That figure is a little misleading, but I understand how you picked it up because it’s everywhere.
Police “clear” crimes to be progressed for prosecution.
Prosecutors “prosecute” crimes. It’s this that the 2% figure is aimed at. The clearance rates (the job done by the police) is higher.
According to this article[1], 22% of reported serious crimes led to arrests. 4% (of reported serious crimes) led to convictions. They then halve both of those numbers to account for unreported crimes. The article still uses the 2% figure in the headline despite the nuance in the article.
That might sound academic given the overall point you make still stands. I just thought it was worth mentioning.
Ok then, so more technically, and more generously to police from a purely reactionary perspective of ‘they can only respond to reports’… they do an adequate job of clearing 4% of what actually gets reported to them.
I know that cops dont actually prosecute, I made that post before falling asleep, I was a bit loose with language.
Their role in the prosecution process is basically to be witnesses, to gather evidence for the trial.
And, unless I am misunderstanding this… ~82% of the arrests they do actually make … don’t result in convictions, and are thus ‘overarrests’ in some sense… as … you went to all the effort to make an arrest, and it turns out that no actual crime was committed?
Cops have an ~18% chance of making an arrest for a serious crime that actually sticks?
They have an ~82% likelihood that they are overpolicing, like by definition, when it comes to serious crimes?
Apologies if I sounded like I was lecturing there. I got very into the numbers.
I see the 82% figure you mention too. But I feel out of my depth now. An arrest requires probable cause (a low threshold), whereas courts require reasonable doubt (a high threshold). The gap between these two seems to be what should let police work function. Eg: attorneys examine or challenge the charges, plea deals, case dismissal / acquittal etc. But I’m skimming articles I don’t understand at this point.
82% does seem high to me too. But I also see too many cut-and-dry cases on TV. I don’t know what to think.
No worries about seeming to lecture me, you were more correct and precise, I was sloppy, any other person reading this convo would be well served by the precision and context.
So thus I will now nitpick you: ‘beyond a reasonable doubt’.
Hehe.
I definitely concur that basically all cop oriented or cop centric media is set up to make almost all cops and such look like extremely well intentioned and competent people, when factually, most cops are simply of average intelligence, and are uh, kind of well known for things like abusing their partners, being right wing authoritarians, also doing overtime fraud.
I would be curious to see if other countries have a substantially different arrest to conviction ratio.
I know that many other countries spend far less money on policing, have far lower rates of incarceration, and some even require something akin to, or an actual law degree of some kind before they can actually be various grades of police officer.
Further, obviously, almost all other country’s police are significantly less highly armed, and the US is just rife with absolute bullshit practices being promoted as legitimate training and procedures… we still widely use ‘lie detectors’ that simply measure stress, and often give false positives snd false negatives, we have nonsensical ‘body language expert’ shit everywhere… and just generally, the police are taught that the general populace is basically an enemy combatant force, ala how we approached policing in the Iraq occupation… because a lot of the people and materiel from Iraq War 2 just got recycled into local Police Departments.
EDIT:
Oh right, and then now ICE just is the Gestapo, and has more funding than the Marine Corp.
Also the NYPD currently has more funding than the entire military of Norway, or Vietnam, or Mexico.
(not combined, but singly)
It would be the 30th largest military in the world by funding, if you threw it up there.
ICE, alone, would be uh… abouth the 18th, as large as the entire defense budget of the Netherlands.(tied for 18th), somewhat less than the entire defense budget of Israel (17th), a bit more than the entire defense budget of Brazil (19th)… if you go by per annum allocations.
If you’re in the US, yes, you’re famed for all the policing issues you mentioned. I can only go off of conversations with my friends dotted around the EU but the perception we have is that police here are different because of circumstances rather than innate qualities. They’re generally not armed, they’re slightly better educated and at least on paper, there are institutions providing oversight.
But the same problems exist here to one degree or another, especially racism. But also excessive force, using their position as an officer to protect themselves from accountability around issues including domestic violence … and while lie detectors are rarely used they are starting to use AI at border control to detect if people might be lying: https://peopleofcolorintech.com/articles/ai-lie-detectors-at-borders-who-does-the-eus-ai-act-actually-protect/
So I don’t know how we really compare. I see some crazy videos from the USA of people’s interactions with police. It seems like another world completely compared to here in Ireland. And ICE seem like domestic terrorists rather than law enforcement.
But we also have institutional corruption so bad that the force tried to frame a whistleblower (Maurice McCabe) for child abuse. The most senior people were replaced with someone who wasn’t Irish (Drew Harris), essentially given the job of draining the swamp / reforming the institution.
That figure is a little misleading, but I understand how you picked it up because it’s everywhere.
Police “clear” crimes to be progressed for prosecution.
