NYC major crime complaints fell when cops took a break from ‘proactive policing’

https://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-proactive-policing-crime-20170925-story.html

by spideymans • 5 years ago

147 129 5 years ago

latimes.com

nanis4• 5 years ago

The scientists found that civilian complaints of major crimes dropped by about 3% to 6% during the slowdown.

1. Why call the cops if you know they won't do anything?

2. Relatedly, why "snitch" when you know there won't be any cops around?

kevingadd6• 5 years ago

I think you'll find many residents of many cities will call the cops even though they know the cops usually won't do anything.

treeman792• 5 years ago

Ages ago when I was a kid, our house was constantly being robbed. No city police in a town of 50,000

County police who took an hour or more to show up finally told my dad to get a gun and explained how we should move the body to make it look like we were being attacked. So that we didn’t get arrested.

So yea we moved promptly.

CobrastanJorji• 5 years ago

Well, sure, because the insurance company's first question will be "is there a police report."

teawrecks• 5 years ago

I think their point is that it could explain the 3-6% drop. But yes, the other 94-97% of people still call.

temp8964• 5 years ago

The title suggests a causation on this 4.5% change?

Paywalled, I didn’t read the article.

kevingadd6• 5 years ago

The article does say the study attempted to control for those variables, yeah.

nanis4• 5 years ago

“While we cannot entirely rule out the effects of under-reporting,” the authors wrote, “our results show that crime complaints decreased, rather than increased, during a slowdown in proactive policing, contrary to deterrence theory.”

Original research is here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-017-0211-5

Both authors are political scientists who are highly unlikely to have a command of econometrics. I am not sure if they took into account the panel nature of the data and in those circumstances where authors focus solely on either the cross-section or the time-series nature of the process, it is not uncommon for "results" to be nonsense.

tus89• 5 years ago

what does the word proactive mean to you?

Aeolun• 5 years ago

You arrest people before they can commit the offence.

I think there was a documentary about this a few years ago called Minority Report.

bkirwi• 5 years ago

FWIW, this is addressed in the article and the paper it covers: the slowdown involved reduced "proactive policing" -- "systematic and aggressive enforcement of low-level violations" -- but the observed drop is in major crimes like burglary and assault. The authors also do some work to control for the overall crime reporting rate.

falcrist2• 5 years ago

I'm a bit confused... Everyone is assuming that the police wouldn't respond to calls during this period, but the article doesn't suggest that this was the case.

Even looking through articles in 2014 and 2015 doesn't provide me with any evidence that police weren't showing up to crime scenes... just that they weren't doing the "proactive policing" thing.

Am I missing something here?

5faulker• 5 years ago

The apathy is real

pope_meat• 5 years ago

Police are like hammers that see everything as nails.

It's just not working.

kevingadd6• 5 years ago

Good example of how sometimes a strategy you apply can prove itself necessary but only because it's addressing a problem it creates. Sometimes you have to just grit your teeth and try a new approach to see if it's going to be an improvement

SubiculumCode5• 5 years ago

I'm not sure why you got the hammer, your comment is exactly correct. Overpolice->More crime->Oh No we Need more Policing->More Crime->...->...

nickff2• 5 years ago

"“While we cannot entirely rule out the effects of under-reporting,” the authors wrote, “our results show that crime complaints decreased, rather than increased, during a slowdown in proactive policing, contrary to deterrence theory.”"
"Each week during the slowdown saw civilians report an estimated 43 fewer felony assaults, 40 fewer burglaries and 40 fewer acts of grand larceny. And this slight suppression of major crime rates actually continued for seven to 14 weeks after those drops in proactive policing — which led the researchers to estimate that overall, the slowdown resulted in about 2,100 fewer major-crimes complaints."

The fact that assaults, robberies, and burglaries aren't being reported would seem to indicate that people just weren't bothering to contact the police, because they knew the police would not help. Murder, rape, and (hospital-reported) shooting rates dropping would be more indicative that less policing would reduce crime.

kevingadd6• 5 years ago

Are you suggesting rape and murder have the same causes as assaults and burglaries? The article describes the claim that "proactive policing" creates pressures that would lead to (among other issues) assaults and robberies. Why would removing those pressures reduce the frequency of rape?

nickff2• 5 years ago

I'm suggesting that assaults and burglaries tend to be under-reported, and would be more 'marginalized' by under-policing. I think the reporting rate for rape and murder is much higher (and less variable) than those of burglary and assault.

