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by diogenes4 972 days ago
> We don't need less funds

We spend more on our police force than each country in the world spends on its military, except for ourselves and china. We need less funds.

1 comments

Do you have a source for that? It seems like a problematic measure to use absolute dollars spent as it had to be normalized per capita and to cost of living.

In just officers per capita the US more or less middle of the pack.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_depend...

This site claims $129 billion: https://www.urban.org/policy-centers/cross-center-initiative...

Sure, you can adjust per capita. I still think it's a fairly shocking statistic—we certainly don't get that value back except as a jobs program.

I got ~$80 billion from the Bureau of Justice Statistics (page 14):

https://bjs.ojp.gov/sites/g/files/xyckuh236/files/media/docu...

One caveat: That spend metric has a standard error of ~$2.6 trillion. With a T.

(See page 25 in same document for the error table.)