Cops are mostly useless

Here’s an observation that you might find counter-intuitive, unless you recognize that the police carry a cost in inherent destructiveness: more police doesn’t work.

In 2016, a group of criminologists conducted a systematic review, opens new tab of 62 earlier studies of police force size and crime between 1971 and 2013. They concluded that 40 years of studies consistently show that “the overall effect size for police force size on crime is negative, small, and not statistically significant.” “This line of research has exhausted its utility,” the authors wrote. “Changing policing strategy is likely to have a greater impact on crime than adding more police.” Decades of data similarly shows that police don’t solve much serious and violent crime – the safety issues that most concern everyday people. Over the past decade, “consistently less than half of all violent crime and less than twenty-five percent of all property crime were cleared,” William Laufer and Robert Hughes wrote in a 2021 law review article, opens new tab. Laufer and Hughes are professors in the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania’s Legal Studies and Business Ethics Department. Police “have never successfully solved crimes with any regularity, as arrest and clearance rates are consistently low throughout history,” and police have never solved even a bare majority of serious crimes, University of Utah college of law professor Shima Baradaran Baughman wrote in another 2021 law review article, opens new tab, including murder, rape, burglary and robbery. Existing research also affirms the findings in the recent report on police work in California.

I once had a nice encounter with the local sheriff’s department when a visitor accidentally locked their keys in their car — they came right over and used their collection of simple tools to break into the car, and the officer was quite nice. He didn’t need to use his gun. I’m all for a disarmed police force, also one that doesn’t use an armored personnel carrier or tank.