“One time he attacked a woman unprovoked and killed her dog” is, in fact, evidence that he is particularly disposed to violence. The vast majority of people have never committed a violent crime. So it is also evidence that it will recur (at least, it is more likely to recur than for an average citizen)
Cities that took a tough "law and order" approach and hired a bunch of police and locked a bunch of people up saw the same exactly drop in crime rates that more lenient jurisdictions did.
And yet major metropolitan police departments are typically hundreds of cops short of their allocated head counts. Defunding is one thing but the strangely high levels of resignations/retirements suggests to me that something is going on.
I’m fine with it, they were both removed from office by people who cared more about shallow symbolic victories than the empirical realities of mass incarceration and community safety.
After you attack people with totally legit concerns for personal safety as seeking "shallow symbolic victories", you should consider yourself lucky that all you got from me was a LOL.
Ah yes, now that Chesa is gone, San Francisco is back to being the crime-free paradise it was before he got there. Life ain't that simple, sorry. The people who are most concerned with personal safety--crime victims--are, on average, overwhelmingly more likely to support less carceral approaches to violence.
OK. I lived in SF and still visit friends there every year. It's ... fine. And violent crime fell under Boudin.
Yes, there are visibly unhoused people. It's a city. But crime is not, and has never been, out of control there. Juristictions in CA with "tough" DAs have way worse crime rates. Ever hear of Sacramento under Anne Marie Schubert?
I'd subscribe for that piece. Oh, wait, I already have subscribed :)
I mean, some rather obvious differences have to do with Chesa Boudin's parentage, and the skin melanin content (also SES, but of course melanin Trumps SES whenever the two conflict) of Turner, his victim, and Judge Persky.
If/when you do write that piece, it might be worthwhile for you to include a link to
Signed by, among other people, more than 30 San Jose deputy public defenders (how many deputy public defenders did Santa Clara Country even *have* in 2016?):
"We fear that this shift will disproportionately impact the underprivileged and minorities in our communities and perpetuate mass incarceration."
The not so quiet part was said very much out load in a secondary article inspired by that petition:
"But the judge is finding support from a number of public defenders, who argue that punishing him will ultimately hurt their own clients — most of them, unlike Turner, poor people of color."
Brock Turner was wealthy. In my experience, progressives do want to see vigorous punishment when the wealth and powerful misbehave. If a homeless addict had done the same crime then it might be different.
The police exist as much to protect criminals from the community as they to protect the community from criminals. Community-administered justice would be swift, harsh and unlikely to distinguish between the accused and convicted.
Also, our current criminal punishment system is not great at engaging with victims. (It has been improving in some places where a concerted investment has been made, but this is more the exception than the rule.) Interpersonal violence is treated as an offense against the state, rather than against a victim and a community. As such, it is quite common for victims to report feeling re-victimized by the criminal legal system. That's why abolitionists advocate for alternative systems that actually center the needs of the victim and the community, rather than treating them as peripheral to the process.
People and govt like to do the easy part first, like reducing sentences or eliminating prosecution and don’t do the hard part, which is make the kind of system you describe work.
In 2021, SPD overtime budget ALONE (about 7% of their total budget) was more than the entire budget of the Communications and Community Safety Department, which answers all 911 calls and directs them to either the police or other emergency response services and government agencies. Currently they have a severe shortage of dispatchers.
Homicides. IE people were killed. Yes, it is post facto, but someone did the most mortal of deeds, and the number of police to look into it is diminishing. There is no one to investigate, and I really don't care if the killer is mentally disturbed, high as a kite, or what. They already did it. And there is no one to follow up, no one to look into it, no one to help the family of those killed.
The numbers of one went up, while the numbers of the other went down. I know correlation is not causation, but the timing is a little bit suspect. And all the community involvement in the world goes out the window when someone is dead.
