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  • We're gonna need more than 50m. How about the 3b we give to LAPD?

    • Me: That can't possibly be right. There is no way the LAPD costs more to operate than the entire country of Madagascar.

      Also me: Well I'll be damned

      (It looks to me like 2b, not 3b, but that's still a fuck of a lot of money, and still more than Madagascar)

      (Edit: A fun side note to this is that it probably means that if the LAPD really wanted to, it would have the ability to win a war with Madagascar and take it over.)

      • It was 3b until the George Floyd protests. Then we defunded them. Now they're trying to claw it back. They just got 500mill added to their budget last year.

        • Ah, got it. Makes sense.

          Personally I do not like defunding as a primary solution. If you have a shitty police department, and you give them less money, you're going to get a much shittier police department, of a slightly smaller size, and you're going to have more crime. That doesn't sound like progress. I can see it making sense where there is so much bloat in the budget that they're getting tons of money they don't need, but even then, you won't have solved anything by giving them less money except for an economic problem, which usually isn't the most pressing concern if you have bad police.

          I feel like: Make the right reforms so that the department won't be shitty, and then you won't need to punish them, and they can do their jobs. Although where the LAPD is concerned that might involve sending them to Madagascar and starting over from scratch.

          • I've gone down that rabbit hole, looking over the FBI's, statista's, Brookings, and other published crime rates over the 14- years. Over that time the crime type fluctuations weren't as drastic as the news or police departments would have you believe.

            As an example here are the homicide rates for that time period:

            Crime rates before George Floyd:

            Homicide Based on the FBI Uniform Crime Reports data provided in the search results, the homicide rates for major U.S. cities from 2010 to 2019 showed the following trends:

            Crime rates after GF:

            Homicide Based on the search results, a general average for homicide rates in the United States from 2020 to 2024 can be summarized as follows:

            edited for lame-o formatting and removed some weird percentages from notes I didn't finish looking up and therefore the stats weren't complete and not referenced either.

            • Hm... I think it's important to do this, to check all various people's assumptions against the reality of how it works out, but there are so many confounding factors that I don't think you can say this proves anything about how defunding police relates to increased crime.

              • There were so many foundational differences in society during the years of Covid lockdown that I don't think you can extrapolate from them to assuming something happened (or didn't happen) because of defunding police (if that is in fact what you're saying).
              • You're limiting it to homicides, which probably behave differently from a lot of other crimes. Looking at all crimes or all violent crimes, and seeing if there's a consistent pattern, might be a really useful thing.
              • I don't think there was enough reform, on a national scale, in the wake of BLM to say that it would have had an impact.
              • You're aggregating together all localities, when they had very different types and degrees of reform, if they had any at all.
              • There's so much individual difference in reporting that you're going to get all kinds of artifacts when you aggregate it all together on a global scale.
              • A lot of the roots of crime exist totally separate from policing. IMO there is sort of a minimum standard of policing you have to meet, so that people will understand that it's pretty reliable that they'll get in trouble if they do something wrong, and as long as you've met that standard, the amount of crime you have will depend on socioeconomic factors much more than anything the police do "better" or "worse".

              I do think that using the BLM reforms as a way to get at what the impact of reforms was would be a good thing. Maybe limit it to specific localities, see if there's a pattern between particular types of reform and particular outcomes (both in terms of the police "improving" and in terms of the overall crime level changing). It would be a ton of work. Maybe you could limit to a few specific localities that did big reforms, and a few specific ones that didn't, in similar cities over a similar time frame, and see if patterns emerge.

              I do think it's an important thing.

              Your point about the media freaking out about "crime" in a way that's totally divorced from any sense in which crime is increasing is absolutely true. That's kind of a perennial feature of the media, though.

              • No. I have all different types of crimes. I just didn't want to paste it all in here but they all follow the same pattern. And that's why I went over the last 15 years of crime and not just now. The trends show that after 2015 things started to trend upward from larceny and thrift to homicide. I'm definitely going over averages because what else would I do? There'd be no point to going in and looking at individual municipalities. I think the average is to a pretty good job of explaining that defunding slave catchers didn't really put a dent in the crime levels that the slave catchers would want you to believe.

11 comments