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Originally Posted by Chris
What? Are you being deliberately obtuse?
There are copious examples. Simply look back to when there were more police officers, and witness the lower crime level.
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A parallel measure of crime, the Crime Survey of England and Wales (CSEW) which is based on interviews with the public about their experiences whether they were reported to police or not, said overall crime fell seven per cent to 6.4 million offences.
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A recent review of the literature commissioned by HMIC concluded that there was
not enough evidence to say that higher numbers of police officers was the direct
cause of lower levels of crime (Bradford 2011). Despite consistency in some more
recent research, almost all the studies reviewed by Bradford were said to suffer
from limitations which made their findings inconclusive. Nevertheless, while no
single study was found to provide robust evidence of a cause-and-effect
relationship, the review highlighted that the studies, when taken together, pointed
to the potential for police numbers to be negatively associated with at least some
forms of recorded crime, so when police numbers were higher, crime would be
lower. This potential association was found particularly in relation to property and
other acquisitive crime. It was estimated that a 10 percent increase in officers was
likely to be associated with a reduction in property crime of around 3 percent (Levitt
1997). In comparison, the evidence of an association between police numbers and
violent crime was found to be weaker and sometimes contradictory.
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Yet it is violent crime that has gone up, and non-violent crime gone down. Other factors in play.
The chances of a police officer being in the right place at the right time is extremely small compared to the number of wrong places or wrong times.