StanislavPetrov• 5 years ago

Are you suggesting rape and murder have the same causes as assaults and burglaries?

They absolutely do - and the cause is having violent criminals running loose on the streets. The overwhelming majority of serious crime, from rape and murder to assault and burglary is committed by an extremely small number of people. When those people aren't removed from society after committing crimes, they are out on the street committing other crimes. As a resident of NY for over 4 decades I haven't seen the situation this bad since the bad old days of the 80s and 90s. The streets are littered with people booting up on the sidewalks, in midtown, in broad daylight. Aggressive "panhandlers" harass, threaten and assault passersby without fear of reproach or arrest. The fact that crimes are not being reported or prosecuted does not mean that there has been a reduction of crime - quite the opposite - which is abundantly apparent to anyone who lives here. Since the "no bail" law was passed as well as laws preventing people under 18 from being prosecuted as adults (among other things), there has been a massive spike in crime. In years passed, getting caught with an illegal gun, let alone using it in a crime, would mean automatic jail time. Today, that criminal is back out on the street in hours. There is a good reason that New Yorkers rejected Bill Deblasio's buddies in favor of former cop Eric Adams to be the next mayor - the city is a disaster zone.

koolba• 5 years ago

The only major crime statistic that I’ll trust is the murder rate. It’s the only one that can’t be faked. Petty crime goes unreported. Arrest and conviction rates can be gamed. But you can’t hide people dying.

runnerup2• 5 years ago

Yes you can, just rule it a suicide or accident. I've seen a likely murder in mountain view misclassified as a diabetes-related accidental drowning.

MegaButts• 5 years ago

Yeah, I've actually seen this happen enough times that I believe it's more common than people think. I don't have statistics, but I've noticed multiple people die under mysterious circumstances (including a close friend) and they were usually ruled a suicide, even when the family objected.

unethical_ban• 5 years ago

Well, that's a "technically" while still missing the point. It is much more difficult to meaningfully shift murder rate numbers via mass mis-reporting, compared to other statistics.

co2benzoate• 5 years ago

Have you considered getting in touch with an investigative journalist?

bshep• 5 years ago

Example: Where I grew up if you didnt die within 24hrs or being shot it was not considered a murder, the gorvernment changed the way the statistic measures murders many years ago to lower the ‘murder’ rate.

Edit to add this link with the murder rates: https://www.statista.com/statistics/984823/homicide-rate-pue...

elzbardico• 5 years ago

Brazilian police: Hold my bear.

kevingadd6• 5 years ago

Sadly many parts of the US (and other countries) have been hiding the death rate for our current pandemic with varying degrees of success, it's quite possible to hide murders too. You can disguise them as something else.

air7• 5 years ago

source?

ipaddr2• 5 years ago

Other places are adding deaths to the covid list.

kolbe• 5 years ago

Even murder can be tricky because medical advancements or hospital shutdowns can really impact the survival of severely injured people

Avshalom• 5 years ago

murders go unreported/recorded all the time "NHI" "accident" "missing persons" and of course missing person implies there's some one who knows/is-willing-to-report that you're missing.

gervu• 5 years ago

Yeah, like the cops have never gotten caught claiming someone accidentally fell on 43 bullets before. Or like there haven't been numerous cases of misattributing COVID deaths because they were inconvenient for the genocidal robber nihilists we have passing for a major political party. And that's just malfeasance, there's plenty of just plain error involved.

Having a deaths count -- which itself definitely has error bars, otherwise what the heck are missing persons estimates -- doesn't mean you have a correct attribution of those deaths. Never trust data in the absence of auditing how it got there.

misiti3780• 5 years ago

Yep, I learned this from The Wire!

timy2shoes• 5 years ago

Even the murder stats can be juked, like McNulty's arc in season 5 or the bodies in the vacants.

onlyrealcuzzo• 5 years ago

Fortunately, murder is a rare occurrence - so only trusting this isn't going to help much unless you live in a major US city.

The murder rate in most areas of the US is under 5 in 100,000.

There's less than 50 police departments in the US where you can expect even 50 murders per year. With numbers that small, you'll run into a lot of noise.

retrac• 5 years ago

We suffer this here. Toronto has roughly 40 - 80 murders each year. So each year comes with helpful headlines informing us the homicide rate has halved or doubled over the previous year, often with some commentary about what this regression/progression indicates for our society. If you average over a few years, you find out it's basically flat.

pengaru• 5 years ago

Murder stats only count the found bodies, and even then as others have stated the classification as murder vs. other causes can and will be gamed.

wnevets• 5 years ago

The only major crime statistic that I’ll trust is the murder rate. It’s the only one that can’t be faked.

