Thread by @Gaohmee, I absolutely can not keep up with my mentions at all

I absolutely can not keep up with my mentions at all - I apologize. I& #39;m getting a lot of folks who clearly want to talk about what horrible things will happen to me when we abolish police, so how about we actually do talk about police effectiveness then? Let& #39;s do it.

I& #39;ve been trying to look into data on police effectiveness and it actually gets really complicated for a number of reasons. The gist of it is that we have very little public access to the data of police effectiveness due to the way we collect arrest data.

The Bureau of Justice Statistics collect arrest data fromt he country& #39;s 18k law enforcement agencies, BUT said agencies self-report on a voluntary basis. Yes, you read that right.

This leads to significant disparities in the information they share. The data for actual arrests and who, why and when gets arrested remains largely inaccessible to the public. Statistics on crime are then isolated from data about the effectiveness of enforcement.

The data that we DO have therefore has a ton of gaps. We do know things like this though: about 10.5 million arrests are made every year and the vast majority of those are for noncriminal behaviour, drug violations and low-level offenses.

Again, I apologize that I don& #39;t have hard numbers on this, but according to the collating of the data we DO have, we know that racial disparities among arrests are huge and have been rising and that the majority of crime victims DO NOT REPORT CRIMES TO POLICE.

Arrests for violent offenses, according to the data set we do have, only make up 5% of all arrests. We also know that while violent crime has been on the decline for years, arrests have been rising, which means that arrests for low-level offenses have been rising.

The category that these low-level offenses are put into is being referred to as "all other offenses" by the FBI, which, you know... reinforces the black box that is police effectiveness. "Other" here may refer to traffic offenses, failure to pay fines and more.

There is very very little integration between court data and police data, so it& #39;s difficult to trace arrests all the way through to prosecution. The data set suggests that a majority of arrests are actually dismissed in court.

Now, are you familiar with the broken window theory? The broken window theory claims that low-level crimes automatically lead people to escalate into more serious crimes. The data we do have does not support this claim. It& #39;s a popular theory among law enforcement.

Further, the non-violent offense that has been on the rise the most have been drug offenses. Black folx are 2.4% more likely to be arrested for it, despite drug use being more or less equal across all ethnic groups.

This is a little more anecdotal now but every time I had to call the police in my 31 years of lifetime, it was because I had no other choice. I either needed it for insurance purposes or I had no access to more suitable services.

I have countless stories in which I have intervened in a potentially violent situation or with a distressed person in public where I did not want to call the police but had no other choice, ultimately being forced to put people around me in danger.

So where am I going with this? If police effectiveness data is a black box because it is based on self-reporting and we know that the vast majority of arrests are non-violent offenses....
How the hell do we justify the huge amount of resources we pour into militarized police?

Our arrest data alone is a clear indicator that we do not need heavily armed police forces in our streets, that their jobs are evidently not as dangerous as they make us and themselves believe.

What we do know is that we need other solutions to help with the problems in our neighborhoods. Access to other solutions than calling armed people into non-violent situations, because that& #39;s what most arrests seem to be.

Everything we know points to police being extremely ineffective for what we believe they do for our society. The only option is radically defunding or abolishing police and find better solutions.

Source and further reading:

https://theintercept.com/2019/01/31/arrests-policing-vera-institute-of-justice/">https://theintercept.com/2019/01/3...

Also, can we just talk about how absolutely messed up it is that the group we give literal military grade equipment and weapons to only rely on voluntary self-reporting of their actions? Like... what?

Latest Threads Unrolled: