Lorenzo Warby on Handwaving Freakoutery

[Lorenzo Warby]

Thank you for your thoughtful suggestion, which gave me something to consider on my morning walk.

“Funding centred policing” is a perfectly reasonable label. However, I am going to stick with fiscal-sink because, just like violent crime is very strongly a tail effect within the population, so it is across localities.

There is generally very little difference in rates of violent crime between high income/upper class and middle income/middle class neighbourhoods. Violent crime tends to be very strongly concentrated in particular localities. This is, in part, a result of the population-tail effect as lower executive function tends to be socially sorted downwards and be strongly heritable.

This also means that such localities actively require more policing. So, given that violent crime by locality is not an even gradient (based on revenue, average income or funding) but shows such intense spike patterns, I will stick with the label fiscal-sink hypothesis. But I do need to make the funding follows social clout point more explicitly in future, ta.