It absolutely can and has been. [1]

Photos of the teenager’s corpse show a deep cut on his right arm, horrific bruising on his neck and chest. His face is swollen and covered with cuts. A silhouette of violence runs from the corner of his left eye over the cheekbone to his jaw, and his legs are pocked with small burns the size of a lighted cigarette. But police in Japan’s Aichi prefecture saw something else when they looked at the body of Takashi Saito, a 17-year-old sumo wrestler who arrived at a hospital in June. The cause of death was “heart disease,” police declared.

[1] https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2007-nov-09-fg-autop...

filoeleven• 5 years ago

You absolutely can.

Murder rates don’t include “justifiable homicide”, because police departments are not required to report officer-involved shootings or killings to the federal government, nor the outcomes of any investigations into them. Which can also be gamed.

I’m not saying that radically transforms the statistic—I have no idea. But it’s a factor.

amatecha• 5 years ago

https://archive.is/rrBsp

Rebelgecko2• 5 years ago

From the "correlation is not causation" school of thought, I immediately had 3 thoughts:

1. The # of phone calls to the police about a crime are not necessarily indicative of how common that crime is. If people think the police won't do anything, they're less likely to bother calling (I see this often in my area with things like stolen bikes and catalytic converters... people often don't bother getting a police report unless their insurance requires it).

2. Throughout the 2010s the crime rate trended downward

3. Crime rates can have seasonal variations (but this can vary based upon location and type of crime)

Skimming through the paper, #1 wasn't addressed at all.

For #2, the paper compared the 2015 data against 2014. I don't think they did anything to compensate for annual trends in crime rate. In other words, if the crime rate in Des Moines, Iowa lowered at the same time, is that actually a ripple effect from NYPD's actions? Or are both cities just part of a larger downward trend that we saw coming out of the 2009 recession?

For #3, they actually took temperature and precipitation into account which was cool.

syops3• 5 years ago

I haven’t read the paper and by your admission you haven’t either. You skimmed it. Do you find it reasonable to believe that you could come up with potential objections to the paper that the authors didn’t also think about?

You made a claim in #1 about the likelihood of people calling police when they think police won’t do anything about it. That claim sounds plausible but is it correct? Do know of studies on this?

If you, a non expert, can think immediately of three thoughts then it seems highly likely the authors - who spent effort and time on the topic - also thought about these same thoughts. Maybe these things aren’t addressed because it’s obvious to them that these aren’t valid objections and it’s obvious to their target audience.

coryrc2• 5 years ago

I get my car broken into biyearly. After the first time, I don't report because it's a waste of time. Same when bicycles are stolen from my friends. I don't need a study to say the sky is blue.

Rebelgecko2• 5 years ago

You made a claim in #1 about the likelihood of people calling police when they think police won’t do anything about it. That claim sounds plausible but is it correct? Do know of studies on this?

There's a number of studies, some of them contradictory (perhaps because they're looking at different populations of people). Hagan et al[1] found that in urban African-American communities, cynicism towards police and the legal system was a major factor in whether or not someone called the police after being a victim of a crime (in a way that is actually a bit counterintuitive to me).

Anyways, I owe the authors an apology. I took another look at the paper and noticed that they (sort of) addressed the issue of under-reporting, as was mentioned in the article.

Tautologically, they point out that underreporting of the crime rate doesn't impact the accuracy of statistics showing that the number of reported crimes went down. However they do admit that this makes it harder to make a causal link.

Maybe these things aren’t addressed because it’s obvious to them that these aren’t valid objections and it’s obvious to their target audience.

That's an interesting point, and I suppose it's hard to say without being an expert. OTOH, from talking to people I know who have left academia[2], the 'publish or perish' mentality makes it easier to put blinders on when faced with something that's inconvenient.

[1] https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1722210115

[2]: Admittedly this is going to be a biased sample

newacct583• 5 years ago

Most of those same criticisms can be levied against the "broken windows" theory on which the studied policy was based, though.

SubiculumCode5• 5 years ago

Correlation is not causation, but there certainly is a lot of evidence that causally links poverty with crime and drug-use, and poverty from accumulating petty fines and late-fee penalties. It seems to me the burden is on the broken-window excuse of a hypothesis.

I've spent weeks in a middle-class community never seeing a cop. Surprise surprise, the crime-rate is low...Yet I knew that plenty of recreational drugs were flowing through this white-middle class community...it was barely hidden. Meanwhile, in poorer communities like where I grew up, police are everywhere patrolling, waiting to harass anyone they don't like the look of... hell I was interrogated for sitting in my front yard once.

spideymans3• 5 years ago

I've been blessed to run in many different social circles in life. Poor black kids, incredibly wealthy white kids, I've seen it all. My experience is completely in line with yours.

The wealthy white kids I was around were loaded with hard drugs. Coke use was rampant. I could open random drawers at my friends place and see bags of the stuff. Heck, some were outright dealing the stuff.

Meanwhile my poorer black friends pretty much only smoked weed, while occasionally dabbling in some other minor drugs (mushrooms, MDMA, etc...).

Of course the only ones with stores of police harassment were my poorer friends. My rich friends got away with anything they wanted

Stupulous2• 5 years ago

I don't think this works as a causal explanation. A decrease in petty fines shouldn't be significant enough at changing poverty to be reflected in crime rates in just a couple months. You'd also expect a delay as the fines that would otherwise be demanded in that time wouldn't be collected for some months, I assume.

As an alternative, maybe people who are mistreated by police become immediately more likely to commit crimes? Or maybe police who would otherwise be doing proactive policing are doing something more beneficial instead? Those are just speculations, though.

anigbrowl• 5 years ago

(2017)

This is a good and interesting story but it's not new information, nor does it seem to have been updated with more recent data.

SubiculumCode5• 5 years ago

Tickets and such for minor violations, impounds, etc, all these can represent a major financial hit to a struggling family or young adult. I have worried for a long time that over-policing causes more crime than it prevents, and it generates distrust of the police as a group that is there to make your life trouble rather than keep you safe. There is just an incredible amount of research confirming that over-enforcement of petty infractions accumulates into community economic hardship, crime, and instability.

spideymans3• 5 years ago

Tickets and such for minor violations, impounds, etc, all these can represent a major financial hit to a struggling family or young adult.

A very minor mistake - the kind of mistake I'm sure we've all made at some point - can easily send the life of a poor person spiralling out of control.

Get thrown in jail for a night, you could lose your job. If you lose your job, you will miss rent. If you miss rent, the lack of social safety net means you're essentially screwed. It's even worse if you're find or a parent. It's no mystery why people in this situation would turn to crime.

exogeny• 5 years ago

I've lived in a few different major cities and NYC for the last decade, and I can definitely say I have never seen more broken, ineffective policing than here. It's truly ridiculous. Your experience, obviously, may vary.

Multiple instances of police openly threatening citizens. Phones ripped out of hands and smashed onto the ground, for the mere crime of filming an interaction. During the BLM protests, every single act of instigation and provocation that I witnessed was started by the police.

I don't know what the answer is. But it is very clear the police here are a paramilitary jackboot squad, and that the city and the strength of their union protects them. They have almost complete impunity, and they see normal, everyday citizens as the enemy. I fear that we're in for more trouble now that we've elected an ex-cop Mayor of the city.

(For background, I'm a tall, white man. I can't imagine how bad it would be if I wasn't.)

sjm• 5 years ago

Yeah it really feels like the NYPD has a lot of contempt for the city they operate in, politically, socially, culturally. I saw the same thing at every protest I attended — when there were no cops around, it was extremely peaceful. I only ever saw it get ugly when cops were harassing people, pushing people around, or trying to basically shut down protests by blocking off surrounding streets and trying to close in on protesters.

JumpCrisscross• 5 years ago

NYPD has a lot of contempt for the city they operate in

A lot of New York cops live outside the areas they patrol. The ones who live in the city are overrepresented on Staten Island. That said, for every peaceful protest last summer there were unprovoked nighttime riots which seemed to occur more when the cops were somewhere else.

akudha• 5 years ago

I saw 5 or 6 cops tackle a drunk guy. He was so drunk, barely able to stand, a 10 year old kid could've taken him down. The amount of force used in the most trivial of cases blew my mind.

During the occupy wall street protests, I saw the cops a few times (I was working in a nearby building). The amount of serious gear they had, it was insane. I bet they are better armed than most militaries.

