Do more cops decrease crimes?

I've been reading a lot from the media lately about how Joe Biden is claiming that Obama's jobs bill will decrease crimes and decrease fires and make our education system worse.  He's been claiming that a vote against Obama's jobs bill will be a vote for more rapes, more murders, and worse educated kids.

The idea here is that Obama's administration is falling for the idealist claim that more money will result in more police officers, more firefighters and more teachers.  If Obama's bill does not pass, this will result in layoffs.

If you don't believe me, at a recent press conference the President's press secretary, John Carney, was asked the following question:  "The vice president said that murder will continue to rise, rape will continue to rise, all crime will continue to rise. Does the president agree that's gonna happen if his jobs bill doesn't pass the Senate?"

Carney responded by saying:  "I think it would be hard to find anyone who doesn't agree with the simple equation that fewer police officers on the street has a direct effect on the crime rate.  That's the point he was making and that's a point that the president absolutely does..."

So what is the truth?  Do more cops prevent crimes?  Do more firefighters prevent fires?

The truth is that Biden's claim that rapes in Flint Michigan have actually declined 11 percent since budget cuts in 2008 -- rapes did not triple as he claimed.  For more such statistics check out this article from factcheck.org.

The idea here is that a man will not decide to rape a woman if he knew there were more cops on the streets.  This is the kind of "wisdom" the Obama administration is counting on voters believing.  Yet the truth is there is no evidence to back this up.

Common sense will have it that you could have 100 cops in one area of downtown Detroit and that will not stop the crazed impulse of a crazy sex addict.  You could have 100,000 firefighters in the small town of 100 people and that will not prevent one fire.

Democrats have also claimed in the past that more teachers per classroom will make children learn more, and provide them with a better education.  Yet the Japanese have the best education system and the best educated kids in the world according to statistics, yet the Japanese also have the largest class sizes per teacher in the world also.  So that sort of tosses that "theory" into the trash.

It turned out that the only reason democrats were calling for smaller class sizes was to justify the need for more teachers.  It was a teachers union kind of thing.

So more cops do not prevent crimes, more firefighters do not prevent fires, and more teachers per student do not better educate kids. People who say otherwise are buying into feel good "idealist" statements that simply are not "realistic."