What is More Likely to Reduce Crime?

What single individual thing could/should the government spend more money on that would lead to the greatest reduction in crime? And no, I'm not interested in some bull**** answer about how the government shouldn't spend money at all.

1.) Better Education
2.) More Police
3.) Infrastructure(better lighting, security cameras)
4.) Universal Basic Income or other welfare type programs
5.) Social Programs(after school programs, sports leagues to keep kids out of trouble)
6.) Civic Improvement(gentrification)
7.) Subsidize Personal Gun Ownership.
8.) Other

In general, I'm curious if people think more force or more investment in the general welfare of our citizens would be a bigger help.

Focus more on mental health. Treat mental health as we do exercise and fitness. Spend more money and time on preventive measures. Realize that single parent homes is an epidemic and make it a special point to check on these kids mental wellbeing.

MrWonka said:

What single individual thing could/should the government spend more money on that would lead to the greatest reduction in crime? And no, I'm not interested in some bull**** answer about how the government shouldn't spend money at all.

1.) Better Education
2.) More Police
3.) Infrastructure(better lighting, security cameras)
4.) Universal Basic Income or other welfare type programs
5.) Social Programs(after school programs, sports leagues to keep kids out of trouble)
6.) Civic Improvement(gentrification)
7.) Subsidize Personal Gun Ownership.
8.) Other

In general, I'm curious if people think more force or more investment in the general welfare of our citizens would be a bigger help.

Click to expand...

I presume you are talking about violent crimes and property crimes? Like gangland violence, burglary, theft, mugging, murder (including mass-shootings), domestic violence and mayhem? The question is which of the above programs has been found to empirically reduce the desire of young men to engage in criminal behavior, especially violent criminal behavior? Find whatever that is, and I am happy to try pour some of my tax dollars into that. And if none of these social welfare or government aid programs reduces that propensity by any significant margin, we should instead need to return to preventative measures like regular foot-patrol policing in high-crime neighborhoods.

Felis Leo said:

The question is which of the above programs has been found to empirically reduce the desire of young men to engage in criminal behavior

Click to expand...

That is essentially the question though. Obviously, throughout history we have to a certain extent tried virtually all of these methods to a certain extent, but there's really no way to control for such a thing. It's not like you are going to convince a state to eliminate their police entirely to see what effect spending all their police funds on education would have.

MrWonka said:

What single individual thing could/should the government spend more money on that would lead to the greatest reduction in crime? And no, I'm not interested in some bull**** answer about how the government shouldn't spend money at all.

1.) Better Education
2.) More Police
3.) Infrastructure(better lighting, security cameras)
4.) Universal Basic Income or other welfare type programs
5.) Social Programs(after school programs, sports leagues to keep kids out of trouble)
6.) Civic Improvement(gentrification)
7.) Subsidize Personal Gun Ownership.
8.) Other

In general, I'm curious if people think more force or more investment in the general welfare of our citizens would be a bigger help.

Click to expand...

It could be done without costing a dime, in fact we would save money while also reducing the crime rate. Legalize drugs, we went through this same exact scenario during alcohol prohibition.

MrWonka said:

What single individual thing could/should the government spend more money on that would lead to the greatest reduction in crime? And no, I'm not interested in some bull**** answer about how the government shouldn't spend money at all.

1.) Better Education
2.) More Police
3.) Infrastructure(better lighting, security cameras)
4.) Universal Basic Income or other welfare type programs
5.) Social Programs(after school programs, sports leagues to keep kids out of trouble)
6.) Civic Improvement(gentrification)
7.) Subsidize Personal Gun Ownership.
8.) Other

In general, I'm curious if people think more force or more investment in the general welfare of our citizens would be a bigger help.

Click to expand...

Jobs. Close the borders and cut the supply of unskilled and low skilled labor. As it stands today, the Anerican low and unskilled labor is a troublesome workforce.

But, wages will rise due to the shortage, and so will prices, so one way or another we are paying for it.

Education, tackle wealth/income ineqaulity, and legalize, regulate, and tax virtually every type of drug. The more desperately impoverished the lower class is, the more often you'll see problems arise like higher divorce-rates, alcoholism, and so on. The poorer and less educated a person is, the more likely they are to either come from or be a part of a broken home.

A combination of stagnating wages, the loss of manufacturing jobs due to bad trade deals, and the creation/expansion of a lucrative black-market for drugs is to gangs and gang-related violence is what gasoline is to a fire.

I have read that one reason why there is so little street crime in Japan is that the people are afraid of the police.

