Quote Originally Posted by OngBonga View Post
It's kinda hard to believe someone needs statistics to understand that an active police force acts as a deterrent.
There have been many studies that show increasing policing has no effect on overall crime rates. Others show increasing punishments for crimes has no statistically significant effect on the rate of those crimes being committed.

It's one of the reasons I encourage people to investigate the history of policing (specifically in the US, but around the world). The notion that a society needs a standing police force is a relatively recent human invention. Throughout most of human history, people lived in societies without police forces. This was a surprise to me when I learned it last summer, and it's spurred a lot of thought on my end about what the actual purpose of a police force is - both in intent and realization - and what it could or should be.

I'm not claiming to have any answers about what a "perfect" police force would look like, but many assumptions about what role it actually fills in our society are simply false. The presence of police, on the whole, does not have any effect on crime rates. The severity of legal consequence for a crime has little to no bearing on someone's willingness to commit that crime.

Given that the police are paid with tax money, and that the primary functions we all assume they perform are false, I think it's appropriate to consider that we are not getting what we think we're paying for. I think it's important to question whether the effect we're trying to buy is in fact even viable, given human nature.