• DreamButt@lemmy.world
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    6 days ago

    I did some napkin math on my city’s police budget once. The short version is that there was no correlation between the budget and crime rates. Crime was generally going down per capita and that was (seemingly) regardless of how much the budget was increased or decreased for a given year

    Police don’t prevent crimes, they just punish the poor and ignorant

    • RoidingOldMan@lemmy.world
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      6 days ago

      The police recently had a bond issue in a local election here. The stat I saw mentioned in the debate was that 1 extra police offer was estimated to lower the crime rate by 0.1%. Based on the size of the city or whatever, they think if they added 10 cops, they think they could lower crime by 1%. IDK that seems like you’re spending about a million dollars more annually to prevent a fairly small number of crimes. There are probably other things you could spend that million on that would lower crime by 1%.