I was with a group of friends this weekend and the topic of police charities came up. Someone mentioned they would give money to a charity that paid for more cops on the street. Some people thought that would be a good idea, while I and another dissenter maintained that more cops were about the last thing we personally needed.
My line of reasoning being I’ve had plenty of run ins with cops for speeding, etc. but no cop has ever helped me out directly*, for example, my car has been broken into a couple of times and the cops certainly didn’t do anything about it, not that I expected them to.
*But, cops certainly provide a crime deterrent that indirectly benefits me. To what degree, I do not know. With one more cop on the streets, perhaps my car would never have been broken into, and one with less, I might have been murdered by a maniac years ago.
All in all, however, as a frequent scoff-law and infrequent victim of crimes, I would have to say that increasing the man power of the police department in my city would decrease my quality of life.
Increasing the numbers of police won’t do anything unless the police force is handled properly.
I would like to see cops walking down the streets more often and interacting with the neighborhood. Just walking up and down city blocks to see if anyone needs help. Instead they all ride around town in their patrol cars, only responding to 911 calls, trying to keep in touch with the scum of society.
More cops on the streets, not more patrol cars, would be a good thing.
My town has no police. We are covered by the State Police. I have a friend at the local barracks who tells me that at night they usually have two cars on the road. They have to cover 17 mostly rural communities over a large area. I would be in favor of more police officers in the area. I can’t complain too much, I moved here because it is an area that police are not needed much. FTR yes I am a police officer but I don’t work where I live.
While sometimes when I encounter the police I rather not (speeding, disturbance calls, etc.), they have always treated me fairly and with professionalism. I can’t remember personally being directly benefitted from a police encounter, but I’m certain I’ve benefitted indirectly from their encounters with others.
Costs aside, I think the threshold where the number of cops is reaching it’s optimal limit is when they cannot find anything useful to do besides entering fields of service better performed by people with different training.
All this is assuming cops are in general doing good coppery - if they weren’t where I live, the problem probably wouldn’t be finding the optimal size of the force.
I totally agree with this; especially at night. Even in my little quaint home town, there were some dicey individuals out on the streets past 10. I’d feel a lot more comfortable if knew the police were somewhere near by.
Here, where I sit, we have too many officers in our little suburban town and too few in the Capital City. This translates into too many stops here for little or no reason, and too few in the Big Town. Would it be that officers could be spread out over areas of little crime and concentrated in areas of much crime. Given the problems of territory and acknowledgement of who-caught-who, that’s probably not going to happen in my lifetime. YMMV.
Yes, only if they’re needed to handle an excess in real, violent crimes. In our town, since most like to just hand out speeding tickets, there really is no need to add more. That can really go for the whole county.
I wouldn’t. There is a happy medium to be found and saturating the area with police protection isn’t a good thing. You get people who are attracted to copperization and that particular personality type all over the place potentially harassing individuals? No thank you.
On the flip side, we don’t want to have roving warlords due to the lack of coppage, so, again, moderation. I think I’m fine where we’re at right now.
I’d say we could use more, especially on the county level. But, thanks to Stroger, we’re getting rid of 'em, not hiring 'em. :rolleyes:
I know I feel much safer, knowing that we won’t have the county coverage in our unincorporated areas (where there’s public housing and all the gang problems) now that the budget has passed.
I’d need a lot more information. Mostly I’d want data on how many police are in the area, how many would be “normal” for the area, and what particularly the new cops would be trying to accomplish.
Especially as someone newish in town, my most memorable “encounter” with the police would be seeing an upside down police car in the median. That doesn’t do a whole lot to tell me whether there are sufficient or insuffient cops in the area.