Cost Effective Rules for Police Deployment
The Coronavirus costs of care, and loss of State and Local taxes from the shutdown and slow restart, means that such budgets will be lowered, by force. Hence, we need better policies to save money in these State and Local governments, including policing.
We wrote before that the costs of housing a homeless or mentally challenged person is about $40,000 a year, as opposed to the present $100,000 a year to treat them though policing, jails, and hospital admissions. It is also a lot more humane and caring. This also frees up police time.
There used to be scandals on how much policing costs resulted because they were padding their salaries with a lot of overtime work. Since we have to reduce budgets, this should stop.
The main point of this article though, is that we should evaluate the costs to society before we call the police, using a cost effectiveness analysis. This should occur with cost effective rules for the public at large, from the 911 dispensing facilities, and the police action rules.
I hate to take the tragic George Floyd case as an example, but this is an incredibly extreme case of wastage. For passing a $20 dollar fake bill, the police were called. There are a lot of wattages in running any businesses, like buying stock that doesn’t sell, or which expires in shelf life, or in staying open times with slow hours or days. Losing $20 from a fake bill, or from minor thefts, should just be written off as the cost of doing business.
The fact that the store staff should have gone out and risked any kind of physical response to ask for the product back or for another $20 bill is absolutely ridiculous. Any business insurance company should have dropped any business with such rules. Presumably most passage of counterfeit bills is done by innocent people who were given the bills in some other transaction. I remember as a kid, they used to pass bills below an ultraviolet light to check them, when $20 actually meant something.
The police should not even be sent out for any petty thefts below a certain amount that were cost effective, probably needing even a grand theft amount. Since the police time, risk, cost of booking, cost of jail time, cost of charging, cost of sentencing, and cost of confinement undoubtedly exceed the loss at the minimum grand theft amount by many times over, it is a great loss to society to pursue. The cost of confining a prisoner for a year is much greater than awarding a full college scholarship for a year. Grand theft in California requires a minimum theft of $950.
What about the $20 loss required the dispatching of four policemen? Not cost effective. Why was an arrest considered necessary, rather than just taking a license number or a driver’s license number, and issuing a ticket. The defendant could have challenged it in court, or just paid it, as with any traffic violation, which could have been more serious. With ubiquitous cameras and face recognition software use by police, people can be identified and billed, without police even having to put themselves or suspects at risk.
I remember when I had a heart attack, there was a whole mob of police, fire department, and ambulance in my tiny living room. They only took my blood pressure, but made me extremely nervous. Just the ambulance would have sufficed. They took me to the nearest hospital, which could not take care of me. I had to wait six hours for yet another ambulance to take me to a full care hospital. We need more ambulances, less use of fire and police, and better rules for distribution to hospitals.
The over-incarceration policy of the US was a result of politicians running on no-tolerance policies. It was then promulgated by lobbying by prison building industries, prison guard unions, and private prison lobbying. Whereas Trump released a few, much more could be done. Now that we have more tolerant drug policies in some states, more can be done to release prisoners, especially if we can get tolerant federal policies. The Coronavirus showed us how costs could be lowered by releasing non-essential prisoners, rather than spending tens of thousands of dollars in treating a single very sick one.
The fact that blacks have been over-charged, over-sentenced and over-confined has to be corrected on a federal level, to get rid of problems with states that have a legacy of prejudice. We also have to restore the Voting Rights Act to stop prison-record voting disenfranchisement, which by itself can be inciting certain states to give minorities criminal records.
Again, I am not an expert in this subject, as I am not in most subjects which I opine about. I know the police are necessary and have tough jobs. I myself will limit my calls to them for really essential matters.
These incidents remind me of Victor Hugo’s novel “Les Miserables” , where the “criminal” Jean Valjean only stole a loaf of bread, and spent 19 years at hard labor. He was pursued all of his life, and he had to register as a past criminal everywhere that he went. The novel included the incident which Hugo saw in 1846, a hundred and seventy four years ago. Blacks in the South would still be slaves in the United States for another twenty years. The novel was published in 1862.
