this post was submitted on 12 Jan 2026
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Memes of Production
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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.