police and I currently live in another where I’ve been here for 2 years and seen a police car like 5 times on the highway. It is not the Wild West out there either.
Was/is it a populated area or the middle of nowhere? I'm talking about places here where a PD makes sense to have in the first place.
The vast majority of people adhere to the social contract without a constant threat over their shoulder.
You say that, but I watch people perform dangerous traffic violations in their cars all the damn time. There are certain kinds of laws that do actually need to be enforced.
Traffic violations is an almost perfect example of a place where people pin all the biggest problems on poor exercises of individual responsibility when really it's almost entirely and issue of road engineering and urban design.
We build streets that encourage bad behavior and then get mad when the bad behavior happens.
Even behaviors people consider quite aberrant like street racing can only happen because we build race tracks in cities and then try to pretend they're something else.
Or take drunk driving. Of course people are going to drive drunk when your entire society is structured around driving being the only way a reasonable person gets from point a to point b... This doesn't forgive the bad behavior, but taking a firm moral position here instead of listening to the explanation and making a change is not going to protect any lives.
In the first place, you can't fix bad driving with enforcement. You can only punish it after it already happened. Pretty much no one is going to stop driving badly because pretty much nobody intended to drive badly.
You do not fix road safety with an enforcement-based solution. All the money sent to police to try to keep the roads safe is money that could have actually been spent on engineering solutions to keep the road safe and instead is now pissed away into the wind.
Maybe it just changes the kinds of crimes committed and/or the reporting of those crimes. I came from a small town about 30 min from the nearest station. Police would maybe drive through for a couple hours every weekend or two, or when there was an actual call for them. There was a lot of drunk driving, stunting, petty vandalism and similar crime because for the most part people knew there wasn’t police around. You ado got occasional situations like someone from another area coming to the town and breaking into many sheds, or a business because they know the police response time is going to be so long there’s little risk of getting caught.
On the other hand, it was also the kind of place where people would mostly leave doors unlocked, leave things outside in an in-fenced yard, and similar things because those kinds of crime tend not to happen. In an urban setting it’s the kind of crime that people would commit in a neighbourhood distant from their own, but in a small town it’s all essentially the same neighbourhood, so it looks pretty suspicious if your new BBQ shows up the day after someone else’s gets stolen.
I read another study, though I can't recall where at the moment, that instead of paying law enforcement, putting the money into social programs in a small community was just as effective, but that probably wouldn't scale to entire countries. That being said, it's not like I would go out and rob a place just because the police are no longer a threat. I would imagine many others would feel the same. I don't know about Canada, but in America, citizen's arrest can be a deterrent as well.
There's precedent of living without police (in US, sorry I don't know enough about Canada). The US didn't have an organized police force until 1838 (https://time.com/4779112/police-history-origins/). Before that, and in some places even after that point, the military was used to enforce laws. Hell, in theory, it's one of the purposes for the US 2nd amendment.
I'm sure that some amount of minimal law enforcement presence reduces some amount of minimal crimes, but what crimes? If someone steals makeup from a supermarket and there's no law enforcement to arrest them, how much damage was caused, versus everyone paying into a system that streamlines putting people into a prison system? If it's a serious crime, like murder, I'm sure the national guard, citizens, federal agents, or military branches, could do the work to arrest suspects. They have a different funding structure, and are already being provided a budget, separate from that of police departments.
Again, sorry for the US-centric viewpoint.
there’s no law enforcement to arrest them, how much damage was caused
Vigilantism is fun.
How is it impossible to be true?
I'm not sure how you could make this argument without making assumptions about base crime rates.
If the headline is to be believed, then completely abolishing the Toronto police would have 0 impact on crime rates in Toronto. To my mind, it seems impossible that that would be true.
It seems like you maybe thinking this is saying police do nothing, it isn't.
No consistent association means the data doesn't back up higher or lower funding having an impact on crime. It doesn't say anything about rates when the funding is zero or when funding is very high.
I think it means can't pay to reduce crime, or not pay and expect crime to go up.
Testing for zero would be extremely difficult, because we only have one Toronto sized city in Canada.
I'm guessing here but I suspect that there's a significant number of places with zero police presence that have very little crime. And this article suggests that there are very well funded police presences where crime still happens.
No consistent association means the data doesn't back up higher or lower funding having an impact on crime. It doesn't say anything about rates when the funding is zero or when funding is very high.
Is "zero" not "lower"?
If there's no zero in the dataset, then we don't have any zero about data. It could be, for instance, that some police have a large effect, but that you hit diminishing returns incredibly quickly.
That's literally what I said elsewhere in this thread. People are putting words in my mouth all over this thread but literally all I was saying is that it's impossible that the headline is true verbatim.
How so? The study showed no consistent association between funding and crime rates. That is true verbatim.
Skim the article, it's 20 large municipality's, nowhere is 0 mentioned
Reading is really hard for some people eh?
I mean, the data is only about funding rates that actually exist. No law enforcement at all would be jumped on by organized crime (that's called a power vacuum, and isn't a thing in Canada), but apparently an especially light police presence is no different from a heavy one.
What it most directly supports policy-wise is scaling down the local police a bit. The real work will still get done by whatever investigative teams.
Yeah I totally agree.
If the headline is to be believed, then completely abolishing the Toronto police would have 0 impact on crime rates in Toronto.
Did you even try to read the study?
data on municipal police service expenditures from 2010 to 2021 in 20 of the most populous urban municipalities in Canada
In 2019, police services were the top operating expenditure in a majority of the municipalities. Real per capita spending on police services increased in 16 of 20 municipalities from 2010 to 2020. Marked differences are seen in spending between municipalities: in 2019, in 2020 dollars, Vancouver spent $495.84 per capita, whereas Quebec City spent $217.05 per capita.
Imagine a town that every person is a police officer. Think there won't be any crime? I'd argue there'd be the same if not more than one with no police officers, just different types. There'd be no reporting of crime in the police town though...
When was the last time you needed the police? I've had four interactions with police in the past 5 years. Two times they banged on my door to provide them with video while investigating a break in and an assault. The other two times they totally ignored our stolen vehicle and a suspicious death. Fuck the police, just sell them off to Amazon or Walmart.
You're getting downvoted by the ACAB brigade. But you're absolutely right. If there is zero enforcement of the Rule of Law, then the Rule of Law doesn't exist. Granted cops are only a portion of that mechanism (legal system and legislators and general societal acceptance of these institutions also required.)
You could run an experiment -- remove all cops from Calgary, but keep cops in Edmonton. The crime rate might be similar to background in the first year, but in the third year? Tenth year? I'd suspect that suddenly people would be clamouring for the police to enforce laws in Calgary again.
(I picked those cities because there was a remarkable experiment performed at one point where Calgary stopped fluorinating their water supply, while Edmonton continued. The cavity rates diverged rapidly until political pressure returned fluorination.)
Anyway, a background level of policing is required for Peace, Order, and Good Governance. Not zero police. Not a police state either.