The government NPR radio network and website is promoting a story suggesting that Baltimore’s high crime rates are owed to a lack of police officers in the city.
There is just one problem with this notion: Baltimore has the SECOND-HIGHEST rate of cops per-capita in the U.S.! (1st is Washington, D.C..)
Wherever city governments have cut police staff and budgets, crime has tended to go down. See here. This seems counterintuitive; but people tend to become safer when they take responsibility for their own personal safety.
Just as in health care and welfare policy, government intervention is a poison that worsens almost everyone’s circumstances. Towns that have fired, cut, eliminated or privatized their police departments have invariably found that crime goes down.
