the amount of policing has basically no effect. numerous studies show that potential punishments don't deter murder, either pre-meditated or murders of opportunity. further, police rarely ever stop murders, and only solve about 55% of murder cases. lastly, murders are rare: 0.005%, or 16k/yr, in the US. that's because of the severe social, not legal, repercussions. people feeling connected to each other lowers the murder rate, not policing.
I wonder what would happen if murder stopped being policed. Would the murder rate remain unchanged as “numerous studies” suggest? Or would an unchanged base rate in murder without official retribution lead to blood feud style relationships between people and increase a secondary, tertiary, … n-terary murder rates?
If police leave 45% of murders unaddressed, I wonder how many current murders are secondary in nature, as in would not have occurred without an unretributed precipitating crime be-it murder, rape, assault, etc.
It’s an interesting idea to think about murder not being policed or have legal repercussions. Would it be comforting to know if you kill somebody drunk driving there wouldn’t be a big problem? I guess somebody like Dallas’ Dr. Death would still have to deal with pesky civil lawsuits.
the extreme limit (anarchy) isn't a practical possibility, since no government, however small, would give up its coercive power that way. it's more fruitful to talk about varying levels of policing and varying legal consequences, and the prevailing conclusion there is that murder rates aren't particularly sensitive to these variables in the practical bands of interest. but note that "policing" need not be done by a police force--in tribal groups for instance, tribal members generally police each other.
we'd be better served by having many more detectives, and far fewer gun-toting beat cops, if we were interested in solving more murder cases though. that's the kind of policy discussion we should be having, not the politically-driven narratives that currently prevail around the topic.