Maybe there would be less street crime by American young gentlemen (and ladies) if they feared the police a little more.

Because of the media, the police are afraid to be vigorous in suppressing violent crime, lest those young gentlemen yell that they have been mistreated. Then the media will make heroes of those young gentlemen, and lawyers will line up to sue the police.

To be frank, there is not enough space to house all the young gentlemen who commit violent crime, so they are let loose to continue preying on defenseless people.

Violent crime will only increase in coming years because of certain reasons.

MrWonka said:

What single individual thing could/should the government spend more money on that would lead to the greatest reduction in crime? And no, I'm not interested in some bull**** answer about how the government shouldn't spend money at all.

1.) Better Education
2.) More Police
3.) Infrastructure(better lighting, security cameras)
4.) Universal Basic Income or other welfare type programs
5.) Social Programs(after school programs, sports leagues to keep kids out of trouble)
6.) Civic Improvement(gentrification)
7.) Subsidize Personal Gun Ownership.
8.) Other

In general, I'm curious if people think more force or more investment in the general welfare of our citizens would be a bigger help.

Click to expand...

Good questions and a very good topic, one that I would hope our elected officials could embrace in a useful manner.

I had to choose OTHER as my poll option. Some of the items you had listed could certainly be in my OTHER bag for addressing crime, a couple of them I don't think I would include.

Better education is one that I think is extremely important, and that early education is the place to start.

Someone mentioned a better focus on mental health issues. That is extremely important and also touches on better education. Police officers need better education in dealing with the public segments that are mentally unhealthy. We also need more mental health infrastructure so that more people can get the help interventions that they need. I saw back in Illinois that the state was closing mental health facilities and putting patients-clients out on the streets or at best into halfway house and or group home settings where the patients-clients were not protected from society and society was not protected from them. It was becoming a large problem for police forces across the state, dealing with persons they really weren't trained to deal with or to even recognize as mental cases.

I need to go away for a bit, but I will be back to give more of my ideas that fall under the OTHER selection.

MrWonka said:

What single individual thing could/should the government spend more money on that would lead to the greatest reduction in crime? And no, I'm not interested in some bull**** answer about how the government shouldn't spend money at all.

1.) Better Education
2.) More Police
3.) Infrastructure(better lighting, security cameras)
4.) Universal Basic Income or other welfare type programs
5.) Social Programs(after school programs, sports leagues to keep kids out of trouble)
6.) Civic Improvement(gentrification)
7.) Subsidize Personal Gun Ownership.
8.) Other

In general, I'm curious if people think more force or more investment in the general welfare of our citizens would be a bigger help.

Click to expand...

Gentrification, which we used to just call redevelopment, does more than anything else right now. People with money move into a neighborhood, because they have money and influence, they demand greater security / policing in that area, they have less tolerance for crime in that area, and because they have money the bring in other businesses - job opportunities to that area, as well as much greater tax revenue to that area so the area gets better funded schools and infrastructure. Finally, they increase the net worth of existing homeowners in that area as those residents home values increase.

SouthernDemocrat said:

Gentrification, which we used to just call redevelopment, does more than anything else right now. People with money move into a neighborhood, because they have money and influence, they demand greater security / policing in that area, they have less tolerance for crime in that area, and because they have money the bring in other businesses - job opportunities to that area, as well as much greater tax revenue to that area so the area gets better funded schools and infrastructure. Finally, they increase the net worth of existing homeowners in that area as those residents home values increase.

Click to expand...

Then it loses the cache, the flavor that drew everybody there in the first place and they look for the next place the young and vital have made interesting and take it away from them.

And all the renters get to pay for higher mortgages.

There was a time when rent wasn't somebody's mortgage and insurance payment.

Unnatural markets are great for those who can afford to exploit them.

MrWonka said:

What single individual thing could/should the government spend more money on that would lead to the greatest reduction in crime?

Click to expand...

Embracing the simplistic question, Better Education for long term benefits, Better Policing (which isn’t the same as just more officers) for short term benefits.

Obviously a holistic approach is the only realistic one in the real world, including many of the items in your list to some extent. I think the mental health aspect someone else mentioned is worth highlighting too.

MrWonka said:

In general, I'm curious if people think more force or more investment in the general welfare of our citizens would be a bigger help.

Click to expand...

I think that’s the wrong approach since it isn’t an either or question. It’s always going to be some combination of the two so artificially playing them off against each other is actually counterproductive.

What if...? said:

Then it loses the cache, the flavor that drew everybody there in the first place and they look for the next place the young and vital have made interesting and take it away from them.

