There’s “no consistent association” between police funding and crime rates across the country, according to a published study by University of Toronto researchers.

  • @karlhungus@lemmy.ca
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    141 year ago

    How is it impossible to be true?

    I’m not sure how you could make this argument without making assumptions about base crime rates.

    • @bionicjoey@lemmy.ca
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      -71 year ago

      If the headline is to be believed, then completely abolishing the Toronto police would have 0 impact on crime rates in Toronto. To my mind, it seems impossible that that would be true.

      • @karlhungus@lemmy.ca
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        91 year ago

        It seems like you maybe thinking this is saying police do nothing, it isn’t.

        No consistent association means the data doesn’t back up higher or lower funding having an impact on crime. It doesn’t say anything about rates when the funding is zero or when funding is very high.

        I think it means can’t pay to reduce crime, or not pay and expect crime to go up.

        Testing for zero would be extremely difficult, because we only have one Toronto sized city in Canada.

        I’m guessing here but I suspect that there’s a significant number of places with zero police presence that have very little crime. And this article suggests that there are very well funded police presences where crime still happens.

        • @bionicjoey@lemmy.ca
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          -91 year ago

          No consistent association means the data doesn’t back up higher or lower funding having an impact on crime. It doesn’t say anything about rates when the funding is zero or when funding is very high.

          Is “zero” not “lower”?

          • @TotallyHuman@lemmy.ca
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            41 year ago

            If there’s no zero in the dataset, then we don’t have any zero about data. It could be, for instance, that some police have a large effect, but that you hit diminishing returns incredibly quickly.

            • @bionicjoey@lemmy.ca
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              -7
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              1 year ago

              That’s literally what I said elsewhere in this thread. People are putting words in my mouth all over this thread but literally all I was saying is that it’s impossible that the headline is true verbatim.

      • Victor Villas
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        1 year ago

        If the headline is to be believed, then completely abolishing the Toronto police would have 0 impact on crime rates in Toronto.

        Did you even try to read the study?

        data on municipal police service expenditures from 2010 to 2021 in 20 of the most populous urban municipalities in Canada

        In 2019, police services were the top operating expenditure in a majority of the municipalities. Real per capita spending on police services increased in 16 of 20 municipalities from 2010 to 2020. Marked differences are seen in spending between municipalities: in 2019, in 2020 dollars, Vancouver spent $495.84 per capita, whereas Quebec City spent $217.05 per capita.