Interesting study in criminology for anyone who has access to scholarly publications through your library or school:

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/1...276.x/abstract

Relationships reflecting the view that police presence is essential for crime prevention and social order are examined for variation duration of police strike, city size, and offense category. Overall, analysis yields very limited support for the police presence argument, suggesting that strikes have neither a significant nor a systematic impact on rates of reported crime. Implications of findings for the formulation of police policy are discussed.
I have read abstracts for similar studies done abroad where crime rates spiked during a police strike, but that might be due to pernicious self-defense laws along with a general lack of an armed populace and a culture willing to take on the responsibility of defending yourself.

Anyway, with all the police stuff floating around recently, I thought I'd share. I'm a history buff and I always found it interesting that police as we know them today were a post-civil-war invention, and that the US got by just fine (in fact, if reports are correct, it got by better than its European counterparts, which *did* have proto-police of a sort, and lots of them,) without them. So I'm always on the lookout for data points about the effect of no police on places people tend to think police are vital (ie cities.)

This isn't a police bashing thread, but something I thought the board at large (including our police members) might find interesting.