The reason it’s unclear is that nothing either of you have said has anything to do with policing.
Edit: you added the correlation bit after I replied, but why do you believe that to be the case? If you have more police in an area, of course they’ll hear more gunshots there. That doesn’t necessarily mean there actually are more gunshots.
What you’re actually saying is “poor people need more policing”, which is A) offensive and B) counterproductive.
> If you have more police in an area, of course they’ll hear more gunshots there. That doesn’t necessarily mean there actually are more gunshots.
So let me get your point straight: your worry is that since wealthy areas have less sensors gun-crime in those areas will go under reported?
Idk about your neck of the woods but where i live if I hear a gunshot I call the police with a high probability. If i see someone brandishing weapons i do the same. And of course i call the police/emergency services if i see someone with a gunshot wound. These all create the statistical evidence independent of the sensor systems.
Let's imagine a city divided in two halves of equal population. West City is poor and has a high crime rate, East City is rich and has a low crime rate. Should police resources be allocated equally to both? How about public health facilities or welfare payments?
In the real world, wealth is relatively easily measured and crime rate is not. The question no one seems to be willing to answer is: why do you believe poor people commit more crime?
Some crimes, like shoplifting, are hard to measure because it often goes unreported because the defunded police don't respond to them. But the murder rate is easy to measure.
When people put bars on their windows on the ground floor, it is not the police causing them to be willing to spend the money on that.
Crime can also cause poverty. For example, if the family breadwinner goes to jail, the family slips into poverty.
As best we can tell, “stand your ground” laws in states like Florida result in hundreds of deaths each year. How many of those would be considered murder in other states?
Police killed over 1,300 people last year. How many of those people truly posed an immediate danger to others, and how many were murdered by a trigger-happy cop who was not held accountable by his colleagues?
Crime, even serious crime like murder, is socially constructed. It’s not objective; society decides what’s illegal and who gets to do it anyway.
Yes. The medical examiner decides if a death is homicide or not.
> result in hundreds of deaths each year
Lacks context - the number of homicides in the same year.
> How many of those would be considered murder in other states?
They're still considered homicide.
> Police killed over 1,300 people last year
That figure is for all deaths where police were involved. A subset of that would be the police killing. Furthermore, if someone points a gun at a policeman, and the policeman kills him in response, that is self-defense, not murder. There are officers killed while on duty, too:
Less than 10% of homicides result from police action.
> how many were murdered by a trigger-happy cop who was not held accountable by his colleagues?
In Washington state, each death from a police encounter are investigated by law, and charges get filed if the officer broke the law. That would include being trigger-happy.
> It’s not objective
It's objective enough. My larger point is there aren't a lot of (or even any) homicides that go undetected in wealthy communities. Furthermore, your figures lack context as you didn't compare with the total amount of homicides. Your figures are not enough to claim that the higher homicide rates in poor communities are the result of police murders.
None of this addresses my point. You can measure dead bodies. Whether or not those get counted in the murder rate depends on social factors — are police honestly investigating themselves? are there laws that exculpate killing humans? etc
Arizona has a bill in the works that would make it legal to kill people trespassing anywhere on one’s land, intended to allow farmers with large plots of land to shoot migrants. The bill will probably get vetoed, but in a world where it passes it’s very likely that the number of killings will increase but the number of murders will drop.
>because the defunded police don't respond to them
Police have been ignoring small property crime as a waste of their time for far longer than anyone has called for defunding them. I couldn't get small town police to do anything about my stolen bike that was tagged and visibly sitting outside the house of the guy who took it. Wasn't worth taking anyone off speed-trap duty.
It's not a matter of belief, there's a well known link between poverty and crime.
The ultimate reason is that if you are poor, the proceeds of crime (theft, burglary, robbery etc) are comparatively more meaningful than to somebody who is wealthy, while the cost of getting caught is comparatively less. A rich professional does not steal loaves of bread to feed their family, because they don't need to and they risk losing their entire livelihood if they do. If you're poor, unemployed and your kids are hungry, the risk/reward calculus is very different.
The most costly form of theft — by far — is not burglary or robbery but wage theft. That is a crime overwhelmingly committed by rich professionals and rarely enforced. So if we really want to get serious about stopping theft, we should allocate much more resources to investigating businesses than putting beat cops on the street.
There’s not actually a well known link between poverty and crime in the way you imply. We’ve just decided that we only care about some people committing some crime some of the time.
Ah, so this is what you were so keen to steer the conversation to. Alas, despite the name, wage theft is not considered a criminal act (misdemeanor/felony) in most US states, so enforcement is left to the Department of Labor and the IRS, not police.
Now I'd agree with you that society should be putting more resources into combating this, but I'm still going to ask you to respond to my earlier question: for the hypothetical city with high-crime and low-crime halves, which should the police focus on?
I’m not really steering the conversation anywhere. Wage theft is a felony in many states. Which is the point I’m making: crime is socially constructed, and two big reasons that some areas are “low crime” and some are “high crime” is that we’ve decided to A) selectively criminalize things and B) selectively enforce those laws.
As to your question: if you are playing SimCity and you have a little number in your omniscient UI that reads “crime rate” and police are your one lever to address that, by all means add more police to the area. But in the real world that’s not how things work.
Everything you say, is an attempt to make people look elsewhere, but at the obvious place.
Your point is that crime is spread in a manner, unrelated to where society think crime happens, that there is no correlation between crime and poverty of a neighborhood, and that most likely an inverse relationship between race and crime?
Oh, and according to you, one important way to arrive at your conclusion is to change our definition of crime.
Edit: you added the correlation bit after I replied, but why do you believe that to be the case? If you have more police in an area, of course they’ll hear more gunshots there. That doesn’t necessarily mean there actually are more gunshots.
What you’re actually saying is “poor people need more policing”, which is A) offensive and B) counterproductive.