More people were killed by police in 2023 than ever before.

Police in the US killed at least 1,232 people last year, making 2023 the deadliest year for homicides committed by law enforcement in more than a decade, according to newly released data.

Mapping Police Violence, a non-profit research group, catalogs deaths at the hands of police and last year recorded the highest number of killings since its national tracking began in 2013. The data suggests a systemic crisis and a remarkably consistent pattern, with an average of roughly three people killed by officers each day, with slight upticks in recent years.

At the same time, mass incarceration remains near all-time highs.

we have thousands of federal, state, local, and tribal systems. Together, these systems hold over 1.9 million people in 1,566 state prisons, 98 federal prisons, 3,116 local jails, 1,323 juvenile correctional facilities, 142 immigration detention facilities, and 80 Indian country jails, as well as in military prisons, civil commitment centers, state psychiatric hospitals, and prisons in the U.S. territories — at a system-wide cost of at least $182 billion each year.
... In 2022, about 469,000 people entered prison gates, but people went to jail more than 7 million times. Some have just been arrested and will make bail within hours or days, while many others are too poor to make bail and remain in jail until their trial. Only a small number (about 102,700 on any given day) have been convicted, and are generally serving misdemeanors sentences of under a year. At least 1 in 4 people who go to jail will be arrested again within the same year — often those dealing with poverty, mental illness, and substance use disorders, whose problems only worsen with incarceration.

Meanwhile, police killed in the line of duty dropped dramatically in 2023.

According to the report, 136 federal, state, county, municipal, military, tribal and campus officers died in the line of duty in 2023, a 39% decrease from the year before.
The report found 47 officers were killed by gunfire, 37 died in traffic-related incidents and 52 died from “other causes” such as medical events, aircraft crashes and other forms of violence

So enormous amounts of people being imprisoned, plus horrific numbers of people being killed by police, adds up to a nation undergoing unprecedented amounts of crime. Right? Actually, no.

"The national picture shows that murder is falling. We have data from over 200 cities showing a 12.2% decline ... in 2023 relative to 2022," Asher said, citing his own analysis of public data. He found instances of rape, robbery and aggravated assault were all down too.
Yet when you ask people about crime in the country, the perception is it's getting a lot worse.
A Gallup poll released in November found 77% of Americans believed there was more crime in the country than the year before. And 63% felt there was either a "very" or "extremely" serious crime problem — the highest in the poll's history going back to 2000.

There is simply no justification in mass incarceration and all of these police homicides in a time when violent crime has dropped by half and property time has dropped by 2/3rds.
Of course I could have said the exact same thing a decade ago (I believe that I did), and I probably will say it again 5 years from now.