Or maybe our folk beliefs about community safety have more to do with our prior political commitments and lizard-brain emotional responses than with empirical reality! Crazy idea, I know
Your points are reasonable (I don’t like Boudin but not obvious he was responsible for the rise in crime in SF given spikes happened elsewhere too) but the sarcasm directed towards people engaging with you earnestly is unpleasant.
When you spend all day visiting people in jail and trying to get them the resources they need to survive in the face of the grinding indifference of the state, you can talk to me about social etiquette in online discourse.
That cash bail enhances community safety. (Empirically false!)
That alternatives to policing are ineffective. (They're rarely been tried on a scale large enough to draw scientifically valid conclusions, and what research we do have is very positive.)
That violent criminals have high rates of recidivism. (When given support post-incarceration, the levels of recidivism are remarkably low.)
Well we agree on cash bail. That’s a racket. But the homeless man isn’t getting out on cash bail.
I agree we don’t have enough quality data on alternatives to policing, but also, what are those alternatives?
And finally, that last one I’d need to see actual data on violent criminals and recidivism. A 19 year old who gets 5 years is way more likely to be violent again, I’d wager, because young men are far more violent than older men. Whereas my friend was in prison in New York for 13 years, and now he’s a father (to my kid’s best friend) and has a good job. But he was also in his early 30s by the time he got out.
The rise in violent crime rates after the pandemic has been stunning and literally unprecedented--the largest year on year increase in the homicide rate ever in the history of modern record keeping. At the very least the timing, and the optics, are pretty unfortunate.
We have specific, identifiable people in the community - generally experiencing homelessness, mental illness, substance abuse, and other problems - who do crimes all day. Eventually they get around to doing a crime on you. If we had bothered to investigate, arrest, prosecute, and incarcerate for any of their dozens of prior crimes then they would not be in a position to do that next one to you.
These people are out there, everyone knows they’re out there, and still nothing is done and nothing is going to be done. I empathize with the position that these people ought not to be punished - my personal hot take is the criminal justice system should rarely if ever engage in punishment. I would like every effort made for them to be rehabilitated, even if I’m not super optimistic that it’s in the cards for every individual. But they absolutely need to be incapacitated. I don’t even think it matters what impact that incapacitation will or won’t have on the crime stats. It is as core a function of government as water and sewer - without it we don’t have a society. We can’t have people constantly defecting against their neighbors with total impunity.
You might want to take a look at the state of Louisiana where the murder rate in rural parishes is 2x higher than the urban areas. A rural sheriff's idea of reform is not beating you to death before they put you in the squad car.
The bulk of the murders in these rural parishes aren't intruders or random break-ins. It's acquaintances/friends/family members shooting each other over mundane crap and disagreements.
This is exactly why a fundamental distinction needs to be made between predatory crime and this score settling that seems to be part of the lives of some communities.
Predatory crime needs to be treated differently; and much more harshly than community based conflicts that escalate.
You hunt your fellow citizen; you are going to pay a very steep price.
Yeah that's bullshit. Chesa Boudin never pushed for not arrested and prosecuting violent criminals. He actually argued for focusing more of our scarce criminal justice resources on attacking violent crime (and less on quality of life crimes). But you lapped up the propaganda really well, didn't you?
This is an odd example to make an anti-defund point because you could just as easily argue that this is an example of why the police aren’t actually helpful at deterring crime unless there happens to be an officer right there at the moment of a crime occurring. And warehousing the mentally ill in prisons conclusively doesn’t help anybody. Seems like the solution here is exactly what abolitionists have been proposing (as Freddie notes): vastly more resources diverted from policing to mental health care, social housing, nonviolent emergency response, etc etc.
No, I think that incarcerating people without attempting to rehabilitate them is an approach that is doomed to failure, because except in extremely rare cases they will be released back into our communities. What kind of neighbors would you like to have? Ones whose underlying problems had been addressed, or ones who had been left in a cage for years to fend for themselves?
Except most of the time we only do incarceration and then release. If you skip the rehabilitation part, then you’re barely even putting a band-aid on the problem.