All I can say is they are super scary.

mc32• 5 years ago

I've witnessed the same. Police responding with overwhelming force. Unfortunately, we're not unarmed like in Japan (or most of the UK), so there have been instances of police being caught off-guard and killed for being too "chill" so by policy they must respond with almost worse-case-scenario.

With that, I will say they need to learn how to use less than lethal tactics and force to apprehend a violent person. Firearms should be very the last resort as a result of non-confrontation. In other words, the police at times provoke more violence by the way they address an issue. A violent drunk. Instead of getting up close so they lunge with a knife, get far back, get people to move away and then corral the drunk in or use alternate methods of subduction and use lethal violence only when the perp makes it necessary.

the-rc• 5 years ago

IIRC, the NYPD budget is much higher than those for Sweden's or Mexico's military and not too far behind Iran's.

achenatx• 5 years ago

As people have done analysis of what percent of the time police spend on various types of calls, it becomes clear that we only need armed police for around 5%.

investigation, forensics, traffic control, etc etc dont need weapons and tactical training. Let the armed police be like fire fighters and be specifically called in when needed.

j_walter• 5 years ago

That's not a fair analysis though. That's like saying EMTs only need morphine around 5% of the time, so they shouldn't have it in their ambulance. You don't know when you might need it, so you carry it all the time.

rich_sasha2• 5 years ago

Police in the UK do not carry firearms, at all. Regular police have a taser, there are also firearms units on call when needed. This is an outlier even for Europe, where I believe it is standard to carry a pistol.

This has some interesting consequences. The police effectively can’t position themselves in opposition to “the people of the street”. Two police officers against a rowdy pub is poor chances for the law.

As a result, the training emphasises deescalation, talking people down from stupid ideas etc. This part seems particularly effective.

Most days I still think it’s crazy the police here are effectively unarmed, but it does seem to work.

johnnyb9• 5 years ago

I have lived in NYC for 10+ years and I can't say I've had a single encounter with the police.

dopamean• 5 years ago

Lucky you.

rkk34• 5 years ago

I have never seen more broken, ineffective policing than here

When I moved from NYC to San Francisco I was genuinely surprised how much I missed & appreciated the NYPD.

ryan_lane5• 5 years ago

Because the SFPD is even more fucked up than the NYPD? They spend all day going around harassing homeless people. I've watched them kick people inside their tents after they didn't move in a neighborhood they normally do hourly sweeps in.

And don't tell me how crime in SF is so terrible. It's at historic lows, and in comparison to a lot of cities, the amount of crime is essentially non-existent.

The police don't reduce crime, from what I can tell, in any city, using the tactics that they do. Crime seems to correlate more with poverty and ability to afford basic necessities more than anything.

pradn• 5 years ago

The police are also extremely blasé about wearing masks. They hardly did in the thick of the pandemic, let alone now. The people have no democratic control over the police. The mayor and council are too afraid to do anything significant. It wont change unless there's an even more serious grassroots up-swell for police reform, more than BLM.

throwaway0a5e• 5 years ago

This same effect has been seen in cities where the police go on "strike" by not proactively enforcing all the petty crime laws that the city makes money on, notably Baltimore.

nemo44x• 5 years ago

Didn’t “The Wire” already show this? The police decided not to enforce any drug dealing related law so long as it was done in a confined area. This not only made crime go “down” but also resulted in less auxiliary crime since the market was safe and plentiful and because dealers were not being taken out there weren’t turf wars for corners to sell on.

searealist• 5 years ago

The wire is a fictional TV show. It doesn't show anything about the real world.

dirkg• 5 years ago

Police in the US are thugs. They were created to protect property of the rich, and have never been legally obligated to 'protect and serve'. They steal more money than criminals in 'asset seizure' which is legalized theft, murder more innocent people, are literally above the law and cannot be punished thanks to nonsense like 'qualified immunity', and yet are worshipped as heroes, are always complaining and demanding more funds while being completely ineffective and dangerous to people, and the media perpetuates the 'risk their lives' myth.

gremloni2• 5 years ago

They really are terrible. I don’t know why it’s so hard to completely fire the current crop of corrupt police in a bunch of cities and start over — it’s a low skilled position with good benefits, pay and is counterintuitively safe. It’s probably the police unions and to be honest it’s one of the few unions that deserves to be busted. Get the cops on individual liability insurance like nurses and get rid of the union.

cletus• 5 years ago

So you need to look no further than NYC's gravity knife fiasco to see what's wrong with politics and policing.

