There’s “no consistent association” between police funding and crime rates across the country, according to a published study by University of Toronto researchers.
There’s “no consistent association” between police funding and crime rates across the country, according to a published study by University of Toronto researchers.
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.
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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.