Let's imagine a city divided in two halves of equal population. West City is poor and has a high crime rate, East City is rich and has a low crime rate. Should police resources be allocated equally to both? How about public health facilities or welfare payments?
When people put bars on their windows on the ground floor, it is not the police causing them to be willing to spend the money on that.
Crime can also cause poverty. For example, if the family breadwinner goes to jail, the family slips into poverty.
As best we can tell, “stand your ground” laws in states like Florida result in hundreds of deaths each year. How many of those would be considered murder in other states?
Police killed over 1,300 people last year. How many of those people truly posed an immediate danger to others, and how many were murdered by a trigger-happy cop who was not held accountable by his colleagues?
Crime, even serious crime like murder, is socially constructed. It’s not objective; society decides what’s illegal and who gets to do it anyway.
Police have been ignoring small property crime as a waste of their time for far longer than anyone has called for defunding them. I couldn't get small town police to do anything about my stolen bike that was tagged and visibly sitting outside the house of the guy who took it. Wasn't worth taking anyone off speed-trap duty.
The ultimate reason is that if you are poor, the proceeds of crime (theft, burglary, robbery etc) are comparatively more meaningful than to somebody who is wealthy, while the cost of getting caught is comparatively less. A rich professional does not steal loaves of bread to feed their family, because they don't need to and they risk losing their entire livelihood if they do. If you're poor, unemployed and your kids are hungry, the risk/reward calculus is very different.
There’s not actually a well known link between poverty and crime in the way you imply. We’ve just decided that we only care about some people committing some crime some of the time.
