Policing in Nordic countries—which enjoy smaller police forces and vastly lower rates of violent crime and incarceration—shows us what life might look like under *dramatic reform* rather than complete abolition (which I still find utopian).
theweek.com/articles/91814…
theweek.com/articles/91814…
Cross-nationally, we’ve long observed a relationship between crime and inequality. The article argues that getting to a Nordic-style equilibrium of low crime, low policing, low incarceration requires massive investment in the welfare state. 
Redistribution—a mix of welfare state investment, financial market regulation, and anti-trust legislation—is long overdue. America has not been this unequal since before WWII.
There are also some challenges unique to the US relative to other rich countries. The US has something like 1.2 guns per capita while Norway has 0.28. This both makes demilitarization more difficult and the “substitutes” to policing potentially more dangerous.
The US’s biggest challenge is that ethnically diverse countries invest less in social welfare. The sad truth is the US would need to be a major outlier on this plot in order to get to the level of social spending associated with a Nordic-style criminal justice equilibrium.
Why? Because it is far too easy for those who oppose increased social spending to dog whistle (or in the case of POTUS, foghorn) people’s fears and stereotypes of immigrants and POCs.
That is the biggest barrier to building a welfare state, the idea that “my hard-earned money will be given to The Other.” We would need to radically redefine how Americans conceive of “the nation.”
As long as we only have two parties, and those parties are polarized around race, I am not sure how we get there.
As I was searching plots, I came across one comparison that really surprised me. The US and Europe spend very similar % of GDP on criminal justice. It’s the allocation that varies significantly. Europeans spend much less on prisons and much more on police. blog.skepticallibertarian.com/2019/01/09/cha…
Even when you disaggregate the data and compare US states to European countries, you’ll see vastly different police:prison spending ratios, although the ratio in Nordic countries are closest to the ratios of some US states.
Finally, I found this article by the @urbaninstitute helpful: urban.org/policy-centers…
Since 1977 (a major inflection point in the US in terms of wealth inequality and the War on Drugs) while police spending has gone up in absolute terms, it has remained a relative constant 4% of total expenditure over the last 40 years.
What *has* increased dramatically since 1977 is the US prison population, driven primarily by the incarceration of black men.
vox.com/2015/7/13/8913…
vox.com/2015/7/13/8913…
There are many reasons for this that fundamentally *do* relate to the drug war, although it’s worth noting that the vast majority of people in prison are in state prisons, for violent crimes. vox.com/2015/7/13/8913…
There is no apparent relationship between a state’s incarceration rate and crime rate. Decreasing the prison population has not led to increased crime. This suggests we could dramatically reduce our prison population without any effect on public safety. vox.com/2015/7/13/8913…
The data presented in this Vox article argue that mass incarceration has more to do with prosecution and the courts (especially the length of sentences) than with policing. vox.com/2015/7/13/8913…
There is no denying that police in America are overly militarized, quick to escalate, serve too many of what should be health or social functions, and routinely violate the Constitution.
Police unions too often shield police forces from legal or democratic oversight: time.com/5848705/disban…
Black communities bear the brunt of bad policing. economist.com/graphic-detail…
And the brunt of militarization, even though there is no evidence that militarization makes police any safer or reduces crime. Its most significant impact may be in reducing police legitimacy: pnas.org/content/115/37…
What the charts above suggest is that when we look at American criminal justice in comparison to other countries, and even our own past, there is an argument to be made that we are not over-policed. We may actually be “under-policed and overprisoned.” marginalrevolution.com/?s=police+pris…
Policing and criminal justice are not remotely within my expertise. I started this thread because I was interested in better understanding how the US compares to other countries and found there to be less engagement with data and with the problems of abolition than I’d like.
I agree that trimming around the edges will not work. Police clearly don’t give a sh** about body cams. We’ve learned the last few weeks just what they are willing to do, in broad daylight, with hundreds of iPhones watching.
All the documentation in the world matters little if police know that they can violate the Constitution with impunity, protected by rules like qualified immunity, their union, and fellow officers.
Still, I question “defund” or “abolition” as frames. I want more discussion of radical reform: abolishing unions, disbanding poor-performing forces, and starting from scratch using evidence-based strategies that build trust, reduce bias, and make it easy to punish/fire.
I do think the abolition movement is presenting us with a bold vision for demilitarization and for massively reducing community interaction with *armed* services, substituting them wherever possible with services skilled in deescalation, mental health, etc.
I want us not to lose sight of the fact that nearly half of all people killed by police have a disability. nbcnews.com/news/us-news/h…
I want us to not lose sight of the fact that over a third of people in prison have a disability. americanprogress.org/issues/crimina…
I want to not lose sight of the deep racial biases in the way we prosecute crime in America, of the importance of courts and prisons, which may be causing even greater harm, in the aggregate, than police.
I worry that a war between slogans (“law and order” v. “abolition”) will polarize the broad, historic support for reform the protests (and the violent police response to them) have created. Even “defund” has never been popular. As of 6 days ago, 16% supported cutting funding.
