Here’s dril’s candles on a graph for reference.
It’s easy to look at these and assume “well, high crime cities need more police,” but i think that’s putting the cart before the horse.
Police make crime worse.
Police take fiscal oxygen out of the room, away from actual social support programs. The money spent on policing could go to housing, nutritional services, healthcare, civil rights, building inspections, labor rights enforcement, street maintenance, public transportation. But it goes to paying guys to sit around idling Ford Explorers all day and hitting poor people with sticks.
Crime follows poverty in absolutely every single case. Every single “high crime city” is because of the fucking poverty.
also let’s remember that cops are literally always in the process of “creating crime.” They get to choose how laws are enforced, and when the narrative is that poor and marginalized people are the ones “doin the crime,” cops will find crime in the most fucked up socially acceptable Rorschach Test of all time. Like yes, let’s put more money into taking care of people and we’ll see crime drop, and we will also see it drop because there’s less assholes looking for confirmation of and enforcing their biases.


















