Brent we absolutely do not need more cops. I know you will disagree with that but you don't understand how modern policing should work, or how much money is wasted by police departments on things that are entirely unnecessary. First of all, having more police doing routine patrols does not reduce crime. Some academics in criminology have even suggested that having routine patrols by cops make about as much sense as having your local fire department tooling around with an engine company on fire watch. Additionally, so much money is wasted on things like DARE programs and expensive tactical teams when neither has been shown empirically to have the effects on things that we are led to believe by those who are running our police departments. Finally, we have far, FAR too many individual departments. Different training standards and response protocol mean every one of the 18,000 separate agencies might respond differently to the same situation.
If you want to reduce crime, increase education and increase opportunities for good jobs for people in the urban core of our larger cities. The last thing we need to do is throw more money to our criminal justice system if you actually want to reduce crime. Of course, those are wimpy, lefty, pansy solutions, whereas hiring more tough heroic guys to be cops is the American he-man thing to do.
