Sunday, March 16, 2008

The Police is the biggest gang in the city

I am at the Justice 4 Alwy Benefits Concert tight now. The keynote speaker said "the poice is the biggest gang..."

It's kind of true, isn't it? But isn't that partly the point?

In the allocation of public resources and the drafting of policies, there are always going to be winners and losers.

The police, as far as a paramilitary organization, serves the interest of some over the interest of others.

The police, from a public perspective, are gauged not by their effectivness in the apprehension of criminals, but by their effectiveness in reducing crime. The assumption is that the former leads to the latter, but the police can employ other methods.

Harm-reduction and community policing are both ideas that crimes can be prevented before they start. The other thing the police can do, as insurances companies do, is to target demographic groups that are statistically more likely to commit a crime. This is neither legal nor just, but it is something the police might be tempted to do.

Intimidation of those groups might yields the kind of results that the police are judged by; perhaps in a more cost-effect manner (albeit, in the short run) than other methods. Arresting criminals invole court costs. Thounsands of people hours in paper work and filing.

As an organization with resource constraints, the police would have an incentive to externalize these costs: persecute minorites that are most likely to commit crimes so that they would be too afraid so that crime statistic would go down, and create more social problems in the long run. But sense of equality and future rises in crime rates are not the concerns of the current administration of the police services.

So,
Winners: Middle class white people and the police.
Losers: Minorities

Simple problem of economics.

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