Before we can even address that question at all we need to pull the politics out of it…get rid of the activists, the lunatics, the politically insane and just look at facts. Then, the facts should speak for themselves. So agreed? Facts only!

Let’s talk about crime…isn’t that what policing is all about? Police are to prevent and solve crimes…yes? Otherwise, why have police?

Before we can realistically discuss crime facts we have to understand a couple of things:

• Violent crimes consists mainly of murder, rape, and assaults.
• Property crimes consists mainly of robbery, larceny, burglary, auto theft, arson, shoplifting, and vandalism.
• Only about 40% of all violent crimes are reported to police.
• Only about 32% of all property crimes are reported to police.
• Only about 80% of all reported crimes are forwarded to a centralized collection and reporting entity.
• That means only about 26 – 32% of all crimes can be used to calculate statistics.
• For this article I will round the average to a 30% figure.

Remember back in school…grade cards. These pesky things came out every so often and told your parents how you were doing in school. A in reading, C in math, B in history and so forth. And at the end of the year the grades were all factored together to decide if you passed or not. If your grades were really bad you didn’t pass, you were held back to repeat the same grade…because you couldn’t prove you learned all that you should have.

Generally accepted throughout the US is a universal grading scale. (see below)

Using that scale, anyone scoring below a 66% received an “F” for fail. Looking at in in reverse…if you failed a test, quiz or an entire grade level it was because you couldn’t get 66% of the goal accomplished. Granted, I don’t know any parent or teacher that would ever give a straight “F” student the title of “failure” under any circumstances. But it was clearly understood that the student had major learning problems…or a serious problem to produce.

And then there were the dreaded “teacher comments” on the grade card as well. Yeah, in my case the teachers always had something to say…you can figure out what.

In the US:

• Total reported stolen property crime amounts to about $16,000,000,000 each year…16billion dollars.
• On average about 30% of reported stolen property is recovered…about 4.8billion dollars.
• Total reported arson loses total about $17,000,000,000 each year…17billion.
• Total auto theft loses come in at about $7,000,000,000…7billion.
• Sadly there are approximately 21,000 murders/homicides each year.
• Reported rapes are listed at about 150,000 each year, 13% of which men are the victims. This number is actual rapes, not attempted rape or sexual assaults. Current estimates are 80% of all actual rapes are unreported.

And consider this staggering statistic…the total cost of all crime in the US for 2017 is estimated at $2.6trillion! Yup, $2,600,000,000,000 each year.

Now, think about this for a minute…on an average year 41,000,000 speeding tickets are issued. And the average cost per ticket is $152. That means police earn over 6billion dollars per year for their government agency…$17,000,000 (17million) per day going into government bank accounts just from speeding tickets!

Why talk about the cost of speeding tickets? Well, hang in there for a minute.

So we now know that police can’t prevent crime…crime costs us $2.6trillion per year. And while they are not preventing crime they are actually taking money out of our pockets another $6billion per year in speeding tickets alone. That is a 3.2trillion dollar loss to US citizens each year.

Now, let’s get back to actual reported crimes:

• Only about 18% of all property crimes are solved.
• Only about 45% of all violent crimes are solved.

According to the generally accepted grading scale in the US:

• Police in the US would receive an “F” grade when it comes to solving property crime.
• Police in the US would receive an “F” grade when it comes to solving violent crime.
• And the “teacher notes” would show something like this, “The failure of your child to perform their duties cost each United States man, women, child, and baby over $10,000 per year.”

First think to think about…over an average lifespan, the F‘s cost the average person nearly a million dollars!

Then think about this…there is a complete and total failure of police to prevent crime and near total failure of police solving crime…while working diligently 24-hours a day to cost US citizens $17,000,000 per day in speeding tickets alone! Yeah, that is over $700,000 per hour in just speeding tickets coming out of American citizen’s pockets!

So then think about these facts:

• Over 260,000 total unsolved murders in the US.
• Over 16 unsolved murders get added to that number each day.
• Over 135 rapes go unsolved each day.

 

So you think the police industry in the USA needs reformed?

But I am not done yet…

< click here to read Part #2 >

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Related Articles –

• Do We Need Police Reform? (Part #1)
• Do We Need Police Reform? (Part #2)
• Do We Need Police Reform? (Q&A – 1)
• Do We Need Police Reform? (Q&A – 2)
• Do We Need Police Reform? (Q&A – 3)
• Do We Need Police Reform? (Q&A – 4)

 

 

 

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