Crime and Punishment
I stumbled on a blog post by Jerry Ratcliffe, who is a Professor of Criminal Justice and Director of the Center for Security and Crime Science at Temple University, Philadelphia, and a former police officer with London’s Metropolitan Police (UK).
From one of this posts:
Graph no. 2 is another image from my Intelligence-Led Policing book. The crime funnel represents what happens to a random selection of 1,000 crimes that affect the public (top bar). It shows the loss of cases through the criminal justice system. These are British national data derived from public records, but the comparisons to the U.S. are very similar. If you take a random selection of 1,000 crimes actually suffered by the public (violence, robbery, vehicle theft, residential burglary, theft and criminal damage) you can see that they only report 530 to the police, who in turn record just 43 percent of the original total.
Click to embiggenize.
Of these 429 events, 99 are detected (solved or cleared in some way) and of these, 60 end up with a day in court. The majority of those are found guilty or plead the same, but in the end only four of the events from the original 1,000 end up in a custodial sentence for the offender. This is an incarceration rate of 0.4% based on crime suffered by the community.
The main point here is that impacting higher in the crime funnel will be more effective because it affects the numbers below and affects a larger number of actual cases. Improving the detection rate will have an impact on prosecutions, pleas and incarceration, but only to a minimal level. Being prevention focused and changing the higher numbers is much more impactful. Consider if you could have a 10% change on one level. Where would it be most effective?
I don’t know how accurate the figures above are, but I assume the numbers are about as reasonable as the law enforcement community can provide. I’m not sure “an incarceration rate of 0.4% based on crime suffered by the community” is all that much of a deterrent, except insofar as crimes, apparently are just like potato chips – people who engage in crimes generally don’t stop at one. Most delinquents commit multiple crimes and eventually get snagged for something. But meanwhile, a whole of of people suffer a whole of outrage.
As to Ratcliffe’s question… I suspect what Ratclife is getting at is what the current esteemed leadership in Baltimore considers heavy handed policing. And I bet his 0.4% figure is a whole lot lower for Baltimore these days too.
If I got this right only 50 of 99 arrests for what somebody alleged were crimes were actual crimes as defined by law.
The other thing I get from this is some chief cop is proposing to just put all alleged offenders in a Gulag and forget about the laws and criminal justice system. That’s the way to handle disorder.. Damn those liberal civil rights judges and defense attorney’s.
Where does this come from, Mr. Kimel?
“If you take a random selection of 1,000 crimes actually suffered by the public …..you can see that they only report 530 to the police.”
How the fuck would he know how many real crimes were unreported? That would have to mean that every tom, dick, and harry who thinks something they experienced or saw was a crime and that means they had the where-with-all to know what a crime is. “I saw a guy in my local bar push the guy next to him… that’s assault .. a crime. But I didn’t report it because the guy apologized.” Or ” I saw a black dude driving a car I’m sure was stolen, but I didn’t get the license plate number so I didn’t report it.”
In 2015 the US incarceration rate was in excess of 650 / 100k population.
http://www.prisonstudies.org/country/united-states-america
If we follow this top cop’s proposal it should be at least 50/4 times higher at about 8300/100k population… roughly 12x what it is now. Why 50/4 time? This top cop starts off with 1000 crimes and only 4 of 1000 crimes get punished by incarceration while 50 of 1000 crimes are actually found guilty of a crime. In other words, according to this top cop we need to quit having trials and judges .. just let the cops put people away..
Last week someone broke into my wife’s car (parked on my property) and stole a phone charger. I am not an attorney, but I am reasonably certain that B&E and theft are both crimes. I also have a reasonable suspicion that walking up my driveway in the middle of the night qualifies as trespassing. Interestingly enough, we have cameras, but there are a few angles the cameras don’t catch well – we have video of a shadow at 11:35 PM moving along the side of the vehicle.
Now… what would be the point of reporting this to the police? Heck, I had a car actually stolen once. The only benefit of reporting it to the police was that it was that much more credible to a different set of police officers investigating a bank robbery in which my previously stolen vehicle was used as a getaway car.
The reality is, most of us are regularly victimized in ways that aren’t reporting to the police. I imagine some simply survey work – or even asking some of the criminals who do end up in the system – should provide some sort of guidelines as to how much crime is actually being reported… or not.
Nope. He said this:
Basically, he is saying I should report the theft of a phone charger. But that of course, requires the cops to be willing to take me seriously if I did show up to report the theft of a phone charger. I don’t see any of that happening any time soon.
Longtooth, I think the plan is to just have the police blow the offenders away with the surplus 50 caliber guns and grenade launchers that the Trump administration again wants to provide the police so “they can get tough on crime”. Kimel just has to move to a state where he can kill the battery charger thief under a “stand your ground” law and we can save all the tax dollars going to support the criminal justice system. Is this a great country or what?
Actually Mr. Kimel, what he’s promoting is a police state as “big brother” so that intelligence on everybody and their location, whereabouts by the minutes, associates, friends, relatives, teachers, , phone taps, internet sites used email communications, etc. can be put used to arrest people who MIGHT commit a crime in the future the on conjecture from “intelligence”.