Prosecutors “prosecute” crimes. It’s this that the 2% figure is aimed at. The clearance rates (the job done by the police) is higher.
According to this article[1], 22% of reported serious crimes led to arrests. 4% (of reported serious crimes) led to convictions. They then halve both of those numbers to account for unreported crimes. The article still uses the 2% figure in the headline despite the nuance in the article.
That might sound academic given the overall point you make still stands. I just thought it was worth mentioning.
1: https://theconversation.com/police-solve-just-2-of-all-major-crimes-143878
Ok then, so more technically, and more generously to police from a purely reactionary perspective of ‘they can only respond to reports’… they do an adequate job of clearing 4% of what actually gets reported to them.
I know that cops dont actually prosecute, I made that post before falling asleep, I was a bit loose with language.
Their role in the prosecution process is basically to be witnesses, to gather evidence for the trial.
And, unless I am misunderstanding this… ~82% of the arrests they do actually make … don’t result in convictions, and are thus ‘overarrests’ in some sense… as … you went to all the effort to make an arrest, and it turns out that no actual crime was committed?
Cops have an ~18% chance of making an arrest for a serious crime that actually sticks?
They have an ~82% likelihood that they are overpolicing, like by definition, when it comes to serious crimes?
Apologies if I sounded like I was lecturing there. I got very into the numbers.
I see the 82% figure you mention too. But I feel out of my depth now. An arrest requires probable cause (a low threshold), whereas courts require reasonable doubt (a high threshold). The gap between these two seems to be what should let police work function. Eg: attorneys examine or challenge the charges, plea deals, case dismissal / acquittal etc. But I’m skimming articles I don’t understand at this point.
82% does seem high to me too. But I also see too many cut-and-dry cases on TV. I don’t know what to think.
No worries about seeming to lecture me, you were more correct and precise, I was sloppy, any other person reading this convo would be well served by the precision and context.
So thus I will now nitpick you: ‘beyond a reasonable doubt’.
Hehe.
I definitely concur that basically all cop oriented or cop centric media is set up to make almost all cops and such look like extremely well intentioned and competent people, when factually, most cops are simply of average intelligence, and are uh, kind of well known for things like abusing their partners, being right wing authoritarians, also doing overtime fraud.
I would be curious to see if other countries have a substantially different arrest to conviction ratio.
I know that many other countries spend far less money on policing, have far lower rates of incarceration, and some even require something akin to, or an actual law degree of some kind before they can actually be various grades of police officer.
Further, obviously, almost all other country’s police are significantly less highly armed, and the US is just rife with absolute bullshit practices being promoted as legitimate training and procedures… we still widely use ‘lie detectors’ that simply measure stress, and often give false positives snd false negatives, we have nonsensical ‘body language expert’ shit everywhere… and just generally, the police are taught that the general populace is basically an enemy combatant force, ala how we approached policing in the Iraq occupation… because a lot of the people and materiel from Iraq War 2 just got recycled into local Police Departments.
EDIT:
Oh right, and then now ICE just is the Gestapo, and has more funding than the Marine Corp.
Also the NYPD currently has more funding than the entire military of Norway, or Vietnam, or Mexico.
(not combined, but singly)
It would be the 30th largest military in the world by funding, if you threw it up there.
ICE, alone, would be uh… abouth the 18th, as large as the entire defense budget of the Netherlands.(tied for 18th), somewhat less than the entire defense budget of Israel (17th), a bit more than the entire defense budget of Brazil (19th)… if you go by per annum allocations.
Counter-nitpick accepted 😄
If you’re in the US, yes, you’re famed for all the policing issues you mentioned. I can only go off of conversations with my friends dotted around the EU but the perception we have is that police here are different because of circumstances rather than innate qualities. They’re generally not armed, they’re slightly better educated and at least on paper, there are institutions providing oversight.
But the same problems exist here to one degree or another, especially racism. But also excessive force, using their position as an officer to protect themselves from accountability around issues including domestic violence … and while lie detectors are rarely used they are starting to use AI at border control to detect if people might be lying: https://peopleofcolorintech.com/articles/ai-lie-detectors-at-borders-who-does-the-eus-ai-act-actually-protect/
So I don’t know how we really compare. I see some crazy videos from the USA of people’s interactions with police. It seems like another world completely compared to here in Ireland. And ICE seem like domestic terrorists rather than law enforcement.
But we also have institutional corruption so bad that the force tried to frame a whistleblower (Maurice McCabe) for child abuse. The most senior people were replaced with someone who wasn’t Irish (Drew Harris), essentially given the job of draining the swamp / reforming the institution.
So what I’m reading is that police are wrong or bad at what they do ~82% of the time.
78%, but yes