this post was submitted on 19 Jan 2024

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126

'No consistent association' between police funding and crime rates in Canada, study indicates (www.cbc.ca)

submitted 10 months ago by sik0fewl@kbin.social to c/canada@lemmy.ca

41 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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

all 43 comments

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[–] Drusas@kbin.social 19 points 10 months ago (1 children)

This seems like it would be obvious. Police don't prevent crime; they respond to it.

[–] BedSharkPal@lemmy.ca 6 points 10 months ago (2 children)

I think the theory is there is some level of "deterrent" at play here. Always seemed like a stretch, and this just looks to reinforce that.

[–] Drusas@kbin.social 4 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Pretty sure all it really deters is speeding within eyesight of the police car.

[–] SkepticalButOpenMinded@lemmy.ca 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

There can be a deterrent effect in very specific situations. At crowded public events, like a parade, a police presence can lower crime at that event. Sometimes. But otherwise, police don’t work like that.

[–] BedSharkPal@lemmy.ca 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I tend to agree completely.

[–] SkepticalButOpenMinded@lemmy.ca 2 points 10 months ago

Yeah sorry it sounded like I was correcting you, but I meant to say I agree with you too.

[–] LostWon@lemmy.ca 17 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

No surprise here, but I'm glad to see a study finally being done in Canada. Expecting police forces to prevent crime instead of just responding to it is like expecting emergency rooms to handle all preventative care.

[–] avidamoeba@lemmy.ca 1 points 10 months ago

Policing might have preventative effect on more opportunistic crimes. Crimes that aren't driven by need or mental state. I think you're right about the rest.

[–] apprehensively_human@lemmy.ca 17 points 10 months ago

Defund the police

[–] ininewcrow@lemmy.ca 9 points 10 months ago

How about a study associating wealth inequality.

[–] CanadaPlus 5 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (2 children)

Wow, I wouldn't be surprised by little connection or uneven, but none?

I'm guessing the important police work is carried out far from the local level with programs targeting organised crime and similar. Apparently the local guys write tickets and that's it. I would have at least expected they'd help by showing up to drunken brawls before they escalate, but apparently not.

[–] Kelsenellenelvial@lemmy.ca 7 points 10 months ago (1 children)

The thing to be careful about here is it only spans about 10 years, and it’s based on reported crime rates. That means you get somewhat skewed results because lots of people don’t bother reporting minor crimes thinking nothings going to happen anyway. You may not ever hear back about that police report for your stolen bike, but decisions do get made based on the aggregated reports. You also get things like they make targeted enforcement effort, maybe in a rough neighbourhood, or targeting a specific type of crime that seems to be on the rise and you see the reported crime rate rise because of that effort. We would also expect it to be a lagging metric, an increase in budget doesn’t always mean immediate results. It takes time to decide where to use that increase in funding, maybe time to source new equipment and train officers on its use, maybe they’re able to hire more officers but there’s a training period before you see the results of increased staffing. If budgets aren’t committed ahead of time the department might be conservative about spending on things like increasing the workforce that creates and ongoing cost vs programs that can be rolled back if the budget falls, or capital expenditures that provide value beyond the initial cost.

[–] CanadaPlus 4 points 10 months ago

Social science is often slippery like that. This is still pretty suggestive, though.

[–] WiseThat@lemmy.ca 3 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Actually, in most cases having fewer police on the streets leads to LESS petty crime.

This is because cops tend to spook people, so everyone (including the innocent, law abiding citizens) will leave areas that are patrolled.

This creates the ideal scenario for crime: there are few/no witnesses around for a while after the cops come by.

In pretty much every case I am aware of where cops go on strike and stop doing regular beat patrols, crime goes DOWN.

[–] CanadaPlus 1 points 10 months ago

Is there documentation of that somewhere?

[–] SkepticalButOpenMinded@lemmy.ca 2 points 10 months ago

Canada spends a LOT less on policing than the US and has MUCH less crime. Crime severity is basically half in Canada, and per capita police spending is half. For example, the safest major city in North America is Toronto.

Not coincidentally, Canada also has better social services like public healthcare, more equitable access to schooling, and higher social mobility. This is the argument for defunding the police. We need police, but other things have a much bigger effect on safety.

[+] bionicjoey@lemmy.ca -23 points 10 months ago (5 children)

That's literally impossible to be true. Maybe if their dataset was only police depts where they are receiving between 200% and 300% of what they need to maintain operations. But there's no way a community with literally no police at all wouldn't have a higher crime rate than a basic minimal police force operating at like 80% funding.

[–] qwertyqwertyqwerty@lemmy.one 20 points 10 months ago (1 children)

The crime rate probably wouldn't change, just the reporting of crime. It's not like law enforcement really prevents much crime.

[+] bionicjoey@lemmy.ca -12 points 10 months ago (2 children)

If people know a community has literally no law enforcement, they would flock to that place to do crimes. A certain minimum level acts as a deterrent. I think what the study really showed is that there are diminishing returns past a certain threshold amount of funding. And that most or all police depts are well past that threshold.

[–] Fenrisulfir@lemmy.ca 16 points 10 months ago (1 children)

This isn’t true at all. I grew up in a place with no full time police and I currently live in another where I’ve been here for 2 years and seen a police car like 5 times on the highway. It is not the Wild West out there either.

[+] bionicjoey@lemmy.ca -9 points 10 months ago (2 children)

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.

[+] EasternLettuce@lemm.ee 12 points 10 months ago (1 children)

[deleted]

[+] bionicjoey@lemmy.ca -9 points 10 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] admiralteal@kbin.social 15 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

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.

