1 Entire Contents

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2 Introduction. 1

3 Commented Content. 1

3.1 LAW AND ORDER—NOT THE DONALD’S JOB. 1

3.2 America’s Real Crime Problem: The Nanny State Criminalizations Made In Washington. 1

3.3 Why 4,814 fatal encounters between police and citizens during the past five years?. 1

3.4 Stockman's Conclusion. 1

2 Introduction

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3 Commented Content

Author: David Stockman

Publication Date: Thursday, October 23, 2020

 From: https://www.davidstockmanscontracorner.com/dump-trump-law-order-howling-not-the-donalds-job/?mc_cid=78cc6009fc&mc_eid=23bf5d4e64

Full Title: DUMP TRUMP: Law & Order Howling—Not The Donald’s Job

SubTitle: Part 6.  LAW AND ORDER HOWLING—NOT THE DONALD’S JOB

3.1 LAW AND ORDER—NOT THE DONALD’S JOB

When all else fails, Fake Republicans like Richard Nixon back in the day and Donald Trump today turn to “Law & Order” demagoguery to incite the electorate in their direction. Indeed, after his Greatest Economy Ever got monkey-hammered by the lockdowns, the Donald fairly leapt upon the proverbial strongman’s white horse, presenting himself as the nation’s savior from the scourge of rioting, looting and violence that befell a relative handful of liberal cities after the death of George Floyd in May.

Then again, we have been here before. When Republican presidents mount the steed of Law & Order, it’s usually because they have failed at or abandoned the real job of the conservative Opposition Party in American democracy. That is, to battle mightily against the Government Party (usually the Dems) in behalf of free markets, fiscal rectitude, sound money, smaller government, federalism and maximum personal liberty at home and peaceful nonintervention abroad.

Thus, when America was plagued with the short-term outbreak of truly destructive riots in dozens of major American cities in the summer of 1968—Detroit, Cleveland, Newark, Gary, Chicago, Philadelphia—Tricky Dick Nixon put himself over the top at the polls in November by running for National Sheriff. So doing, he punted on the real mission of the Opposition Party in those times, which was to sound the alarm about Lyndon Johnson’s drastic ballooning of the state in the form of “guns and butter” finance and the eruption of Great Society spending and meddling programs.

In fact, during the heyday of Eisenhower Republican prosperity, Federal spending had averaged about 17.5% of GDP—once Ike had drastically shrunk Harry Truman’s bloated Korean War military budgets. But by 1968, LBJ’s “guns and butter” enthusiasms had added two full percentage points to Uncle Sam’s girth, to 19.5% of GDP.

Needless to say, Sheriff Dick Nixon spent much political capital launching wars on crime, drugs, student protests, cultural radicalism and what Vice-President Agnew famously described as the “nattering nabobs of negativism”. But when it came to the actual job of the conservative Opposition Party, not so much.

By the time Tricky Dick was escorted away for his final ride on the White House helicopter, Federal spending was approaching a peacetime record of 22% of GDP, which level was easily exceeded during the recession of 1975. During the interim, the new Great Society programs and Medicare/Medicaid entitlements had mushroomed, even as Nixon had massively added to Social Security benefits in the run-up to the 1972 election.

Federal Spending % of GDP

On the other hand, Nixon didn’t need an electoral mandate for Law and Order because the eruptions in the urban ghettos during the summer of 1968 quickly burned themselves out, while mainly leaving a trail of harm among the residents living therein. Like at present, there had been no enduring crisis—just a fleeting interval of overwrought political emotions, copycat vandalism and disappointed community expectations after the heady days of the War on Poverty and the civil rights revolution.

Yet what was true 52 years ago, remains so. That is, policing the big cities is not the job of the Federal government or the President of the United States; and, in fact, it is one of the principal functions implicitly reserved to the states and their sub-units by the 10th Amendment to the Constitution.

Indeed, administration of local law and order is one of the main reasons we have 87,575 units of government separate from the Federal government, including the 50 states, 3,034 counties, 35,933 cities, towns, municipalities and townships and 48,558 other units including school districts and special purpose units of local government (e.g. police, fire, library districts, etc.).