For reference, a "gravity knife" is something originally issued to paratroopers. They could get stuck in trees and need to cut themselves out of their chutes. They needed a knife they could use with limited mobility. The traditional gravity knife had a button that released the knife that fell into place and locked by force of gravity.

These became popular later and evolved, most notably into the spring-loaded switch blade. To combat this and crime in the 70s and 80s, NYC clamped down on so-called gravity knives, which the law defined as anything that could be opened with one hand.

This law was clearly abused. NYPD officers would forcefully try and open a knife with one hand, claim it was a gravity knife and the owner would be charged. With a prior arrest this may be upsold to a felony.

This was such a problem for many professions that needed a knife for their job, most notably stagehands on Broadway and custodians. One custodian walking home at night ended up with a 5 year prison sentence with an upsold felony charge.

And of course minorities were overly targeted with this law.

Through the 2010s reform was repeatedly attempted. Twice this was vetoed by Cuomo at the behest of the Manhattan DA. Cuomo at this time I'm convinced still thought he could be president some day (to be fair, he probably could still be if he switched parties based on recent evidence) so courted the "law and order" crowd and political support from the police unions (who opposed reform) and the DA. Vague reasons were given for the veto.

Eventually this did pass but there still seems to be problems with that.

So let's outline the problems here:

1. A so-called Democratic governor choosing personal ambition over targeted minorities;

2. Arrest targets within the NYPD that drive police to meet those targets;

3. Police unions wanting more ways to randomly charge people for doing their job just in case they wanted to; and

4. Targeting of minorities, likely because they were poor (and couldn't thus afford legal representation and were also more likely to have a criminal record so the charges would stick).

For me I was glad to see Cuomo go but frankly I couldn't stand the guy long before the sexual harassment allegations came to light. It seems like every issue I looked into Cuomo landed on the wrong side of it and personal political gain seemed to be the reason. For example, NYC property tax reform and congestion charging for private vehicles in Manhattan.

look_lookatme• 5 years ago

An important addendum is that if you leave any part of the knife exposed (such as knife on the inside of pocket, but clip on the outside) that is considered "brandishing" and can trigger a stop by the police. This is a common pretext for a stop and frisk.

When I lived there I switched to a Case folding knife so I wouldn't accidentally run afoul of this law.

zone411• 5 years ago

A random paper on crime and policing from 2017 covering two months in one city that shows a small difference in some types of crimes (complaints of felony assault, burglary, grand larceny) but not others (murder, rape, robbery, grand theft auto) and it's on Hacker News? How? Looking at the graph of the period after this slowdown, the crime also appears to be down year-over-year by about the same amount as during the slowdown.

scythe• 5 years ago

From the linked article: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-017-0211-5

In sharp contrast to this trend, evidence shows that arrests by the Detective Bureau increased significantly during the slowdown. This result is highly relevant to one of our theoretical mechanisms, since the Detective Bureau is charged with intensive investigations, rather than proactive policing. Further confirming that the slowdown’s effects were localized to proactive policing, we find no evidence that ‘Major crime arrests’ were significantly affected by the slowdown when we condition our estimates on ‘Major crime complaints’.

This paragraph appears to rule out many of the "armchair" objections being raised in the comments. If it is a robust finding, it would imply that some "proactive policing" arrests are effectively a nuisance to prosecutors and detectives as they work to combat severe criminality.

Nonetheless, I was surprised to see how much confidence the authors report with such limited data. They are not shy about saying "our results imply..." (cf. suggest) and go on to assert the existence of a "vicious feedback between proactive policing and major crime" It's one study, in one city, over a brief time period. Further work is needed to see if the results generalize.

andyxor• 5 years ago

not sure what to make of the recent resurgence of anti-police articles (from 2017?) I'd think the current explosion of violent crime in all the major US cities should be enough to put an end to this insanity.

Go and explain the idea of "less policing" to that beaten and robbed grandma in Oakland, or to the mother of that girl who got shot by a stray bullet in Chicago.

My guess is BLM is steadily losing support with general public thus the attempt to resuscitate this dying fad.

tamaharbor• 5 years ago

All well and good, but as a former resident and frequent visitor to NYC, I can assure you is is quickly returning to its late 1970s - early 1980’s shithole status.

NYC major crime complaints fell when cops took a break from ‘proactive policing’

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