The neighbors you have in fact fought for, promised, and delivered are ones who can and will do anything to anyone and never meet a representative of the state in response.
I don't agree, at all. Police can compel this guy to get treatment or to gave legal consequence. Social workers can't. It's a totally romanticized notion of homelessness and mental illness, that everyone that so suffers is merely waiting to be offered help and will gladly accept it when offered. That's totally contrary to the actual problems of the perpetually-homeless and treatment-resistant mentally ill.
I just finished "San Fransicko: How Progressives Ruin Cities", by Michael Shellenberger, which makes a similar point. I can't say I agree with everything Shellenberger says, but he is dead-on that not all homeless people have the same kinds of problems. Some are simply poor, some are mentally ill, and some are drug-addicted, and when activists pretend that one solution will serve them all...well, it's the old everything-looks-like-a-nail situation.
Well the criminal legal system can do that, cops can’t. A patrol officer with a gun can’t do much to help in this situation except either shoot the guy or arrest him and turn him over to the legal system, which will most likely jail him temporarily and spit him out again or imprison him for longer and then spit him out again. Maybe a judge will 5150 him—or whatever the NY version is—but barring concrete and long-term psychiatric intervention the problem isn’t actually solved.
Except for the woman who was hit with a stick and whose dog was killed. His arrest is all the justice she can expect, since nothing can bring the dog back.
Exactly, which is about as shallow a measure of justice as we can have, especially given that even under the most punitive regime this man will be released from incarceration within a couple years at most. Will he have been offered—or even compelled—psychiatric treatment in the meantime? I don’t know, but I know that we spend a lot more money on punishment than we do on rehabilitation, so I wouldn’t bet on it!
I believe psychiatric medications are indeed offered in prisons, because unmedicated mentally ill inmates would be a recipe for disaster.
I don’t believe the state can compel people to take medication when they’re not incarcerated (either in an institution or a prison) which is one of the big problems. But radical progressives don’t like that idea anyway.
You kill a dog, you get arrested seems fair to me, regardless of how far it goes next. And at least that woman would know she could walk through the park for a few days without fear of meeting him again.
Sadly, time in jail would probably be better conditions for him than living in the park, unmedicated, scrounging for food.
Some state facilities are up to the task of providing limited psychiatric treatment and some rehabilitation programs, but municipal jails never are. Riker’s Island is essentially Bedlam Asylum only it’s in a nominally progressive 21st-century city, so it’s even more of a moral abomination. Wouldn’t wish a stay there on my worst enemy.
> because unmedicated mentally ill inmates would be a recipe for disaster.
Not when you can warehouse them in psych or solitary.
Seriously, what inmates receive is well below standard of care for their conditions. Just as you wouldn't say "well, some of them do get physical medications for some things, so the medical care must be ok," you wouldn't say that "medications are offered" is evidence of good or even adequate psychiatric care.
The process takes time, during which other people are not being attacked and other dogs are not being killed. You are declaring that this “doesn’t solve anything” but clearly it mitigates somewhat - the alternative of leaving the guy alone doesn’t even do that.
Counterpoint - progressives have been pushing this stuff for years in their strongholds and they're still in power, so why change? Are the people of Seattle yearning for the next Sherriff Arpaio?
You can adjust the allocation of resources to (appropriately) prioritize those solutions, while also recognizing the need for a last resort option. Which is what armed law enforcement should be; a last resort in cases of violence or threat of violence.
I agree, but that doesn't address the question: how does this story demonstrate the necessity of armed law enforcement? The NYPD is the best-funded police force in the world, and they couldn't prevent this from happening. How much more money has to be shoveled into the maw of policing before we acknowledge that this system is not designed to protect ordinary people?
Removing police and abolishing prisons is the definitional "luxury belief". The people most impacted as victims of crime are those who are already in disadvantaged groups, and it's disgusting how many "compassionate" people on the left are willing to throw them under the bus.