Far more so than the giant Federal bureaucracies that have insinuated themselves into the law and order business, such as the FBI, DEA, BATF and the far-flung operations of the Homeland Security Department, the overwhelming share of these local government units are actually creatures of their respective electorates. If law and order breaks down or is wanting, therefore, the solution is to clean house at City Hall or the county courthouse, not import Federal money, laws, regulations and rhetorical posturing from Capitol Hill or the Oval Office.

And if the local electorate fails to clean house, it will bear the brunt of the adverse consequences of too many homicides, robberies or destructive attacks on private property within the jurisdiction in question. After all, serious crimes—especially homicides and violent assaults on persons and property—are overwhelmingly the work of local residents, not regional or national crime rings.

Moreover, if the electorates of badly governed jurisdictions like Seattle, Portland, Minneapolis, Chicago, New York and Baltimore at the moment fail to remedy their own crime problems, the ultimate brilliance of Federalism comes powerfully into play: On the margin, residents and businesses vote with their feet, causing local economic decline and diminution of tax revenues, and thereby eventually generating electoral demands for corrective action.

The Nixonian Cop-Out

At the same time, presidential Law & Order demagoguery by GOP presidents has readily become a cover for betrayal on Federal policy matters that actually count. Until the Donald came along, of course, Tricky Dick Nixon was the poster boy for this kind of doctrinal perfidy.

While the man’s policy sins are almost too egregious to reprise, Richard Nixon’s brand of right-wing Big Government left little to the imagination as he—

• Famously abandoned sound money when slamming the gold window shut at Camp David in August 1971;
• Made a mockery of free markets when imposing wage, price, rent and interest controls on the entire US economy shortly thereafter;
• Fecklessly fueled the growth of Big Government by putting Federal bureaucrats in charge of domestic energy industries and employing subsidies and import controls to pursue the folly of national energy autarky;
• Deeply wounded the cause of fiscal rectitude by adopting the specious Keynesian notion of “full employment budgeting”, which amounts to an excuse for chronic government deficits whenever an imaginary figure called “potential GDP” is not realized (most of the time);
•  Attempted to vastly expand the Welfare State through a guaranteed annual income (Family Assistance Plan) and an incipient form of national health insurance (Family Insurance Plan);
• Eroded Federalism through revenue sharing handouts from Washington and a vast expansion of federal grant-in-aid programs; and
• Fueled a 50-year assault on the social and economic stability of the nation’s declining urban centers via the abomination of the War on Drugs.

Needless to say, the latter betrayal gets us to the present moment. There is no more of a Law & Order crisis today that demands presidential attention and Washington intervention than there was in 1968. Like with Tricky Dick, it is a deficit of votes which motivates the Donald’s blustering attacks on the supposed outbreak of criminality in the nation.

Yet the overwhelming bulk of the American electorate is not in any danger owing to the antics and defaults of the clowns running Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Portland, Minneapolis, Chicago or even New York City. Even if you count every big city that has had even a single night of rioting this past spring and summer, it amounts to less than 10% of the US population.

Moreover, if officials in the latter continue to fail to suppress the thugs of Antifa and stop criminal looting and arson being done in the name of Black Lives Matter, in due time their electorates will remedy the situation without any help from Washington: To wit, they will select better leadership or their citizens will flee for better governed environs.

But as we demonstrate below, there is an elevated and unnecessary level of friction between the police and citizens in the nation’s urban centers. The latter condition is overwhelmingly caused by and aggravated by the War on Drugs and the criminalization of related social behaviors such as gambling, prostitution, adultery, vagrancy, obscenity and other victimless crimes.

Moreover, these unnecessary frictions can be solved by repeal of bad laws, not costly and counter-productive efforts to get tough on crime; and most certainly not be sending Federal cops into cities where local officials are wittingly or unwittingly abetting crime and riots and thereby bringing ruin upon themselves.

So just as in Nixon’s time, by relentlessly obsessing about crime-ridden Democrat cities the Donald is abandoning his real job. Namely, giving battle to the crushing burden of debt, speculation, bad money and Nanny State meddling that has descended upon the American economy from the far-flung redoubts of Imperial Washington.

