A few things stand out considering this is mostly about canabis. Look at how much effort they went through to mostly catch ~3 time dealers, of a drug in many ways less dangerous than the alcohol they're drinking at the end.
> He told her firmly it was $20 for the quarter ounce, nothing less. “It’s a good thing you don’t want any more,” said Williams, “because that’s all I got.”
Sounds like a dealer really ruining lives right there.
> Several of the suspects were found guilty. “One of the guys ended up with seven years,” LaJoye said. “There were a lot of sentences, four or five repeat offenders wound up going to prison
One person going away for 7 years? 4-5 offenders going to prison (implied less than 7 years). Seems hardly worth risking officers lives, teams of police (bonuses), or the effort.
> “Then we really started drinking!” said Wasylyshyn, who finally joined the party. “You don’t give cops free food and free beer and expect them to walk away when it’s still there.”
To be fair, there appeared to be plenty of other drugs going on as well. “Suspects were taken to the Shiawassee County Jail and scheduled for arraignment on multiple felony charges, including delivery of cocaine, crack, LSD, marijuana, and prescription drugs.“
> The trouble had started in 1986, when General Motors announced it would close seven plants in the area, starting a depression.Thousands of workers were laid off, and families began to flee the area in search of jobs. In 1987, Money magazine had named Flint the worst place to live in America. Now, dealers were at large, peddling cocaine, marijuana, LSD, and prescription pills.
Seems to me that those laid-off workers found other employment, and the police then spent their time jailing them for working hard to survive.
> But inside one of the arrested suspect’s cars, police found a young boy. Wasylyshyn called on Williams who carried the boy to a police car and told him everything would be okay. “He was part of this so-called victimless crime,” Williams told me.
The ones who victimised that boy were the ones who took him from his parents and locked the latter up!
> The end take for the cops included several motor vehicles, vanloads of suspects, and, crucially, over $100,000 in cash from the reverse buys.
How is this different from highway robbery? If gangsters stole a large amount of property & money from hard-working businessmen, I doubt that the Atlantic would celebrate it.
> But while the 1990 operation didn’t make a long-term impact on crime, it was a life-altering event for the officers who took part in it.
I don't begrudge them their good time, but … is that what the taxpayers are paying them for?
Assuming you can arrest N people per year, does it reduce crime more to arrest them all on the same day, or spread out over the year?
The argument for all on the same day would be that it shuts down a network which would have to be recreated from scratch, while if you arrest people gradually new people can take their place.
I wonder if psychologically, potential criminals would be more worried about getting caught if they see people getting arrested every day or if one day a year they see mass arresting. I wouldn't be surprised if one of them happened to be a more effective deterrent, although I have no idea which it would be.
There's almost certainly going to be more widespread news coverage of one large batch arrest.
Research shows the perception of getting caught influences decisions to commit crimes much more than the penalties. Potential criminals don't tend to maximize the ratio of expected reward to expected penalty.
I think the best strategy would probably be to keep the network of informants intact and look at the social graph. Once they find a minor dealer within N (probably 2) degrees of separation of M people who weren't previously within N degrees of separation of an arrestee, nab them. Intentionally spreading arrests across the social graph would probably also help reduce the disproportionate cost borne by poor and minority communities.
I'd be willing to bet that hearing from a friend about their friend's arrest has a higher psychological impact than hearing about 50 random strangers on the news.
On the other hand, it seems law enforcement is more incentivized to grab headlines and maximize published arrest counts rather than actually maximize psychological deterrence. There are certainly plenty of idealists who would maximize deterrence anyway, but I fear they would be unlikely to be promoted as rapidly as those playing the system.
The real question is how to properly incentivize law enforcement so even the cynics are targeting the best outcomes for society rather than the biggest media impact. Unfortunately, humans are just generally bad at optimizing over the decades-long horizons involved in incentivizing the maximization of society's long-term best interest. Making an exotic 30-year crime rate derivative (even if we found non-gamable metrics) part of the police pension plan doesn't seem like the right sort of solution. The impact decades out isn't likely to have much effect on day-to-day decision making, and even if it did, it exposes the officers to a lot of extra variability beyond their control. On the other hand, immediately incentivizing the implementation of good-looking ideas before there's time to accurately measure their impact opens one up to Enron-like gaming. So, it looks very difficult to properly incentivize long-term law enforcement goals via either long-term incentives or near-term incentives.
I suspect mass arrests would be more effective. Consider the relative fears versus relative risks of car crashes (constant) and airliner crashes (rare, but tend to kill a lot of people all at once).
> He told her firmly it was $20 for the quarter ounce, nothing less. “It’s a good thing you don’t want any more,” said Williams, “because that’s all I got.”
Sounds like a dealer really ruining lives right there.
> Several of the suspects were found guilty. “One of the guys ended up with seven years,” LaJoye said. “There were a lot of sentences, four or five repeat offenders wound up going to prison
One person going away for 7 years? 4-5 offenders going to prison (implied less than 7 years). Seems hardly worth risking officers lives, teams of police (bonuses), or the effort.
> “Then we really started drinking!” said Wasylyshyn, who finally joined the party. “You don’t give cops free food and free beer and expect them to walk away when it’s still there.”