Detroit Police Badge
How often do you see police just driving around and patrolling? Police officers are no longer easy to find patrolling the streets. Less cops means less tickets getting handed out. That might be a good thing for some drivers, but that also means the streets are a lot more dangerous.
In the United States there are about 900,000 police officers. That might seem like a lot, but there are about 316,100,000 people in the U.S. That means there is 1 cop for every 351 people. Only about 593,000 police officers are full time.
Detroit Michigan is currently the most dangerous city in the U.S. Is that due to the lack of police officers. In Detroit there is 1 police officer for about every 340 people. Hussein Baydoun, a Unis Student says, “the reason there is a lot of crime in Detroit is because the police take so long to respond to crime, the criminals know they can get away without getting caught.”
City’s like Honolulu, Hawaii are very safe. Most likely because the amount of police officers per person ratio. Honolulu has 1 cop for every 75 people. That’s a big difference between Honolulu and Detroit. Does more cops mean less crime? Dearborn, Michigan police officer Kirkwood says, “I believe that if any city or suburban area had more officers patrolling their streets, crime would drop to a certain degree. Naturally, police presence is a deterrent to crime. The more officers people see, the less likely someone is to commit a crime.”
Why is it that police are becoming rare to find in many cities? The number of officers is being hired is decreasing and the crime rate is increasing fast. It has gotten to the point where some cities will take an hour to respond to a crime. Everyday crime is increasing, and that means our chances of being victims is rising as well.
What is going to happen if the number of officers continues to fall. The world would be come more dangerous than it all ready is. Something needs to change. we need to make sure there are more cops. The big cities should put the most amount of money possible into the police services. They should make police duty more desirable so people want to be police officers. Cities could increase pay or give officers some incentives.
The solution has yet to be seen although crime rates continue to rise. Police and citizens will all agree, we need more police on the job immediately!
Hassan Bazzi
Unis School Journalism
Sources
https://www.governing.com/gov-data/safety-justice/law-enforcement-police-department-employee-totals-for-cities.html