No, Donald, There Is No Crime Wave In The USA

Obviously, when it comes to crime, it doesn’t get more serious than homicide. Yet as shown below, the homicide rate per 100,000 in recent years has been barely half of what prevailed during the 1970-1995 period, and has continued to edge lower.

Indeed, there was no elevated murder problem before Nixon’s War on Crime was launched in the late 1960s, which rates have returned to historic norms after the turn of the century.

In the interim, the Baby Boomers had poured into the streets during the high crime years (18-40 years) of the 40 million young men who comprised half their numbers. That’s what accounts for the bulge in the middle of the graph below. Yet as they got older, jailed or dead, the murder rate fell back to earth—street crime being a consequence of demographics, not an occasion for Oval Office fulminations, spending schemes or sheriffing operations.

The same is true of total violent crimes, which includes rape, robbery and aggravated assault, as well as homicides. As shown below, the rate per 100,000 in 2019 was less than 50% of the early 1990s level.

Moreover, preliminary FBI statistics (not shown) indicate that neither the homicide rate nor the total violent crime rate appreciably changed in 2020. So the Donald might well like to follow in Nixon’s footsteps and get himself elected National Sheriff. But the graph below—-plunging relentlessly from the upper left to the lower right over the past three decades—reminds that this constitutionally non-existent office is the very last thing America now needs.

Total Violent Crimes Per 100,000

Nor has there been some 11th hour reversal of these falling crime trends that provides justification for the Donald’s recent Law & Order Howling. The FBI’s preliminary data for 2019 indicates that all four categories of violent crime were down versus prior year:

• Homicide: -3.9%;
• Forcible rape: -7.3%;
• Robbery: -7.4%;
• Aggravated assault: -0.3%.

To be sure, during 2020 to date there has been an upsurge of homicides in a handful of big cities owing to the BLM/Antifa demonstrations and riots after the George Floyd uprisings in Minneapolis.

Still, even in the 25 largest US cities shown below, total violent crimes in 2020 YTD are essentially flat with 2019 (up 0.4% during the first 7 months) and property crimes are actually down by -7.7% year-to-date.

As to this year’s surge in homicides, 80% of the 576 increase in cases through the end of July compared to 2019 is attributable to just eight cities including Chicago (+173), NYC (+60), Philadelphia (+56), St. Louis (+42), Houston (+39), Atlanta (+30), Louisville (+27), and Los Angles (+25).

By contrast, a nearly equal number of big cities, including Dallas, Newark, Baltimore, Miami, Las Vegas, Plano and Lincoln have experienced little change or even declines from 2019.

In short, notwithstanding the cable TV tsunami of coverage of urban protests and riots and the Donald’s false characterization of Law & Order as a national crisis, there is no break-out of homicides and other violent crimes, even in the big cities. For the nation as a whole, the downward trend in crime rates which has been in effect for nearly 20 years remains in place.

By contrast, when it comes to the Donald’s real job as a Republican president, he has presided over what can only be described as a horror show. Owing to the total demise of fiscal rectitude and the Donald’s mindless attack on the last vestiges of sound money during his watch ( i.e. the Fed’s aborted “normalization” in 2018-2019), the burden of total debt (public and private) grinding down the US economy has soared to nearly $81 trillion.

In terms of of annual rates of gain, the blue bars below show that combined public/private borrowing is again off to the races, vastly exceeding the egregiously large gains that were recorded during the Obama years. And it commenced happening at the top of the longest business cycle in US history—long before the Covid/Lockdowns sent borrowing skywards—when the nation’s bloated burdens of debt should have actually been paid down.

In fact, the chart below is the smoking gun. Donald Trump inherited an economy already staggering under a debt burden of $66.2 trillion and a near record 348% of GDP. There was simply no way to repair the underlying damage and restart the engines of dynamic capitalist prosperity except to get the Fed’s Big Fat Thumb off the interest rate scale and permit honest free market price discovery to be restored throughout the financial system.

The Donald did the opposite: He appointed a Washington based private equity grifter as Fed chairman, and then relentlessly hounded him for ever lower rates and hideously “easy money” until after 10 years of so-called recovery, the Donald had succeeded in forcing interest rates back to the so-called once-in-a-century emergency levels at the zero bound.