(See also the condemnation of women who want domestic abusers or sexual predators locked up as displaying "carceral feminism". In this case too there seems to be among the responses a vein of thought that the victim should somehow "take one for the team" and ignore the crime, to be a good liberal).
Are there police forces that need cleaning out? 100%. Should some offenders be diverted away from incarceration? No doubt. That doesn't mean there aren't some people who Deserve Prison. The system by which we punish offenders is not just about sticking it to criminals (or enforcing racial systems, etc). It's about the dignity of victims, and showing that we take their suffering seriously - and that we recognise the right of the average citizen to want to be safe.
Spouse was a beat officer for five years. I asked him about this recently and he said the only physical altercations he ever got in (he never had an arrestee fight him) were with the mentally ill and drug users. They’re dangerous because they’re untethered from reality and often even their nervous system pain signaling is jacked up. It once took three officers to carry a tiny woman with dementia out of her nursing home after she attacked other residents. She screamed the whole time, threatening to sue the entire city of Baltimore. (We don’t live in Baltimore.)
Seems like we should spend more resources on addressing issues of drug abuse, mental illness, and homelessness so officers like your spouse can focus on doing other stuff!
I agree. What to do with offenders in the meantime?
Contrary to popular belief, social workers can’t often talk a person having a mental break out of it. They are dangerous, and police, who are trained in subject control, would be called on most of the time anyway.
I agree. Unclear to me how putting people in cages for just long enough to vaporize any social ties and then releasing them back into the community accomplishes that.
It's not clear, and it shouldn't be a binary choice, but lack of political will on all sides, left and right, have seemed to make it so. The first duty of society is to provide public safety. The woman and her dog are completely blameless, as undoubtedly are others. They deserve the first measure of society's protection.
And since we are forced into this binary choice, think of this: if this had happened to someone else, somewhere else instead of her and there, that man might well be dead.
We put them in cages until they're old enough to stop predatory behavior. Perhaps you're comfortable with predators prowling children and the vulnerable, but I'd rather live happily free with predators locked safely away.
We need to make it much easier to institutionalize people for longer periods of time. Right now hippies convinced almost every state to make it impossible to keep someone in a hospital (asylums barely exist anymore) for longer than a week or two
I think some of the impulse on the Left (or at least the Anarchist Left) comes from the same place that inspired Ursula Le Guin to write in 'The Dispossessed':
"For we each deserve everything, every luxury that was ever piled in the tombs of dead kings, and we each of us deserve nothing, not a mouthful of bread in hunger. Have we not eaten while another starved? Will you punish us for that? Will you reward us for the virtue of starving while others ate? No man earns punishment, no man earns reward. Free your mind of the idea of deserving, the idea of earning, and you will begin to be able to think."
I don't know if I agree, but it's a provocation. And is a vision of a society radically different to the USA as it currently exists.
Oh that may be true, but nonetheless I strongly recommend reading it. I came across it forty years ago and still re-read it every few years. It makes you think rather differently about things you take for granted, and that's not a bad thing.
Given that the NYPD's systemic mishandling of sexual assault cases is currently under federal investigation--again, we are talking about the most well-funded police force in the world--I don't think bringing up sexual violence is really a point in favor of our current police system.
Poor people are the ones most in favor of police and criminal justice reform. Poor people are the ones most impacted by our carceral society and the lives it ruins.
Almost no one believes in abolishing the police and prisons. You did a great job beating that straw man to death.
Yeah. I actually think the folks who say we need MORE police, not fewer, are onto something. There are a few people working in this vein, but some of the key arguments are summarized in this pair of posts by Alex Tabarrok:
The basic argument is that criminals actually respond better to a greater likelihood of being caught than they do to increased prison sentences. But we’re doing it backwards: instead of moderate penalties applied consistently, we let a lot of crimes go unprevented or unsolved, but when we DO catch someone we put them in prison for a long time. Because criminals don’t have a strong sense that a penalty is coming, prison is not a very effective deterrent. But we do nonetheless end up with a ginormous population of people who spend their prime years in prison.
