Numerous policing initiatives have come and gone over the years, one failing right after the other, like the infamous stop-and-frisk program implemented by then New York mayor Michael Bloomberg in 2003 that gave cops the power to search random "suspicious" people on the assumption that they might carry drugs or guns. As you could probably tell, most of these initiatives were steeped in racism, as critics often attacked programs like stop-and-frisk as unfairly punishing non-white people.
But surely, some of these programs had to be good, right? Not exactly. The controversial stop-and-frisk program actually did not result in much, if any, crime reduction. When the program expired, crime rates actually dropped, which sounds almost contradictory if you don't consider the fact that crime naturally decreases over time. Second off, a fair amount of arrests made by cops don't actually reduce crime that much or are actually false arrests.Â
Driven by the FBI's lack of transparency and accessibility on crime data, the Vera Institute of Justice analyzed crime and arrest trends across the nation for two years to understand the relation between arrests and crime rates. Their results run counter to the common assumption that more arrests reduce crime, as out of the 10.5 million arrests made annually, the vast majority are actually non-criminal in nature. A good chunk of arrests are also made solely for drug possession and other non-violent crimes at a strikingly disproportionate rate, with Black people being arrested for drug possession two-to-three times more than white people.
Even something as seemingly innocuous as fines issued out by police isn't exactly indicative of more stringent police work being a net positive for any area. The idea that more arrests/fines means that policing is working is pretty much a big lie, which would probably be very beneficial to the same people killing unarmed Black folks on the reg.