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this post was submitted on 19 Jan 2024
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The crime rate probably wouldn't change, just the reporting of crime. It's not like law enforcement really prevents much crime.
If people know a community has literally no law enforcement, they would flock to that place to do crimes. A certain minimum level acts as a deterrent. I think what the study really showed is that there are diminishing returns past a certain threshold amount of funding. And that most or all police depts are well past that threshold.
This isn’t true at all. I grew up in a place with no full time police and I currently live in another where I’ve been here for 2 years and seen a police car like 5 times on the highway. It is not the Wild West out there either.
Was/is it a populated area or the middle of nowhere? I'm talking about places here where a PD makes sense to have in the first place.
You say that, but I watch people perform dangerous traffic violations in their cars all the damn time. There are certain kinds of laws that do actually need to be enforced.
Traffic violations is an almost perfect example of a place where people pin all the biggest problems on poor exercises of individual responsibility when really it's almost entirely and issue of road engineering and urban design.
We build streets that encourage bad behavior and then get mad when the bad behavior happens.
Even behaviors people consider quite aberrant like street racing can only happen because we build race tracks in cities and then try to pretend they're something else.
Or take drunk driving. Of course people are going to drive drunk when your entire society is structured around driving being the only way a reasonable person gets from point a to point b... This doesn't forgive the bad behavior, but taking a firm moral position here instead of listening to the explanation and making a change is not going to protect any lives.
In the first place, you can't fix bad driving with enforcement. You can only punish it after it already happened. Pretty much no one is going to stop driving badly because pretty much nobody intended to drive badly.
You do not fix road safety with an enforcement-based solution. All the money sent to police to try to keep the roads safe is money that could have actually been spent on engineering solutions to keep the road safe and instead is now pissed away into the wind.
Maybe it just changes the kinds of crimes committed and/or the reporting of those crimes. I came from a small town about 30 min from the nearest station. Police would maybe drive through for a couple hours every weekend or two, or when there was an actual call for them. There was a lot of drunk driving, stunting, petty vandalism and similar crime because for the most part people knew there wasn’t police around. You ado got occasional situations like someone from another area coming to the town and breaking into many sheds, or a business because they know the police response time is going to be so long there’s little risk of getting caught.
On the other hand, it was also the kind of place where people would mostly leave doors unlocked, leave things outside in an in-fenced yard, and similar things because those kinds of crime tend not to happen. In an urban setting it’s the kind of crime that people would commit in a neighbourhood distant from their own, but in a small town it’s all essentially the same neighbourhood, so it looks pretty suspicious if your new BBQ shows up the day after someone else’s gets stolen.
I read another study, though I can't recall where at the moment, that instead of paying law enforcement, putting the money into social programs in a small community was just as effective, but that probably wouldn't scale to entire countries. That being said, it's not like I would go out and rob a place just because the police are no longer a threat. I would imagine many others would feel the same. I don't know about Canada, but in America, citizen's arrest can be a deterrent as well.
There's precedent of living without police (in US, sorry I don't know enough about Canada). The US didn't have an organized police force until 1838 (https://time.com/4779112/police-history-origins/). Before that, and in some places even after that point, the military was used to enforce laws. Hell, in theory, it's one of the purposes for the US 2nd amendment.
I'm sure that some amount of minimal law enforcement presence reduces some amount of minimal crimes, but what crimes? If someone steals makeup from a supermarket and there's no law enforcement to arrest them, how much damage was caused, versus everyone paying into a system that streamlines putting people into a prison system? If it's a serious crime, like murder, I'm sure the national guard, citizens, federal agents, or military branches, could do the work to arrest suspects. They have a different funding structure, and are already being provided a budget, separate from that of police departments.
Again, sorry for the US-centric viewpoint.
Vigilantism is fun.