And even if you think some policing should ultimately be made unnecessary by mental health treatment, poverty reduction, etc. — those things would take years or decades to become effective, and you still need to protect people in the meantime. (And if we need a social justice sweetener — victims of crime are disproportionately black, poor, mentally ill, homeless… pick your favorite.)
So, IMO — more and better policing is the place to start.
If we were willing to disarm the police, I could be persuaded that having more of them walking around could be a net social good. But in a society as heavily-armed as ours, good luck getting anybody to agree to that.
True - we need to punish and incarcerate more criminals.
2. That we are a vastly over-incarcerated nation.
False - we are a vastly high-crime nation. There is no material number of non-criminals that are being incarcerated. We can ask if the punishment is fair, but the rate of incarceration correlates with the rate of crime.
3. That existing police departments exhibit endemic racism, corruption, unequal enforcement, and impunity from consequences.
False - If based on statistics. Cops are more prevalent and attentive in areas of high crime. Cops are no more racist, corrupt or biased than is the general population, and are likely much less so today given the consequences. I do think there is class-bias with police. They are upper-middle class professionals and they deal with the dregs of society. I don't know what to do about that in an era where uppity upper class liberals do the same.
4. That those who are mentally ill deserve special dispensation within the criminal justice system, as their condition complicates questions of culpability.
Yes - build facilities for them and commit then to care.
5. That ordinary citizens should be careful about when and why they contact the police, and should do so understanding the potential for violence and racism that so often stem from police interactions with people of color.
Huh? This does not seem good advice. People need to contact the police if they believe that there is a crime or threat that warrants law enforcement. It is up to the police to decide what is appropriate or not.
I would argue that police are not upper middle class. MAYBE middle class once they have seniority. But the pay in average sized cities is not great.
And police departments are often very racially diverse. I don’t buy “internalized racism” as a cop out (pun intended!) for every POC who is politically center or right. Experiencing what cops see on a regular basis makes anyone and everyone jaded and less sympathetic to the perpetrators of crime.
In terms of total compensation, in my area, the police are absolutely upper middle class. I would put them on the bottom of the professional class. Most have college degrees these days. Some are true blue-collar but certainly don't fit into the class of the typical "client:" they deal with. When you consider the rules-following life of a cop having to deal with people that reject all the rules... it makes complete sense that the cops will be irritated having to deal with the people that just ignore the rules.
That has been the point. It isn't racism that we see so much as classism, but because certain races as underrepresented in lower socioeconomic circumstances, it can look like racism.
This is why talking about problems as if they're national is pointless. In some places with similar cost of living, police and other public employees make literally 2-3 times as much as others. The circumstances are entirely different everywhere. Police in New Jersey making six figures are not the same as police in Utah making $35k and are not the same as police in rural Alabama and there's no common thread in culture, economics, demographic being policed, or anything else.
Acceptable point... but then the national media and Democrat narrative of racist cops? Cities looted and burned because of George Floyd?
If we are to accept these broad claims, then it seems broad arguments against them should be acceptable.
The median salary of a police officer in St Louis is $60k. But that is just the salary. Including the value of benefits, including retirement benefits, puts it over $85k. Many of them are well into six figure total compensation.
I don’t accept the broad claims of widespread racism by cops. And I still don’t think it’s wise to paint them with a broad brush nationally, on any front.
And re: the $60,000 figure: there’s a very wide gap between 20+ year veterans’ pay and new hire pay (though many departments are desperate for new hires and offer signing bonuses). Would you do the job for even $60,000 a year? If that’s what cops are getting paid and that’s a fair salary, you’d think it’d be easier to hire and keep them.
I would not do the job for $60k but not for the pay... for the conflict with Democrat politics.
I have cops in my family. Recent brother inlaw retired at 55 with a six figure pension and full healthcare. He has a BS degree. He retired earlier than he was planning due to the stress of the Democrat-run city he worked in. He and his wife just bought a beautiful home on the coast. I am 6 years older than him and still working and need to fund my own retirement and healthcare. So, yeah, at this point that job looks okay.