I want to not pretend that what the majority of Americans care about doesn’t matter. That winning elections don’t matter. That governing does not matter. When succession, revolution, or coup d’etat are not possible, what else do you have but our quasi-democracy?
I want to grapple with the complex nuances of the fact that since Ferguson, police killings have fallen by 37% in America’s largest cities but have risen in suburban and rural areas.
“It seems that solutions that can reduce police killings exist, in other words — the issue may be whether an area has the political will to enact them.” fivethirtyeight.com/features/polic…
And that one reason elections matter is that our present POTUS gives license to police and would-be vigilantes to terrorize black people, immigrants, and even “anarchists” (a term that includes young, white lefties and 75 year-old peace activists). theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/…
At the same time, POTUS’s role is *always* overstated. Americans focus far too much on the presidency. Even the “Never Biden” leftists must surely recognize the importance of the composition of Congress, state legislatures, and city councils for implementing reform.
What I want to be thinking more about how much inequality we as a country are willing to tolerate and how much we should be spending on social programs (welfare, education, healthcare) for reasons that go far beyond policing.
After all, we have never been richer and more prosperous as a country, have never had less crime, and yet we have never been more unequal, have never incarcerated as many people.
Lastly, I wanted to share this thread on Elinor Ostrom’s work on policing. She’s the only political scientist to ever win a Nobel Prize:
I suspect that at least some of @a_vansi’s reading of Ostrom may not map directly to the “defund” debate.
@a_vansi For one, it seems like Ostrom emphasizes *decentralization*: making police forces smaller by, say, chopping the LAPD into ten independent units, not per se shrinking the budget to 1/10.
@a_vansi The idea being that smaller forces would be more accountable to the neighborhoods and communities they serve, both through formal democratic mechanisms as well as increased trust.
@a_vansi Here is a great post that outlines how Ostrom’s ideas and social choice theory might be applied to creating police forces that better serve communities: peterlevine.ws/?p=19603
Thread broke! Re-linking the thread, here:
Yesterday, I got called a lot of things that I never thought I’d ever be called given my background, given my moral and intellectual commitments. But I do think there’s value to thinking in public. So, I’ve decided to keep adding to this thread.
One of the big areas of pushback was over my seemingly putting Nordic countries on a pedestal. I used the article from “The Week” as a point of departure to imagine a world where there was *much less* police violence and a completely different system of incarceration.
And to discuss some of the reasons why reaching that equilibrium of high social spending, low police violence might be very hard to replicate in the US. This led to a lot of people pointing out that there are many problems with policing in Nordic countries, too.
And that the police discriminate against immigrants and black & brown people, and apply excessive surveillance/use of force against these communities. I don’t doubt that this is true, especially when people describe their lived experiences.
But—the US is an outlier when compared to other rich democracies, on pretty much every measure. The data don’t tell the whole story but they are important. Snopes does some fact-checking. Yes, there are orders of magnitude fewer police killings: snopes.com/fact-check/pol…
That shouldn’t be the only outcome we care about, but it is the most urgent policing problem we face in the US. I think we should look to other countries to learn what conditions result in very few (near zero) police killings and see what, if anything, might be replicable.
A lot of the pushback yesterday was that all police are racist and violent, and so should be abolished everywhere, in every country. (I assume this means all domestic security forces, which would only leave the army to quell conflict, which doesn’t seem like a good idea either..)
I’m gonna come straight out to say that I am not an idealist. I’m a pragmatist. I went into college an idealist and came out concluding that idealism has killed a lot of people. So has pragmatism but on balance, fewer.
If you want to end all murder, all sexism, all racism, all violence, I’m going to be a very disappointing follow. I don’t believe in the perfectability of man.
I believe in the human condition and that our collective effort is to build a society that as equal as possible, as just as possible, as free, peaceful and prosperous as possible, while understanding that we will never completely eliminate evil.
I remember the fall of the Berlin Wall. I remember Pax Americana 2.0 which saw a massive drop in our country’s crime rate, a massive drop in battle deaths world wide (even with our disastrous wars, the world became much less violent when the Cold War ended).
I remember the wave of democratization that swept the world, the integration of China into global trade and the international system, and the long-run trends that extended lifespans, reduced infant mortality, and lifted millions out of poverty.
I’ve also been around for the major shift in the Overton Window around sex, gender, race that has happened in just the last 10-20 years, which was almost unthinkable when I was young.
Maybe we were all too optimistic, but if your comparison set is 1930-2000, even with all the threats to the environment, even with the massive inequalities driving the radicalization of our politics around the world, it’s hard not to feel like things are actually *pretty good.*
It’s clear to me, though—and I say this to the centrists and the right of center folks, with full knowledge I may piss off some of them as well as the radicals—we need *significant* redistribution in this country. We need policies that are left of Biden.
Inequality has reached a breaking point. Either we course correct, the same way we have done many times in the past, by enacting anti-trust laws, financial regulation, social welfare programs, or we will eventually be forced to by war or other catastrophe.
On that topic, this graph surprised me. Among the world’s richest countries, you can see the dip in inequality post-WWII and a return to early 20th c. levels starting in the 1980s, but *only among anglophone countries.* Japan + continental Europe had much different trajectories.