So doing, the Donald fostered a real rampage of crime against persons and property, most especially the confiscation of the wealth of savers and wage earners in their tens of millions owing to the Fed’s drastic and systematic repression of interest rates.

Indeed, the Donald is responsible for exactly the kind of systemic financial crime that John Maynard Keynes himself so eloquently warned about exactly 101 years ago. We are referring, of course, to his famous tract called The Economic Consequences of the Peace–-even if this time around the virulent inflation which he attacked was that of financial assets, not everyday goods and services:

By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and, while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some. The sight of this arbitrary rearrangement of riches strikes not only at security but [also] at confidence in the equity of the existing distribution of wealth.

Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.

Year-Over-Year Change In Total Public and Private Debt Outstanding (Billions $)

At the end of the day, the problem is that the Donald is not guided by anything which even remotely resembles policy or philosophical principles, let alone fundamentally conservative ones. As we indicated, he had a chance to appoint the majority of the Federal Reserve Board since taking office, but ended up putting Pusillanimous Powell in the Chairman’s role and a handful of other avid money-printers in the other board seats.

Not surprisingly, the bloated, elephantine $4 trillion balance sheet the Donald inherited and which was supposed to be drastically retrenched after the financial crisis ended has now exploded to $7.1 trillion, and the Donald self-evidently wants it to grow to $10 trillion and beyond.

That’s capitalism-destroying financial fraud on a gross scale, yet it lies at the heart of the Trumpian economic program. While noisily attacking the criminal jobbery of street ruffians and left-wing thugs, the Donald has actually badgered the nation’s central bank into the greatest financial crime spree in all of recorded history.

Balance Sheet of the Federal Reserve:

3.2 America’s Real Crime Problem: The Nanny State Criminalizations Made In Washington

It should be evident enough by now that the Donald does have a philosophy of government—of sorts. We are referring to his implicit notion that the Federal government is just a larger-scale version of the Trump Organization; and that as its Maximum Leader-CEO, it is his prerogative to steer things in whatever direction promises (by the Donald’s lights) to redound to his greater glory (and presently, his re-election).

At the present moment that means wasting a good crisis (the protests against excessive use of force by the police) on the shrill partisanship of his blustery campaign against crime, riots, looting and plunder in the “Dem-controlled” big cities of America.

In fact, however, there is a very particular and different crime problem in the big cities than the one the Donald excoriates; it’s a “crime” problem owing to the misbegotten War on Drugs and the excessive criminalization of social life.

To wit, unlike the declining homicide rate in the US overall (brown line), the murder rate for black citizens in the 50 largest cities in the US has been flat since the turn of the century and has actually turned upward in recent years ( blue line).

Murder Rates Per 100,000

This unfortunate trend is not the result of systematic racism; it’s the consequence of bad laws and the resulting excessive friction between law enforcement officers and the urban neighborhoods where inappropriately criminalized activities are more prevalent owing to lack of jobs, the disaster of public education and the high incidence of broken homes and single parent families, which now encompasses more than 70% of children born into black households.

Rather than overt racism or even simmering racial animosity, the real evil is the relentless aggrandizement of state power. Among its many ills is the rise of the Nanny State—a conflation of too many laws, crimes, cops, arrests and thereby opportunities for frictions between the state and its citizenry and for abuse by the gendarmes vested with legal use of violence.

The nation has now been enthrall for several months to an emotionally charged symptom of this rogue Nanny State—the unjustified murder of unarmed black citizens by the police.

Among the most recent notorious cases, of course, are

• George Floyd for allegedly passing a counterfeit $20 bill;
• Eric Garner (NYC 2014) for selling un-taxed cigarettes;
• Rayshard Brooks for falling asleep drunk in his car at a subsequently incinerated Wendy’s in Atlanta; and, most egregiously,
• Breonna Taylor for the offense of sleeping without body armor behind a locked door in here own apartment during the dead of night.

Nor are these notorious cases aberrations. During the recent past there were 38 such police killings of unarmed black citizens in 2015, and then 19, 21, 17 and 9 during 2016 through 2019, respectively. That’s 104 unarmed black lives lost to the ultimate abuse of police powers.

