something that drives me crazy is how people believe that cops have much of anything to do with “cutting crime”. they don’t. they react to crime that has already occurred by investigating/pursuing/arresting criminals.
crime prevention comes down to preventing the circumstances which lead people to commit crimes in the first place, and 9 times out of 10, that’s poverty. of course, nobody wants to deal with that…
crime prevention comes down to preventing the circumstances which lead people to commit crimes in the first place
I keep being reminded of the books I’m working on. I guess it just means we have know this stuff for a hundred fucking years.
Mary Stevenson Callcott, Russian Justice, Chapter 5.
Note the recommendation of the Conference in this regard. “In order to insure the effectiveness of judicial work, the judges should endeavor to ascertain the economic and social-political results of the verdict rendered by them, being assisted in this work by public opinion organized around the judicial institutions.” The same body placed a responsibility for prevention of crime on its courts. It was not only a duty to pronounce a sentence on a guilty person, but the tribunal must by means of its favorable position discover the reason for the circumstance of the crime. The recommendation ran, “The court, when trying a case, should not only establish the guilty persons but should also disclose those economic and organizational defects and shortcomings which create a favorable atmosphere for criminal actions, signalizing such circumstances to the attention of the Party and Soviet organs by means of special riders. The results of such signalizing should be checked up from time to time.”
According to compiled police data, only 2% of arrests result in convictions. If 2% of the burgers a cook made were edible, he’d have a very big problem on his hands.
Considering the frequency of false convictions and the rate at which they are achieved by coercion I’d say it’s even worse than that.
Less actually. Engels described this in the “Conditions…”, even in the conditions of purposeful and pretty obvious starvation only a minority of victims turned to crime. Especially that back then, even being unemployed or homeless or too poor to live was literally a crime, as the poor law stipulated, punished by the forced labour camp.
So really, this is the point of this survelliance system - not to prevent crime but to criminalise everyone. As old saying goes “there are no innocents, only people insufficiently interrogated”.
EDIT: wrong person, i wanted to write this to @plinky@hexbear.net
But arresting people as a form of harassment is the burger. Having a cop roll up on a guy sitting on the curb and throwing him in the back of a squad car is the service Americans want.
If anything, the low conviction rate is a problem only in so far as a court proceeding exists at all. Leave them all in jail forever, Gitmo style, and Burger Folk won’t complain.
Remove abilty to buy food from 100 % of population, you’'ll get 99.9 percent ‘criminals’
Because cops are there to provide an armed bulwark against strikes and protect commercial property and its owners, and provide the state with a supply of cheap labour (state depending). Other things they do are ancillary justifications for their existence.