I agree. It was and is ridiculous for single incidents in particular places to be generalized to the whole country. As an aside, I live in a place that is very white, and we had the violent demonstrations with (mostly white) teenagers turning over cars and setting things on fire and graffing Kill the Pigs and smashing windows. The same month that George Floyd was killed, the police here shot a 12 year-old white, unarmed, autistic boy who was running away more than seven times, after his mother called and asked them to check on him and he got scared and ran (and he looked his age...small and skinny). However, his mother was poor and unconnected and had no social movement supporting her, so no one cared and it didn't make a blip as a national story.
One of the issues with police, historically, is that they came from a very narrow social band of the upper-working, and lower-middle classes. Tended to be related to other cops, created very much a clannish situation. As you note, they've become more racially diverse but I'd bet they still come from the same socioeconomic band.
One thing a lawyer and his felon client have in common, is that neither of their kids will become a cop.
The crime rate dropped after the trough on crime politics of the 1990s. It dropped from there but has been on the increase for the last several years.
Our high crime is due to a diverse immigrant population from places where crime is high, a lack of sufficient economic opportunity in urban poor neighborhoods, too few police officers, no asylums and too few drug treatment centers. The lack of economic opportunity has decimated families, sent people to the illegal drug business and gangs. The solution is more cops, asylums and involuntary commitment, drug treatment centers and most of all... and infusion of increased economic opportunity in the poor urban areas including education reform.
"I know serious lefties who believe that we can abolish the police, but only after the end of capitalism."
Wow. The "end of capitalism" really is like heaven for these folks.
Of course they won't ever write down the rules for what should happen if somebody does beat a dog to death in one of their magical utopias. They just assure us that it will all be peachy keen.
The word "serious" really should not be used to describe such people.
Everyone needs to understand that they are on their own now. No one is coming to save you when you are attacked. You had better take your obligation to be your own first responder seriously. Our city has started going downhill after it became clear that crime was no longer going to be punished. After every serious crime, our local young lefties talk about how "we cannot tolerate this". Well, what does no toleration look like, angry posts on the neighborhood facebook or nextdoor pages? A hard stare for the dude who murdered my neighbor in front of his toddler and wife while he was taking out the trash?
Sadly, long after I left an occupation that involved carrying a gun for living; I bought a recent, improved model of CCW pistol (talk about innovation!!); joined a range; and now regularly practice combat pistol and shotgun for home defense. I am always armed now with spectrum of force options when in public. Spray (always), often an impact weapon, and pistol. It is amazing how quickly this just becomes second nature.
Homeless lunatics are everywhere around here now. They have potent recreational drugs and no one will stop them. They wander around an menace people routinely. Many knife attacks also. You do not want ot be on the wrong end of one of these knife attacks by a mentally ill person. They just keep stabbing.
Oh well, we all get to enjoy our rich and vibrant neighborhoods now.
Nothing of the sort. Let me know when the local pols decide the humane thing to do for our "unhoused neighbors" is to let them set up a large tent camp with your house between it and a large urban park. You may actually get over your own cowardice and take your responsibility for your own preservation seriously.
Where on earth do you live where you feel the need to be fully armed as you bravely make your way to the Starbucks to order a half-cafe-decafe machiatto with caramel drizzles.?
A friend is a court reporter. She told us the most brutal murder she ever worked was a rural family who suffered a home invasion. They were tortured and butchered; after the rapes of course. Our problems are simpler, but more pervasive. Street robbery, beatings, car jackings, assault by drugged up and mentally ill people.
Really, what about the teacher in Memphis? The family in Cali recently? My neighbor who shot in the head for no discernible reason while taking out the trash? He was a very nice civilized man. I bet he would given anything to have been armed and trained in that moment.