Of course, the number should be zero. There is no conceivable excuse for heavily armed cops—-usually working in pairs or groups—to kill lone, unarmed civilians, regardless of race or anything else.

And the fact is, being non-black is no guarantee against the same unjust fate. During the same period, a total of 127 unarmed white lives were wasted by the police, as well. That included 32 such white killings in 2001, followed by 22, 31, 23 and 19 in 2016 through 2019, respectively.

Overall, 302 unarmed citizens were killed by the police during the last five years, with the balance in the chart below accounted for by 71 deaths among Hispanic and other victims. That is, the real issue is in these situations (killing of unarmed citizens) is illegal and excessive police violence, not racial victimization.

Nor should the fact that 34% of these police killings involved black citizens compared to their 12% share of the population be construed as evidence of racism among police forces, either. It’s actually evidence that the Nanny State, and especially the misbegotten War on Drugs, is designed to unnecessarily ensnare a distinct demographic— young, poor, often unemployed urban citizens— in confrontations with the cops, too many of which become fatal.

Alas, young black males are disproportionately represented among this particular in-harms’-way demographic. That’s the principal reason they are “disproportionately” represented in the two charts below.

Stated differently, the Nanny State tends to be racist in effect, even if that is not necessarily the intent of the crusaders and zealots who have launched the state into these anti-liberty wars on drugs, vice and victimless inequities and peccadilloes.

Then again, the above charts are only part of the story. As it happened, a total of 4,558 citizens were actually killed by police over that same period, but according to the DOJ statistics, fully 93% or 4,256 of these citizens were armed.

So viewed in context, the unarmed victims account for only a small fraction of lethal violence between citizens and police, and there really isn’t much difference in the unarmed/armed ratio among racial groups. To wit, over the 2015-2019 period as a whole—

• 1,164 black citizens were killed by police—of which 104 or just 8.9% were unarmed;
• 2,151 white citizens were killed by police—of which 127 or just 5.9% were unarmed;
• 1,243 Hispanic and other citizens were killed by police—of which 71 or just 5.7% were unarmed;

But here’s the thing. This data does not really support either the Sean Hannity/Law & Order fulminations of the Foxified Right or the 400 years of racism and victimization mantra of the CNN/progressive Left.

Contrary to the Left, 93.4% of the dead victims of police violence were themselves armed; and the 91.1% incidence among blacks is not meaningfully different than the 95% rate among whites and Hispanics. As shown in the chart below which measures the inverse—the share of victims of police deaths who were not armed—there is absolutely no material differences between racial groups.

At the same time, the above statistics do not prove that the cops were mostly right or justified, either, as per the Donald’s Law and Order Howling.

As we shall explore below, the real issue is did 4,558 citizens end-up on the losing end of police fire because they were hardened criminals and sociopathic threats to society or were they set-up by an overreaching legal system that puts too many citizens and police officers alike in harms’ way?

But preliminary to that, it needs be said that the rightwing mantra about police as heroic victims of criminal violence doesn’t wash, either. They have the overwhelming firepower in these instances of police-on-citizen violence as attested to be the facts regarding felonious deaths of law enforcement officers during the same five year span, which deaths were fortunately at a 50-year low.

It turns out that during 2015 through 2019 there occurred 256 police deaths in the line of fire, bringing the total of police and citizen deaths in these encounters to 4,814. That is to say, the cops won 95% of the time, as well they might, given their overwhelming superiority in arms, training, back-up support and legal immunity from being too quick on the trigger finger.

In this context, it should be noted that police deaths are sometimes reported at much higher levels—-a total of 492 over the last five years rather than the aforementioned 256. However, exactly half of that larger total is considered accidental or non-felonious and includes traffic cops stepping into the wrong lane and even heart attacks in the squad car resulting from too many stops at Dunkin’ Donuts.

3.3 Why 4,814 fatal encounters between police and citizens during the past five years?

So the question recurs as to why there were 4,814 fatal encounters between police and citizens during the past five years.

We think the answer starts with a staggering statistic. Namely, the fact that there were 10,310,960 arrests in the US during the most recent year (2018) excluding traffic violations.

