More than 80% of police-hours are wasted not solving any crime at all

Because they're spending all their time giving soccer moms traffic tickets

I’ve had to rederive these points so many times now, I’m just making a permanent post I can point people to. Broadly, police dedicate at most 10-20% of their time to “actually solving crime” and dedicate the vast majority of their time to overhead and traffic stops.

Let’s break it down

1. There were about 120M traffic stops per year in 2001.¹ This number is actually quite conservative, and I can argue it’s probably closer to 200-400M today,² but let’s just go with the 120M for now.

2. There’s ~708k cops in the USA in 2023,³ and ~659k in 2001,⁴ the year of the 120M stops cite.

3. Let’s scale 120M up to 2023 cops: 708 / 659 * 120M = 127M traffic stops estimated annually for 2023

4. Let’s convert FTE to police-hours: 708k * 2040 = 1.4B police hours annually - note, this conservatively assumes all cops are full time, which is not true, although I couldn’t find strong numbers on what percent are part-time. Also, 2040 is conservative, it’s probably fewer hours.

Now let’s make some reasonable assumptions, backed by time use studies:

1. 10-15% officers who only do bureaucratic / administration / management back at the station

2. 30% of time spent on paperwork (and many cops would estimate this to be even higher) - incidence reports, evidence documentation, write ups, case follow ups, interview and disposition summaries, etc.

3. 25% of time commuting / getting to places (time use studies estimate 15-30%, 25% is from an NIJ study)

So we’re left with ~478M hours for all traffic stops and all actual crime solving. Do they apportion these hours wisely? Ha!

How long does a cop take to give an average person a ticket? Well first, you have to scope out a good speed trap spot, then sit around radaring people or waiting for a flagrant safety violation. Chase em down, pull me over. Sit in your car pondering the vagaries of the universe for 15 minutes, then eventually heave your tired bulk out of your giant SUV and waddle over to them. Take their license, waddle back to your car, spend another 15 minutes pondering the inscrutable, eventually come back and give a ticket. Right? They're probably lucky to generate one ticket every 90-120 minutes. Sometimes you even let them off with a warning, and all that time was entirely wasted, from both a ticket revenue front and an actual-crime-solving front!

But there's 130-400 MILLION traffic stops - and only ~478M cop-hours available for anything at all after overhead. Let’s say they average 2 hours per stop and it was 120M - that means 260M police-hours are wasted on traffic stops!

That only leaves ~221M police hours on doing *anything* that looks like “actually solving crime,” and that is a mere 15% of total police hours!

Take it down to a stop every 90 minutes, and the most you can spend is ~20% of police hours on solving actual crimes.

And remember, 120M was conservative, the actual number is probably 200-400M traffic stops per year! (see footnote 2). Even if they generate a ticket per hour, they’re at 19% at 200M, 12% at 300M, and only 5% at 400M.

And keep in mind, this ~12-20% of “actual crime solving time” completely ignores parking enforcement, the time they spend harassing minorities and teenage skateboarders, any time spent racking up citations and arrests for petty victimless crimes like drugs, trips to the donut shop, general time wasting and kibitzing, etc. All the non-traffic-but-not-useful stuff we know they do, ALL of which would cut into that 12-20% time they could be spending solving actual crimes.

Play with the parameters all you like, easily the majority of "actually-policing" hours are used to generate traffic stops, and by FAR the minority of hours are used on “solving actual crimes.”

Why might this be?

Well, look at the choices - sit in a nice air conditioned car for 80% of your time, interacting with the soccer moms and nice middle and upper class people you pull over, OR be out in the bad parts of downtown interacting with volatile psychos, shambling fentanyl zombies, and schizophrenic homeless people?

Oh, plus writing tickets generates revenue for the city, and doing anything to prevent or investigate actual crime has you interacting with all the psychos and zombies. They are doing easy things because they are easy, and because doing hard things is not only hard in and of itself, but also has much greater reputational risk in our post-Floyd panopticon society.

It’s not hard to see WHY so much police time is put into traffic stops - but that is NOT where we need police hours:

Because it’s not like they’re doing a great job on the “solving crimes” front, either! Look at the clearance rates above, for actually serious crimes, from the FBI UCR site.⁵

Think of this the next time the police complain they are underfunded and understaffed.

Here’s an idea - use police hours for solving crimes

The next time cops ask for more funding, how about we give it to them, but mandate they can only use police hours to solve actual crimes?? This would EASILY 2-5x the amount of time spent on actually solving and preventing future theft, burglary, aggravated assaults, rapes, and murders.

If you’re not spending 300M+ hours on traffic stops, you’ve got more time for actual crime. If you’re not spending all day driving to nowhere, to farm people for ticket revenue, you can save another 200M+ hours, and a lot of gas money and emissions. I imagine some of that “paperwork time” stems from tickets, too, but I’m not even counting that. Just 90% fewer traffic stops and less “driving to nowhere” would roughly triple the amount of time available to spend solving actual crimes.

We need *serious* top-down legislation or prioritization in terms of giving police any more resources or funding, because they have proven that they ARE wasting what they currently have on mostly traffic tickets, and WILL waste any incremental resources you allow them on mostly traffic tickets.

But I actually like traffic tickets!

I’ve actually heard this from multiple people. I assume they’re all bitter 90 year old Karens who want the entire world to be frozen in amber so they can go back to slowly tending their cats or whatever, but multiple times people have said they LOVE traffic enforcement, and please, we should get more.

Sure, there are some actually dangerous drivers out there, and they should be stopped and ticketed. That’s MAYBE 10%, probably less, of current traffic tickets, and can be accomplished with 10%-15% of the hours currently dedicated to it, or you can rely on other motorists calling in or dash-camming truly dangerous drivers (which happens often, and could be publicly messaged to encourage more), and they can respond reactively after a report.

For all the rest, you really think we should be prioritizing giving rush hour commuters and busy moms traffic tickets over investigating and closing rapes, assaults, murders, thefts, and burglaries?? Because that’s what’s happening today!

Let’s get our “actual crimes” house in order first, and THEN see if we want to double police forces for the sole purpose of handing out traffic tickets to everyone.

1. Lichtenberg & Smith, supra note 26, at 422-24 (estimating the number of traffic stops:

low = 60,000,000; middle = 120,000,000; high = 180,000,000

2. Triangulated thusly: ~40M drivers are given speeding tickets every year. It’s difficult to get a reliable source of ticket breakdowns, but the state of New York has one here: https://data.ny.gov/d/q4hy-kbtf/visualization, graph and table seen here: https://imgur.com/a/I9CRgwC

In it, of 10M total citations over 4 years, ~2M of those were speeding tickets if you roll up all the speeding categories. The other ones are things like running stop signs, lacking inspection, registration, or insurance, operating a mobile device, and the like. So if you 5x the ~40M annual US speeding tickets, you actually get 200M total *tickets,* not just traffic stops. How many traffic stops end up in a ticket is a matter of some debate and is hard to find as well, but I think most sources converge on 1/2 - 2/3. Which means that 200M tickets translates to 300-400M traffic stops annually.

3. https://www.statista.com/statistics/191694/number-of-law-enforcement-officers-in-the-us/

4. https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2001/01sec6.pdf

5. https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2017/crime-in-the-u.s.-2017/topic-pages/clearances