Police are not primarily crime fighters, according to the data

My job was broken in to. They sent a detective. He looked around and told us there was basically zero chance he'd catch the guy.

I found a cigarette butt outside. He said "It could be anybody". I said "nobody here smokes". He said "even if it's his, there's little chance it's a DNA match."

To his credit, the detective took the cigarette butt and tested it. There was a DNA match to a guy living in our small town who'd been in jail three times for robbery meaning the cops knew exactly who he was and what he did for a living but weren't doing anything to stop him.

When they went to his house they found everything of ours that he couldn't sell.

Really mind blowing how few crimes are actually solved. I've had real world experience of being a robbery victim and there was absolutely no attempt at solving it.

Someone told me if you have a problem and call the police, now you have two problems.

They've basically became untrained social workers who are terrible at their jobs. They spend lots of time dealing with mental illness and substance abuse issues and they think those can be solved with violence.

Why not just automate traffic violations and remove 83% of police?

Over the past decade, “consistently less than half of all violent crime and less than twenty-five percent of all property crime were cleared...

The response to a car break in is always, just call your insurance company. Imagine if they took it seriously and used forensic tools. Most car breakins are done by a small number of the same people.

Tax collectors for the rich

I remember once my car got stolen. I reported it, and the police came to my house and accused me of stealing it. I was like “why the fuck would I do that.” Which they responded by threatening to make me take a polygraph test. When I was like “okay, fine, let’s do it” they decided to leave. I didn’t get my car back until it was in the impound, and I had to pay 200 dollars to get it back (?!?)

This whole experience is what made me truly realize that the police don’t do fuck all for working class people. They’re just there to take your money. Fuck those useless cops, and fuck the system that makes me pay when my car gets stolen.

I'll never forget this woman I worked with a long time ago. She was in a clerical type of position, but she had an absolute shit-stain of a miserable scumbag for a husband that was actively dealing drugs in the community. She broke down and vented to me one day about the whole thing and I told her she really needs to report it to the police, and that she needs to really do it for her kids to get rid of the exposure they had to the drugs in the home.

She eventually willed up the courage to report it, and I helped her get info from the local sheriff's dept and PD. They had a deputy and detective who headed up this team.

Long story short, she gave them everything. Dates, times, locations, and all the people to bust. She agreed to be a witness, and it was enough to take down a significant distribution ring. Nothing ever came of it. 5 years later her husband was arrested for a traffic infraction, and then he finally ended up in prison because he had ten pounds of cocaine, and 50 some pounds of meth in his vehicle. They never busted up the ring.

I remember the feeling, that the whole thing was just a dog and pony show. I was in my 20's but I learned way back then that law enforcement is a silly joke. Cops don't do shit for the working class.

As anarchist Allen Thornton observes, “Police aren’t in the protection business; they’re in the revenge business.” Forget about Batman driving around interrupting crimes in progress. Police patrol does not prevent crime or catch criminals. When police patrol was discontinued secretly and selectively in Kansas City neighborhoods, the crime rate stayed the same. Other research likewise finds that detective work, crime labs, etc. have no effect on the crime rate. But when neighbors get together to watch over each other and warn off would-be criminals, criminals try another neighborhood which is protected only by the police. The criminals know that they are in little danger there.

— Anarchy 101 by Bob Black

Here's an article about the Kansas City experiment on Wikipedia.

Kind of hard fighting crime when they're the ones starting said crime....

Color me surpised.

Police spend most of their day inserting themselves into the everyday lives of citizens who aren't doing anything wrong.

I have a criminal record. Minor drug charges. I still get pulled over constantly, for zero reason, just so the cop can take a look and see if they approve of my hair clothes etc, and whether or not they wanna ruin my life...because they can, without provocation. Ever get slapped with a resisting arrest because the other charges weren't gonna stick in court? Happens all the time.

Fuck cops.🖕

The courts have ruled many times that the police have no duty to protect.

This article brought to you by "yet another thing we all already figured out years before the study."

Police in my town spend a significant amount of time at the scenes of car accidents. I wonder what percentage of their time?

Their priority should be on crime and accident response and prevention and I feel like it is in my small town. I don't know how this compares to police in larger cities, which makes studies like these valuable.

Police in the U.S. is a shit show and other countries are following because they all reduce the screening procedures, psychological care and training time. But just defunding them, without doing anything else, will make it worse.

You propaply have to build up some completely new type of police force, break it up and fill important positions with new people and start again from there.

Otherwise this will continue to spiral downwards. And with increasingly bad reputation of police you will attract more an more bad people into the job.

Here in Australia, they are more like revenue collectors.

I remember calling 911 and reporting multiple gun shots across the Street. I was told it was probably fireworks. I told them I own guns and know what a gun sounds like, they told me I don't, but they will send someone, I waited and they never came. I wake up the next day and guess what they found a dead guy in the park that had been shot... They never came to ask me questions or anything even though I had notes on how many shots and the time and they knew who I was and my number and address. Cops are useless, I also was a victim of the cops getting the wrong address, I woke up to a bang bang bang open up! I opened up to a shotgun in my face cocked and ready to blow my head off. Only after they realized my house wasn't the same as a house on a different street did they stop pointing guns at me

The article specifically mentions deputies, and how they don't spend time on violent crime, but the article never mentions ONCE, detectives, whose sole job is investigating violent crime. I'm not pro-police in any way, but... yeah. Also it seems like this article was written by an angsty teenager with lines like:

The departments were mostly non-responsive to my questions.

Riverside Sheriff Chad Bianco said the data -- which is self-reported -- is flawed. All four departments declined to answer specific questions about how officers spend their time, and didn’t provide contradictory information.

I'm all for criticizing the police, let's just write it a bit better next time, huh?

So traffic violations are something we no longer want to enforce then? Nearly 43000 deaths in 2021 from automobiles.. https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/traffic-crash-death-estimates-2022

When 3/4 of traffic stops are warnings you know most of them are just the typical person making dumb mistakes since warnings are typically only given to people with no recent record.

No idea why "resonable suspicion" crimes are such a big focus.

Wow who would have guessed. Certainly not marxists who have been saying this for hundreds of years!

https://www.redpepper.org.uk/the-police-are-not-here-to-protect-you/