Interesting, now it would be interesting to see what call activity looked like over the same period. In a time with a major push to defund the police, overall, calls for service likely increased. It did in my case. So smaller agency, higher demand. I’m curious if this played out across the country.
That's a little like saying "I'm losing weight, so I can stop dieting and exercising".
In other words, you have to know more about the level of crime that we are willing to live with, and what else the cities could spend their money on, before you can decide what the right level of staffing is.
The obvious question is how this affected crime up/down in those cities? Would it be possible to post an analysis of how certain crime rates varied with the growth/decline of the respective police departments. Thanks.
Great data - very informative and I haven't seen this before. Based on my understanding of deterrence theory, it's shocking that the homicide decline has coincided with this level of police de-staffing. I also wonder how our urban staffing levels compare with urban centers in Europe, because I know our national numbers already did not compare favorably.
One small question / nit - in the colored tables, the choice of blue for declines and red for increases in staffing was distracting, because red is typically used for declines, unless a decline is generally understood to be a good thing, for example a disease outbreak.
Interesting, now it would be interesting to see what call activity looked like over the same period. In a time with a major push to defund the police, overall, calls for service likely increased. It did in my case. So smaller agency, higher demand. I’m curious if this played out across the country.
Since everyone says crime is dropping, it makes sense to reduce the size of police departments, right?
That's a little like saying "I'm losing weight, so I can stop dieting and exercising".
In other words, you have to know more about the level of crime that we are willing to live with, and what else the cities could spend their money on, before you can decide what the right level of staffing is.
The obvious question is how this affected crime up/down in those cities? Would it be possible to post an analysis of how certain crime rates varied with the growth/decline of the respective police departments. Thanks.
Great data - very informative and I haven't seen this before. Based on my understanding of deterrence theory, it's shocking that the homicide decline has coincided with this level of police de-staffing. I also wonder how our urban staffing levels compare with urban centers in Europe, because I know our national numbers already did not compare favorably.
One small question / nit - in the colored tables, the choice of blue for declines and red for increases in staffing was distracting, because red is typically used for declines, unless a decline is generally understood to be a good thing, for example a disease outbreak.