The first human being ever born became the first murder.  In Genesis 4 Cain killed his brother Abel.  Since the fall of mankind there has been no chance for a human to live completely free of moral dilemma.   The assertion made by Richard Moran in “More Police, Less Crime? Wrong” is a dramatic understatement.  Of course evil is embedded into the moral fiber of our society; evil has been embedded into the moral fiber of every nation, tribe, family, and individual since near the beginning of time.

In a world so full of evil on every level of society, can a solution exist? Never.  Many politicians support the idea of more police to reduce the amount of crime.  There may be an immediate and subtle reduction in some criminal activity, but can this be equated to a true lessening of evil in the world. History suggests the answer would be no.  Adolf Hitler had a police force that most people at the time would have considered unstoppable.   The presence of hundreds of thousands of armed officials may have scared many people into innocence, but the evil still exists in the form of government.  As long as the world is occupied by people governed by other people, evil will exist.

The reasoning behind the “more police, less crime” philosophy seems sound on the surface.  Police are good; people are bad. If society maintains more good police than bad people, the problem is solved.  What supporters of this argument fail to recognize is blatantly obvious: police are people too.  Moran’s assertion that the number of police on the force has little effect on crime is not only reasonable historically, but is also supported by modern statistics.  Police today spend less than twenty percent of their time fighting crimes.  Most of an officer’s work day consists of paperwork, traffic stops, and public nuisance complaints.  Hiring one hundred new police officers in a city could be equated to hiring only twenty full-time crime fighters.  Some of the most peaceful nations in the world remain those with the fewest police and the most weakly armed officers.  This goes to prove that simple fear of authorities is not enough to keep criminals off the street.

Richard Moran’s claim that evil is embedded in the moral fiber of society is a hyperbolic understatement.  The way he makes his assertion leaves readers under the impression that this problem exists only in our modern American society.  This problem has troubled every group of people since the beginning of time.  However, the argument to simply hire more police to reduce the amount of crime does not line up with the statistics.  Police in the modern world are not superhero-like crime fighters; they are men and women trained for a profession extending much beyond arresting murders.  Societies will always experience evil people and evil actions. People will always experience evil in the government.  This fact will not change with the number of uniformed men and women on the streets.