[–] Kelsenellenelvial@lemmy.ca 3 points 10 months ago

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.

[–] qwertyqwertyqwerty@lemmy.one 4 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I read another study, though I can't recall where at the moment, that instead of paying law enforcement, putting the money into social programs in a small community was just as effective, but that probably wouldn't scale to entire countries. That being said, it's not like I would go out and rob a place just because the police are no longer a threat. I would imagine many others would feel the same. I don't know about Canada, but in America, citizen's arrest can be a deterrent as well.

There's precedent of living without police (in US, sorry I don't know enough about Canada). The US didn't have an organized police force until 1838 (https://time.com/4779112/police-history-origins/). Before that, and in some places even after that point, the military was used to enforce laws. Hell, in theory, it's one of the purposes for the US 2nd amendment.

I'm sure that some amount of minimal law enforcement presence reduces some amount of minimal crimes, but what crimes? If someone steals makeup from a supermarket and there's no law enforcement to arrest them, how much damage was caused, versus everyone paying into a system that streamlines putting people into a prison system? If it's a serious crime, like murder, I'm sure the national guard, citizens, federal agents, or military branches, could do the work to arrest suspects. They have a different funding structure, and are already being provided a budget, separate from that of police departments.

Again, sorry for the US-centric viewpoint.

[–] corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca 3 points 10 months ago

there’s no law enforcement to arrest them, how much damage was caused

Vigilantism is fun.

[–] karlhungus@lemmy.ca 14 points 10 months ago (1 children)

How is it impossible to be true?

I'm not sure how you could make this argument without making assumptions about base crime rates.

[+] bionicjoey@lemmy.ca -8 points 10 months ago (4 children)

If the headline is to be believed, then completely abolishing the Toronto police would have 0 impact on crime rates in Toronto. To my mind, it seems impossible that that would be true.

[–] karlhungus@lemmy.ca 10 points 10 months ago (1 children)

It seems like you maybe thinking this is saying police do nothing, it isn't.

No consistent association means the data doesn't back up higher or lower funding having an impact on crime. It doesn't say anything about rates when the funding is zero or when funding is very high.

I think it means can't pay to reduce crime, or not pay and expect crime to go up.

Testing for zero would be extremely difficult, because we only have one Toronto sized city in Canada.

I'm guessing here but I suspect that there's a significant number of places with zero police presence that have very little crime. And this article suggests that there are very well funded police presences where crime still happens.

[+] bionicjoey@lemmy.ca -9 points 10 months ago (2 children)

No consistent association means the data doesn't back up higher or lower funding having an impact on crime. It doesn't say anything about rates when the funding is zero or when funding is very high.

Is "zero" not "lower"?

[–] TotallyHuman@lemmy.ca 4 points 10 months ago (1 children)

If there's no zero in the dataset, then we don't have any zero about data. It could be, for instance, that some police have a large effect, but that you hit diminishing returns incredibly quickly.

[–] karlhungus@lemmy.ca 3 points 10 months ago

Skim the article, it's 20 large municipality's, nowhere is 0 mentioned

[–] Oderus@lemmy.world 5 points 10 months ago

Reading is really hard for some people eh?

[–] CanadaPlus 4 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

I mean, the data is only about funding rates that actually exist. No law enforcement at all would be jumped on by organized crime (that's called a power vacuum, and isn't a thing in Canada), but apparently an especially light police presence is no different from a heavy one.

What it most directly supports policy-wise is scaling down the local police a bit. The real work will still get done by whatever investigative teams.

[–] bionicjoey@lemmy.ca 2 points 10 months ago

Yeah I totally agree.

[–] villasv@lemmy.ca 3 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

If the headline is to be believed, then completely abolishing the Toronto police would have 0 impact on crime rates in Toronto.

Did you even try to read the study?

data on municipal police service expenditures from 2010 to 2021 in 20 of the most populous urban municipalities in Canada

In 2019, police services were the top operating expenditure in a majority of the municipalities. Real per capita spending on police services increased in 16 of 20 municipalities from 2010 to 2020. Marked differences are seen in spending between municipalities: in 2019, in 2020 dollars, Vancouver spent $495.84 per capita, whereas Quebec City spent $217.05 per capita.

[–] nik282000@lemmy.ca 4 points 10 months ago

When was the last time you needed the police? I've had four interactions with police in the past 5 years. Two times they banged on my door to provide them with video while investigating a break in and an assault. The other two times they totally ignored our stolen vehicle and a suspicious death. Fuck the police, just sell them off to Amazon or Walmart.

[–] usualsuspect191@lemmy.ca 4 points 10 months ago

Imagine a town that every person is a police officer. Think there won't be any crime? I'd argue there'd be the same if not more than one with no police officers, just different types. There'd be no reporting of crime in the police town though...

[–] troyunrau@lemmy.ca 1 points 10 months ago

You're getting downvoted by the ACAB brigade. But you're absolutely right. If there is zero enforcement of the Rule of Law, then the Rule of Law doesn't exist. Granted cops are only a portion of that mechanism (legal system and legislators and general societal acceptance of these institutions also required.)

You could run an experiment -- remove all cops from Calgary, but keep cops in Edmonton. The crime rate might be similar to background in the first year, but in the third year? Tenth year? I'd suspect that suddenly people would be clamouring for the police to enforce laws in Calgary again.

(I picked those cities because there was a remarkable experiment performed at one point where Calgary stopped fluorinating their water supply, while Edmonton continued. The cavity rates diverged rapidly until political pressure returned fluorination.)

Anyway, a background level of policing is required for Peace, Order, and Good Governance. Not zero police. Not a police state either.