ccbstl wrote:It's often said that police aren't good at preventing crime. They are more built to investigate after the fact. Why weren't there police on foot nearby to de-escalate?
If they can't prevent someone from spraying bullets during a busy daytime event, a couple of blocks from STLMPD HQ, then why would we continue to allocate them more and more resources?
Police aren't good at preventing crime because police are not equipped to handle the root causes of crime, which is poverty and broken families (these are the main causes in STL, though there's many more), which causes social disorganization and leads people to do things that they wouldn't have done had they had a better upbringing.
Police are generally good at investigating and helping prosecute, but that doesn't actually stop the creation of new criminals. Add on to that our prison system is actually far better at hardening lower level criminals and making them even more socially disorganized, which is partially how a man spent 8 years in prison for armed robbery in North Carolina and came out a schizophrenic murderer. He got no treatment for his mental problems, he probably was mistreated in prison, and he certainly was not rehabilitated. And as a result, a woman is now dead because the government failed at basic theories of crime and punishment.
So police are good at catching and investigating criminals, but the prison system is horrific at rehabilitating them, meaning they get out just as bad or worse, and we have virtually no large scale efforts (there are some small scale efforts) to meaningfully intervene in the cycle of poverty that helps ensure criminality festers.
Police being visible, however, has been shown to reduce crime in a localized area. You're less likely to run a red light if you see a police car on the corner. Crime is basically non-existent at Cardinals games or the entrance to the Arch because there's such a high police presence. I don't know the details behind where police were at this soccer game though.
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