this post was submitted on 12 Jan 2026
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How about…idk instead of shooting and killing the symptoms, you could handle the root cause, police forces don’t stop crime, they respond to it, majority of the crime in the world would have been solved with good mental health services and quality of life
I mean, they are a crime deterrent at least.
Laws are threats made by the dominant socioeconomic-ethnic group in a given nation. It’s just the promise of violence that’s enacted and the police are basically an occupying army.
Like I said. A crime deterrent.
Jobs programs and housing policy are crime deterrents.
I'm not sure deterrent is the right word, but yes I agree that ought to lower crimes. What's your point.
if that is true, how is there still crime?
Well it's just a deterrent, not magic
i dont believe there is any way to prove crime was deterred.
What basis do you believe this? It’s measured all the time with various methods of policing being demonstrated to both deter and not deter crimes.
You can’t reductively bark “can’t prove a counterfactual 🤪” and you’ve seemingly done zero research into the matter
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8356499/
this only shows correlation, not causation
Lmaoo is this how you respond to legitimate research? No wonder nobody takes you seriously and everything you say is a joke 😂
do you know how I know that you didn't read it?
Well if you ever ask someone, "would you ever commit a crime iff you knew you could get away with it" and they say yes, you'll have found at least one example of a successfully deterred crime.
no, you didn't. you can't prove a counterfactual.
Maybe we're disagreeing on what "deterrent" means. I just mean "an incentive not to commit a crime," not "something that absolutely prevents crime." If you're just trying to prove it's an incentive at all, it's pretty easy as you only need to find one example of somebody who decided against committing a crime for fear of police.
there's no way to know what they would have decided in a world without police
OK, but then you're just saying it's purely down to your prior whether or not you think police are an effective deterrent. Which is not exactly a compelling argument against police. I was kind of hoping you had something more to lean on than that.
Sure, but that takes time and isn't fool proof. Full implementation of a program like that could take a decade. You need someone ready to respond to violent individuals.
Police forces also currently handle other things that are necessary like traffic enforcement or serving court documents. Both need to happen, neither need to be done by the police. So you have to replace that function.
Ideally you'd see many of these functions that require limited abilities to detain an individual shifted out of the police to new bodies. From there gut departments and form small bodies designed to apprehend violent criminals. Coupled with several programs aimed at actually reducing the root causes of crime.
It would take decades and a tremendous investment. Unfortunately too many people view nations as buisnesses now, so if things aren't better immediately then they give up and reverse course.