Alex Tabarrok discusses a paper showing that prosecutors may do harm by going after misdemeanors.
Parents Defending Education is another resistance organization that a reader emailed me about. They are dedicated to using voice (would A.O. Hirschman approve?). I think that exit is the better answer.
Beria had something to say about crime too. “Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime.”
That is corruption of the legal process.
In this case “Show me the crime policy you want, and I’ll show you the crime study that supports it.”
That is corruption of the epistemic process.
Aside from homicide – because it’s difficult to ignore dead bodies with fresh holes in them – law enforcement data from reporting all the way to conviction is pretty lousy, for predictable reasons. Garbage In, Anything You Want Out.
As a common sense check, many places in California recently stopped doing anything to shoplifters – misdemeanor larceny. Did shoplifting go down? Do we see big declines in the ‘shrinkage’ numbers in financial reports of small and large businesses?
Mysteriously given these new academic insights, it looks like we don’t.
Stores could very easily prevent shoplifting themselves, but are fully aware that doing so is illegal.
Neighbourhoods could very well police themselves, but at no point will the police be so defunded that they don’t have time to crack down on self-defence.
Divorce was not legalized. Marriage was outlawed. Likewise, shoplifting was not allowed – prevention of shoplifting was outlawed.
From a quillette version of the recent spate of refund-the-police articles:
“Despite generally unfavorable feelings toward defunding the police—a new Gallup poll found that only 18 percent of Americans support the initiative—cities such as Minneapolis, Portland, Los Angeles, Seattle, and New York have all collaborated with activists to make cuts to police budgets in an attempt to make communities safer for racial minorities.”
Sure 80% of the population is against it, but it’s okay. It’s not like America is a democracy or anything, you can pass the policy anyway.
On the plus side: if your vote did count, it would be even worse.
P.S. I don’t think it takes a transcendental genius to work out that if you remove police, crime might go up. I think they’re just comically evil. More dead blacks more better, right BLM?