That’s 3,153 arrests per 100,000 population including babies, grannies, toddlers, tweeners, the disabled, the infirm and religious leaders including nuns, priests, preachers, rabbis and imams.

Consequently, when you talk about the subset of the population which actually get arrested with high frequency and accounts for most of these arrest totals–—young men between 16 and 35 years—the true arrest rate is far higher; it’s upwards of 15,000 per 100,000 population.

Either way, these arrests rates are far out whacko. Americans are not nearly that lawless, even when you allow for the chronic rotten apples in the population and the anti-social propensities of some young men.

And that hints at the real problem: We have way too many crimes and way too many cops who are way too heavily armed attempting to enforce laws that are not really the business of the state in the first place. In the most egregious kind of example, Eric Garner was apprehended and killed for selling “loosies”, or untaxed cigarettes one at a time.

In fact, there are an estimated 300,000 Federal laws and regulations whose violation can lead to prison time; and when you throw in state and local jurisdictions, which historically have had an affinity for outlawing victimless crimes and the infinite forms of human vice, the total number of criminal offenses in America is surely well into the millions.

That’s why a disaggregation of the FBI’s UCR (Uniform Crime Reports) arrest statistics for 2018 tell you all you need to know about why

1. the nation’s police forces are way over-funded, and why
2. a huge share of the confrontations and frictions—including violent encounters––between citizens of all races are unnecessary.

When Liberty Can’t Breathe

In a word, some citizens sometimes can’t breathe their last breath because in far too many instances liberty can’t breathe in today’s suffocating Nanny State, either.

Self-evidently, the legitimate law enforcement function of the state is protection of the life and property of its citizens. But when you look at the FBI’s own national arrest data for 2018, it appears that only about one-quarter of arrests were clearly pursuant to those core functions, meaning that the overwhelming bulk of arrests–-7,621,232-–were for drugs, gambling, prostitution, disorderly conduct, vagrancy, obscenity and the like.

Among the core law enforcement functions, the 26% of all arrests broke out as follows:

• 521,103 arrests for violent crimes against persons (5% of total);
• 1,000,329 arrests for driving under the influence (DUI), a clear threat to the lives and property of other drivers (9.7%);
• 1,167,296 arrests for crimes against property (11.3% of total)

When you drill down, even in these categories, however, the reality of way too many laws, offenses and cops is evident. There were just 11,970 arrests for murder and negligent manslaughter in 2018 across the entire USA at all levels of law enforcement. Clearly, these are the most violent and heinous of violent crimes, yet they amounted to just 2.2% of all “violent crimes” reported via the UCR and a mere 0.1% of all arrests by the police.

Surely that fact bears repeating because it is dramatically at odds with the kind fear-generating Law & Order Howling that the Donald has substituted for his real job. To wit, only one-tenth of one percent of the 10 million U.S. arrests during a given year are for homicide.

Next in order of severity were arrests for rape, armed robbery under threat of violence to persons, and aggravated assault. There were 25,205, 88,128 and 395,800 arrests in these categories, respectively, amounting to 0.2%, 0.9%, and 3.9% of all 10.3 million recorded arrests.

Thus, the above four categories are the core of violent crime arrests and totaled 521,103 in 2018 or just 5.0% of total arrests. That compares to 850,000 sworn law enforcement officers in the USA, of which about 750,000 are employed by the 18,000 units of state and local government.

To be sure, nearly 1.6 cops for every annual arrest in these four core functions sounds more than a bit lop-sided, but there are some additional arrests that add to the legitimate workloads of the police. These include the following crimes and their share of total arrests:

• burglary: 178,611 (1.7%);
• larceny-theft: 887,622 (8.6%); 
• motor vehicle theft: 91,676 (0.8%);
• arson: 9,387 (0.09%).
• DUI: 1,000,329 (9.7%)

Needless to say, these are all serious crimes that need to be enforced for the protection of life and property. But by their very nature, the vast bulk of the arrests in the above five categories do not ordinarily involve violent criminals, nor does their enforcement require combat-strength arms and tactics among police forces.

