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0 pointspyre10y ago0 comments

> Perhaps they could attempt to solve and prevent crimes involving violence and fraudulent behavior, which theoretically is the reason they exist in the first place.

You are assuming that they are not doing that currently.

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jjaredsimpson10y ago

From the article:

American police forces deliberately gorge on the excess of 750,000 marijuana-related arrests every year in order to profit from quotas, grants, and civil forfeiture while allowing hundreds of thousands of rape kits to sit untested for years in police warehouses. Only 4% of all American police arrests are for crimes considered “violent” by the FBI, even though those crimes are offered as the justification for enormous public expenditures, wholesale Orwellian surveillance, and every violent aspect of modern policing.

CPLX10y ago

That's correct they are not. David Simon has spoken at length on that exact issue, and it's referenced in the article I linked to quoting him.

pyreOP10y ago

Do you have numbers to backup the claim that those other crimes are occurring at a higher rate than the number of arrests/convictions for them? In other words, would every "War on Drugs" arrest translate into a "more useful" arrest if we eliminated the War on Drugs (and refocused on other crimes)? My feeling is that it wouldn't.

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