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NetQuarterLatte t1_ivg5sz6 wrote

Reply to comment by VaccumSaturdays in Left Unmonitored In His Cell, He Etched His Suicide Note Into a Wall On Rikers Island by hau5keeping

I saw the twitter threat. There's a lot of fear-mongering in his retorts filled with "anti-cop" political agenda.

Filtering out the fear-mongering/political stuff, the main logical gap in the counter-argument from Alec Karakatsanis is that he's trying to count any law-enforcement as "police". We all know that the typical border patrol officer is not investigating murder cases in our communities, for example.

The second gap: he points out the undercounting of "private police" as problem in the study. It's actually the other way around: the emergence of "private police" only bolsters the study argument that many locations in the US are severely under-policed.

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VaccumSaturdays t1_ivg84yb wrote

I think the fear mongering is the entire length of your post and comment history.

Thank you, good night.

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Rottimer t1_ivhc5zy wrote

>The professor then admitted privately over email that the U.S. census count is actually 1,227,788 police. That’s 76% higher than the number they chose to use in their public article. What’s the significance of this? Using this number, they admitted to me, would mean the U.S. truthfully has “1.1 times the median rate in rich countries.”

I mean, that's fairly devastating to your argument if you're using that as a source. And while you poo poo counting border patrol, or the FBI as law enforcement, the authors in the article you linked don't make that distinction for other countries either.

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NetQuarterLatte t1_ivhpdo3 wrote

>The professor then admitted privately over email that the U.S. census count is actually 1,227,788 police.

It took me 5 minutes to figure out that the 1.2M figure includes police and correctional officers.

The BLS currently indicates:

  • 808,200 Police and Detectives [1]
  • 419,000 Correctional Officers and Bailiffs [2]

Which adds to 1,227,200. That's obviously counting the head-count of policing and incarceration personnel, which is exactly what the cited article is aiming to separate.

Alec Karakatsanis is just being sloppy and hasty in trying to push his political agenda, and making himself look intellectually dishonest in the process.

[1] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/protective-service/police-and-detectives.htm

[2] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/protective-service/correctional-officers.htm

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