And all the renters get to pay for higher mortgages.

There was a time when rent wasn't somebody's mortgage and insurance payment.

Unnatural markets are great for those who can afford to exploit them.

Click to expand...

How is people choosing to move to an area an "unnatural market"?

Let's take a city like St. Louis. St. Louis is the 12th most dangerous city on earth. It has a murder rate that is several times it's peer cities. It's high school graduation rate is only around 50%. It has a high abandoned home rate. However, it also has some incredible old brick row homes that are attracting buyers from the suburbs and other areas. As they buy those homes, money flows back into the city, crime rates in those neighborhoods fall precipitously, property tax revenues increase, new businesses are opened and so on.

When people think of gentrification, they use the example of cities like New York or San Francisco, cities that were already very expensive to live in that get even more expensive. However, that is not the vast majority of gentrification. Most of it occurs in cities like St. Louis, Kansas City, Memphis, Minneapolis, and so on, where its by far a net positive.

The fact is, the only way to improve the living conditions of poor inner city areas is to have people with money move into them.

MrWonka said:

What single individual thing could/should the government spend more money on that would lead to the greatest reduction in crime? And no, I'm not interested in some bull**** answer about how the government shouldn't spend money at all.

1.) Better Education
2.) More Police
3.) Infrastructure(better lighting, security cameras)
4.) Universal Basic Income or other welfare type programs
5.) Social Programs(after school programs, sports leagues to keep kids out of trouble)
6.) Civic Improvement(gentrification)
7.) Subsidize Personal Gun Ownership.
8.) Other

In general, I'm curious if people think more force or more investment in the general welfare of our citizens would be a bigger help.

Click to expand...

Don't have a revolving door on the jails and prisons. It's ridiculous that a minority of people do the majority of the crimes. Why let someone out again and again and again to be arrested 10-20 times, when you know they are only getting arrested for about one tenth of the crimes they actually commit? Don't let anyone be career criminals. Three strikes and you're out because those three times convicted only account for the 30 crimes they actually committed. I'm also not against several of your other ideas but you asked for the single individual thing the government spend more money on that would lead to the greatest reduction in crime and this is it. If someone's goal in life is to be a career criminal then take them off the streets permanently because they are a negative value to society.

Nap said:

It could be done without costing a dime, in fact we would save money while also reducing the crime rate. Legalize drugs, we went through this same exact scenario during alcohol prohibition.

Click to expand...

This was not the question that was asked.

Yeah, it's always fun to come back to a thread a few hours after creating to find that almost nobody even attempted to answer the question.

LouC said:

I need to go away for a bit, but I will be back to give more of my ideas that fall under the OTHER selection.

Click to expand...

The point here is that I'm looking for a singular answer. I realize that an all-around approach is necessary. My question is mostly about an article I read the other day about where I live. Crime has certainly been a problem in certain parts of the city, and to deal with it they're opening up a brand new training and recruitment center for the police. We have one of the worst education systems in the country, and yet rather than spend a dime trying to improve schools the plan is to throw more police at the problem. Guess what? The people making this decision are mostly white southerners. The neighborhoods being policed are mostly poor and black. It's a bass-ackwards solution that will fail.

HonestJoe said:

I think that’s the wrong approach since it isn’t an either or question. It’s always going to be some combination of the two so artificially playing them off against each other is actually counterproductive.

Click to expand...

The goal here is to take it from an economic standpoint. In Economics there's something called the Marginal Cost. Meaning the cost of producing 1 more. My question is if you have a crime problem in your city and you want to fix it both short and long term would you be better off hiring one more cop, or one more Teacher. Increasing enforcement of the law or reducing class sizes. At what point does putting on more cop on the street not lead to a reduction in crime? At what point does reducing class sizes not benefit children?

If we ended the drug war and used the taxes collected from selling legal recreational weed to create a Universal Basic Income could we virtually eliminate the need for police at all?

MrWonka said:

The goal here is to take it from an economic standpoint.

Click to expand...

That only works for spherical chickens in a vacuum. Reality is too complex with too many open variables to make any kind of useful assessment from such a high level. You can (and governments do) make those kind of assessments as lower levels (though even then not as low as they should) but that’s never going to be a literal question of “one more teacher or one more police officer”.

MrWonka said:

If we ended the drug war and used the taxes collected from selling legal recreational weed to create a Universal Basic Income could we virtually eliminate the need for police at all?

Click to expand...

For multiple reasons, no.

