I'm starting to think responding to crime with police is the wrong approach. By the time police are involved, the crime has usually already been committed. It seems like there should be far more focus on preventing crime with social services and economic and health interventions. The police should be our last resort, not our first.
I don’t know. The city doesn’t have much else to spend money on. The next biggest thing is Fire Department, but we don’t have many fires. Then there are parks and libraries and such, but those are pretty low cost.
You could probably cut some funding from the police but it doesn’t seem like a huge misallocation.
Cities don't really have budget to give out cash. If you took the entire police budget (about $50M/yr), you'd only have enough money for $10k/yr for 5,000 individuals. If you have a $10k/year rent subsidy available in Mt View, lots of people from neighboring cities would want to move there to claim the subsidy.
It's not a solvable problem by a single city, even if you believe in cash transfers/UBI.
These objections don't seem as strong to me as they seem to you.
> you'd only have enough money for $10k/yr for 5,000 individuals
5,000 out of the 80,000 total individuals seems to be a sizable number, no? Even 2,500 seems like a lot when your population is so small. Nobody claimed the problem is solvable by a single city, but it seems like you could easily make a difference at the margin.
> lots of people from neighboring cities would want to move there to claim the subsidy.
You could have some process that gives preference to existing residents of a certain period of time, I doubt many poor people living in the area would move to a city and live there for a certain time just for a chance to get a rent subsidy.
This problem of "people moving here to claim benefits" is both generally overstated and pretty easily solved by a number of cities.
I mean... it's just not the responsibility of cities to redistribute income.
In addition to people moving in, you have people paying high taxes who will move out to neighboring cities without this tax. I don't want to pay a 5% wealth transfer tax.
This idea is based on some sort of pseudo-socialist view of the world, except implemented at the worst possible level (municipal). Cities deal with keeping crime down, building roads, etc. They're not here to implement a socialist wealth transfer program.
Mountain View police took more action against drug abuse than against robbery, rape, aggravated assault, and homicide combined by over a factor of 2. [0] They only cleared 60% of those violent crimes.
Maybe they should redirect more of their budget to investigating violent crime. What's the evidence for your conclusion?