That’s “law and order”… apparently the cause of disorder isn’t the problem so it must be because criminals just want to be criminals… “just because” I suppose.
You’re on the wrong track, fella
Longtooth,
So what is the cause of the problem or disorder as you put it? Consider my previous post on murders in Baltimore. Why are there 50% more murders there now since the death of Freddie Gray?
Where do you live that a thief would bother to break into a car to steal a phone charger? Those things cost what, $5? What would a fence offer for a phone charger? Hotels and motels give away the ones left by guests. Their housekeepers aren’t well paid, but even at their wage level, a phone charger isn’t really worth all that much once they have one and perhaps a spare.
(I’m really just curious here. It’s such a strange story, and I live a few blocks from a house that had its garage nearly destroyed when some guy driving a getaway car plowed into it and maybe two miles from where a guy grabbed a slider and moved someone’s house a few yards while she was in it.)
Kaleberg,
I assume the thief wasn’t discriminating, and the only reason he (I am stereotyping, sure, it might have been a woman) only stole a phone charger rather than a laptop, $400 in cash, a revolver, and a lesser Rembrandt is that the phone charger was in the car, but not a laptop, cash, revolver, or a Rembrandt. In other words, it was my wife’s fault the guy didn’t get much of a haul.
But it wasn’t for lack of trying. I will give him that. Based on the state of the vehicle the next morning, he rifled through the glove compartment, opened the center console, and for all I know checked under the seats, etc.
Did I misread the article or did Ratcliffe claim that the real low hanging fruit in crime prevention would be cracking down on unreported crime? That’s nearly half of all crime, but how does one crack down on it? How does one even find out about unreported crime on a reliable basis to crack down on it properly? It’s a great idea, but it’s like belling the cat. Would you want to be stopped on the street and interrogated about crimes against you that you didn’t bother to report?
The next rich vein seems to be the crime that the police don’t consider worth writing down. If we also cracked down on that 10% of all crimes we could cut crime by more than half. This would probably be easier, since the police could be ordered to write down crimes they didn’t think were worth writing down.
By the time the police actually decide the crime is serious enough and/or there is enough evidence to identify and find the culprit, we’re down to 10% of all crime. If I were writing satire, I’d say that this 10% is barely worth the effort and we should just disband the whole police-department, district-attorney, court-system thing as barely useful against crime at all.
Ratcliffe doesn’t go that far, but he seems to be arguing that this final level of the chain is just fine. This puzzles me. Of the 5% of all crimes where the criminal is found or pleads guilty, less that one in ten serves any time. What crimes are we talking about here? Even in England many convicted murderers, thieves, batterers and the like can be sentenced to serve time in jail.
I know that some serious crime isn’t treated very seriously. For example, rape and mortgage fraud are much less likely to be detected and prosecuted than crimes like murder or being a black guy in a white neighborhood. Only 1/4 of all crimes recorded by the police are actually followed up by police work, however, Ratcliffe doesn’t seem to be concerned with the 30% of all crimes that the police record, but don’t follow up on. Is the problem resources? Is the problem too clever criminals? To me, this seems like the crime to go after. Or, did I miss something?
Mr. Kimel,
You asked me two questions::
1. “So what is the cause of the problem or disorder as you put it?
2. “Consider my previous post on murders in Baltimore. Why are there 50% more murders there now since the death of Freddie Gray?”
My answer to both is perhaps you can find the answers by asking the Baltimore Police Commissioner? or perhaps the US Dept of Justice? or by studying sociology? or read my comment to you (most recent) on the Baltimore post you authored?
Mr. Kimel,
You might consider starting with the facts relating crime to poverty though. That’s just the first step. Then you have to go just a little bit deeper (not much though in fact) to find out why poverty is positively correlated to crime.
https://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=pbdetail&iid=5137
After that you can go after the question of why poverty exists and how it feeds on itself as the concentration of poverty increases.
These are just my suggestions if you want to pursue the cause rather than identifying means to repress the symptoms..
My most important suggestion though is that you ask your federal and State and Local legislators why they aren’t doing anything to solve the poverty problem, especially in the high concentration areas such as Balimore., becaue clearly they’re not.
Mr. Kimel,
Either you can use / ;pursue my suggestions or you can rely on the old standby “its their own fault” which is the standard conservative libertarian propaganda.
Longtooth,
Weren’t you just misrepresenting that in comments over here?
Seems we have attempted to descend into comedy with the title of this post. Seinfeld made fun of Tolstoy, KImel has Dostoyevsky.
“did you know the original title for “War and Peace” was. “War–What Is It Good For?”!
I did wonder how many of those unreported crimes were committed by Wells-Fargo.
i suspect Kimel’s car burglar was a child. Glad he (kimeil) didn’t leave his loaded gun in the car.
and while i suspect that “i suspect” is not a very scientific basis upon which to found public policy, i’m not so sure we ever ask for more.
and i can also say with some confidence that i don’t resort to the crime of “self help” because I know who the police would shoot.