If you want to know whether more cops leads to less crime, you’ll want a large sample size and/or some “natural experiments“. Most folks who have looked into that conclude that it does. Part of Mark Kleiman’s plan for reducing the incarceration AND crime rates is to hire more cops. That will be expensive, because police cost more than prison cots. But preventing crime is essential to achieving a low crime low punishment equilibrium.

You’d rather I besmirch the memory of Whitaker Chambers?

Yes, it is supposed to mean something. It doesn’t, and it doesn’t because there are no consequences when it doesn’t (other than, theoretically, in the afterlife), but it’s supposed to.

Now, answer me this; what spin does it put on your question that you have taken, as your nom de plume, the name of a traitor?

I laugh each time I read about someone being “sworn”. This is supposed to mean something?

Uh-huh.

Nevertheless, the claim that Oakland’s public sector salaries should be spent in Oakland shops is different only in degree from the notion that American dollars should be spent on American products. That’s a noxious idea, worth fighting even in the most trivial cases where it’s applied.

Eapen: Actually, I don’t grant that at all. It’s one of cliches in criminal justice to say “I want my police to live where they work…”, and it’s just dead wrong.

For one thing, it leads directly to a lowering of standards in police academies, since college graduates who’ve got their kids into functional suburban schools aren’t about to move back into some decaying urban center in order to land a job with the Metro PD. What you get instead are a) the otherwise unemployable nephews of city councilmen, b) high-school dropouts fresh from a brutalizing experience in the imperial war machine, and finally c) kids who grew up pretty much exactly like you saw in the 4th season of the Wire.

But more than that, the premise is just silly to begin with. No one would ever say “call me old-fashioned, but I prefer an oral-maxillofacial surgeon who also lives within the arbitrary boundaries of the political sub-division in which I now reside. It’s a trust issue.” What you want from a professional is that he should do his job well. The rest is his own business. (And it’s just really weird to hear libertarians support a policy that gives mayors and police commissioners the right to tell other people – even cop people – where they can and cannot buy a house.)

You should seriously rethink that position. And as you do, give yourself this test: if a poor black kid from Oakland approached you and said “Mr. Thampy, where I live there’s two things everybody’s afraid of: one is crime, the other is police. Things are just terrible. What’s the answer? What can we do?.”

Would you look that kid in the eye and say: “Among other things, I believe your life would be better if there were more cops who lived in the same zip code as you”?

(I know what I’d tell that kid: “The answer is…we have to end the drug war. That’s the only thing that we can do that will fundamentally change anything. The rest is all piecemeal bullshit.”)

Other Sean: getting a little carried away? China? Trade war?

So today it serves our purpose to make a (totally non-essential) argument that “Oakland police dollars just aren’t going to Oakland stakeholders”. Fine. Now what are we supposed to say when someone proposes a trade war with China? It’s clearly the same principle, so we’ll be reduced to pathetically pleading “Yeah but…that’s different! See autarky is, like, bad for countries but it’s totally great for towns or something.”

The cool thing about libertarianism is that, unlike certain other philosophies being touted at big conventions this season, our shit actually fits together in a way that makes sense.

The purpose of a police department is not to function as a some Keynesian stimulus program. Are the points we score by forgetting that really worth the cost of making ourselves hypocrites in some future debate?

You know who talks about “Oakland jobs for Oakland boys” and “keeping the money in town”? Two-bit ward heelers and rent-seeking cronies talk like that. We shouldn’t join their chorus of sleaze-bags, just because we think there are too many cops sending too many people to too many prisons. There’s a better way to make that argument – the first 3/4 of your post demonstrates it.