DUI arrests, for example, overwhelmingly involve citizens engaging in socially reckless behavior, but not habitual criminal activity. A detailed study awhile back, for example, showed that 65% of these DUI arrests resulted in no correctional supervision at all and another 27% of cases consisted of individuals sentenced to probation or jail who had no prior arrest records for crimes other than DUI. By contrast just 8% of DUI arrestees had prior non-DUI criminal records, and even then most of them were for lesser offenses.

Likewise, the FBI’s UCR system defines larceny-theft as follows:

The unlawful taking, carrying, leading, or riding away of property from the possession or constructive possession of another. Examples are thefts of bicycles, motor vehicle parts and accessories, shoplifting, pocket-picking, or the stealing of any property or article that is not taken by force and violence or by fraud.

Nevertheless, larceny-theft accounts for 76% of all crimes against property reported in the UCR arrest data for 2018. 

So the question recurs. If the nation’s huge and heavily armed police forces are involved in the arrests of core criminal in just 5% of their apprehensions and are dealing with serious but mainly non-violent criminals in another 21% of arrests dealing mainly with burglaries, drunk drivers, car thieves and arsonists, what are they doing the rest of the time?

It’s not hard to guess. The single largest category of arrests in 2018 was for drug abuse violations, which totaled 1,654,282.

In fact, while total arrests in 2018 were no higher than they were in 1977 despite a 100 million/50% growth in the US population, and had actually dropped from a peak of nearly 13 million in 2006, the opposite trend was extant in the case of War on Drugs arrests.

As shown by the chart below, drug arrests in 2018 were nearly at peak levels and were up by more than 171% since 1977—the vast majority of which are made for drug possession generally, and marijuana possession most often.

War on Drugs Arrests, 1980-2016

Not surprisingly, the next largest arrest category after drugs is one called “other assaults” for which 1,063,535 arrests were made in 2018. Yet the FBI’s own definitions raise considerable doubts as to why these are even a matter of law enforcement by the state:

Other assaults (simple) ―Assaults and attempted assaults where no weapon was used or no serious or aggravated injury resulted to the victim. Stalking, intimidation, coercion, and hazing are included. 

Then, of course, we have all the victimless and vice crimes, including the following number of arrests:

• Prostitution and commercialized vice: 31,147;
• Sex offenses excluding rape and prostitution: 46,937;
• Gambling: 3,323;
• Liquor law offenses: 173,152;
• Curfew and loitering law violations: 22,031;
• Vagrancy: 23,546;
• Public drunkenness: 328,772;
• Disorderly conduct: 329,152;
• Forgery and counterfeiting: 50,072;
• Weapons carrying and possession: 168,403;
• All other offenses: 3,231,700.

The latter huge number tells you all you need to know. The UCR lists 27 enumerated categories of crime including all of those itemized above–plus the usual suspects like fraud and embezzlement for which there were about 135,000 arrests in 2018. Yet when the whole lists is exhausted, 32% of arrests occurred for crimes that are so minor even the FBI is embarrassed to enumerate them:

All other offenses—All violations of state or local laws not specifically identified as Part I or Part II offenses.

So, yes, we do think there are way, way too many crimes and cops, and that de-criminalizing and de-funding law enforcement are the true route to reducing police violence.

Indeed, over the past four decades, the constant dollar cost of policing in the U.S. has almost tripled, from $42.3 billion in 1977 to $114.5 billion in 2017, according to an analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data conducted by the Urban Institute. Yet that 171% gain compares to only a 20% increase in violent crimes from 1.0 million in 1977 to 1.2 million in 2017.

That is, real police spending per violent crime is up from $42,300 in 1977 to $95,400 in 2017.

3.4 Stockman's Conclusion

Better that police did not spend 90% of their time on matters other than protecting the life and property of the citizenry; and in the process turning the Nanny State into an instrument of violence against citizens, and especially the young, poor and minorities who become ensnared in its vast over-reach.

Better still, would that the conservative Opposition Party restore its commitment to the 10th Amendment, eschew the vast over-criminalization of the Nanny State and find a candidate for President who understands that Law & Order Howling is a cheap political trick that distracts from Federal policy matters which really matter.

END