> On the other hand, maybe we're just so socioculturally fucked that it requires massive authoritarian investment to keep a crummy level of peace. I'm undecided.
There are a number of socioeconomic factors that are believed to be the underlying influence on violent crime. My own personal summary on this is that people tend to become criminals when they lose hope in having a fair shot at a successful life, or see an opportunity that they don't find morally reprehensible ("well, it's really the bank/insurance money so it's not hurting a person"). So I think this hopelessness is mostly what drove the pandemic crime increase.
If you spend a huge amount of money on police, and get bad outcomes for both crime rate and negative impacts of policing, there's really two options:
- The money is poorly spent, and better (perhaps less) spending would obtain better outcomes
- Because of other factors, we're doing approximately as well as we can: if we deployed resources away from the authoritarian, heavy-handed mechanisms, we'd have even more crimes and bad outcomes.
I think the former is more likely, but I can't entirely exclude the latter.