MrWonka said:

What single individual thing could/should the government spend more money on that would lead to the greatest reduction in crime? And no, I'm not interested in some bull**** answer about how the government shouldn't spend money at all.

1.) Better Education
2.) More Police
3.) Infrastructure(better lighting, security cameras)
4.) Universal Basic Income or other welfare type programs
5.) Social Programs(after school programs, sports leagues to keep kids out of trouble)
6.) Civic Improvement(gentrification)
7.) Subsidize Personal Gun Ownership.
8.) Other

In general, I'm curious if people think more force or more investment in the general welfare of our citizens would be a bigger help.

Click to expand...

After school programs are nearly miraculous, to my experience.

There can't be just one thing that'll help reduce crime. Here's 3 answers that WILL reduce it:

Discipline- Everything starts at home, and parents have to be willing to tell their kids at an early age 'no' and apply corrections when necessary. Spanking, taking away toys/electronics, time out, no TV/Computer/Smartphone/Tablet/Movies, all this is letting them know that their actions that are bad have consequences. Maybe reestablish a form of it at school, just in case.

Education (so, yeah, the first choice would be one I'd select)- Like discipline described above, but learning why certain things are bad is very important. Learning about the law and how it applies to everyone, including kids is a good way to make them understand. Even show the benefits of when good actions. And if it's guns, teach kids (and adults for that matter) they have to learn about safety and interacting with a firearm. That'll solve a lot of your gun problems right there. Just saying "we're going to ban all guns" or something to that affect will not help in solving these problems because they will still happen.

Parenting- Being a parent, instead of a kid's best friend, goes a long way. The point of being a parent is to help raise your kids to not just help them grow, learn to defend themselves, and to make them more independent, but to also to correct them whenever they do something they're not suppose to. Don't abuse the children, but just enough to where they will learn their lesson. Lastly, it's to help them to understand that they have to yield to authority, and parents are the authority when raising their kids. If those kids don't learn to respect their own parents, they will not respect anyone else.

Education, discipline, and parenting all go hand in hand, and, in my honest opinion, THE 3 most important areas that MUST be acquired. Those 3 alone will prevent a ton of crime. But there are other areas that are important such as mental health and influence. However, the first 3 are the top requirements. As far as laws, on the weapon crime front, just getting rid of or slapping more regulations on guns and knives doesn't solve the problem. We can use examples like Australia all day, but I will bet there's still a ton of gun and/or knife violence in place like that and their media isn't reporting on it. There's not much you can do with any new theft laws to lower its numbers. Assaults, trespassing, rape, and whatever else is going to occur, no matter what laws are put in. I'm glad there's laws and penalties for those terrible things, I'll be the first to admit that (gives a sense of security), but without proper education, discipline, and parenting, crime will not be reduced because people will try to find ways around them if they go unchecked in those areas. In any case, all this has to be accomplished at home. You do all that, crime will drop.

Mongidig said:

Focus more on mental health. Treat mental health as we do exercise and fitness. Spend more money and time on preventive measures. Realize that single parent homes is an epidemic and make it a special point to check on these kids mental wellbeing.

Click to expand...

I agree that single parent households are a major problem but as far as mental health, a low IQ can not be treated or changed and most crime is committed by those individuals.

A common moral code.

SouthernDemocrat said:

How is people choosing to move to an area an "unnatural market"?

Let's take a city like St. Louis. St. Louis is the 12th most dangerous city on earth. It has a murder rate that is several times it's peer cities. It's high school graduation rate is only around 50%. It has a high abandoned home rate. However, it also has some incredible old brick row homes that are attracting buyers from the suburbs and other areas. As they buy those homes, money flows back into the city, crime rates in those neighborhoods fall precipitously, property tax revenues increase, new businesses are opened and so on.

When people think of gentrification, they use the example of cities like New York or San Francisco, cities that were already very expensive to live in that get even more expensive. However, that is not the vast majority of gentrification. Most of it occurs in cities like St. Louis, Kansas City, Memphis, Minneapolis, and so on, where its by far a net positive.

The fact is, the only way to improve the living conditions of poor inner city areas is to have people with money move into them.

Click to expand...

Interesting post but I have one question...when people with money (mainly whites) move in, where do the poor (mostly minorities) go? Into areas that the people with money (mostly white neighborhoods) abandoned in the suburbs. Doesn't the cycle start all over again but in reverse?

MrWonka said:

This was not the question that was asked.

Click to expand...

So you don't actually care about reducing crime but simply want to find more ways for the government to spend money?