One thing I've learned living in several cities in the U.S., of which 2 have been called Murder Capitals, is knowing what neighborhoods to avoid and at what times. Harder to do when you live in or adjacent to a high-crime neighborhood. The one thing my neighborhood did was make enough noise w/ the local PD station to do more evening patrols, and put up private crime cameras after a brutal shooting of a father who was walking his kids to school and tried to stop a carjacking of his elderly neighbor. Crime fell and the neighborhood slowly turned into one of the safer neighborhoods in city.
And I will add, in a very sizable US city that you would immediately recognize as "troubled" by gangs and drugs (like all of them). I live in the most integrated neighborhood in that city.
I train with several black ladies who are my neighbors and realize that they need to take care of themselves. This is way more complicated than you can understand. Oh, and our Starbucks closed, due to... We have hardy locals we like better anyway.
Every inch of New York City is covered by NYPD and business cameras. If the police gave a shit about catching this guy, they would have. What "Crystal in a community meeting thinks about crime being a construct" or whatever has literally 0 bearing on police practices. The dog's owner wants to press charges. Nextdoor has no bearing on this process.
We should defund the police because the VERY amply funded NYPD hasn't been able to catch a mentally ill, violent, dreadlocked man, in Park Slope, where they have nothing to do all day since there's almost no crime compared to the rest of the city.
Defund is not about thinking we can solve violent crimes with wishful thinking. It's about pointing out that in the absence of any mechanisms of accountability, police will keep doing what they do, which is not much to prevent or solve violent crime.
The cops did not give a shit about solving this because in Compstat metrics, there is no category for "killing a woman's dog," so if this guy were caught, the worst it'd clock in as is misdemeanor assault because he apparently flung piss at the woman.
Yes, it's funny to poke at dumb ass progressives blathering with a high-school stoner's understanding of social justice.
But the headline of that story should have been, "WTF do cops in Park Slope do all day?"
But how do progressives survive politically as the "sorry, nothing you be done about a dog murder" party? The public is very sensitive to this stuff. And I don't think there's a coherent message behind the guilty white liberal segment that doesn't want crimes like this prosecuted but also doesn't have a plan for alternative approaches to community safety.
The police aren’t stupid. They know crimes like this are sensationalized and politically charged. They have been told, directly or indirectly, not to pursue crimes like this.
Yeah I get that. One of the barriers is that often it’s the progressive DA who sent that message to police, and threatening the police if they don’t ignore it is neither practical nor productive.
The perp needs to be shot in the act. There is no other way anymore. Every woman in this society needs to be trained to combat pistol capability and given the option of being armed when unprotected. And none of us are protected anymore.
Even if there are men that need killing, the idea that we are equipped to figure out who they are is laughable. But if you insist, let's start with the Sacklers and work our way down the list.
Since I don’t spend my time worrying about people who have more money than me, I had to look up who the Sacklers are.
Anyway, the context for my remark is the discussion of whether it is justified for an armed individual to employ violence to stop a violent aggressive attack. So, by all means, if you happen to be armed when the owners of a pharma company start beating your pet dog to death, kill away.
It was a predatory violent attack. The woman was being attacked. It is not about punishing about a dog. It is about ending a violent attack. Violent predators need to be dealt with in the moment when they are attacking. That is the only way to prevent being a victim. In this case he killed the dog; it could have just as easily been her. We don't know in the moment. You cannot put yourself at the mercy of a violent predator.
That teacher jogger who was just murdered in Memphis fought back; but she had no tools.
I guess it is according to which dog and which person. This is up to each individual person. I do not know the intimate facts of this case; but there is an indication that she was under attack also, that could be a misunderstanding on my part. If you attack my leashed and properly behaving dog unprovoked and I intervene to protect my dog; you have to break off the attack to prevent attacking me, that changes the legal context. I know the law; dogs, however beloved, are but "simple property" under the law.
Progressives are not the "sorry, nothing to be done about a dog murder" party. The reporter emphasized chatter on Nextdoor and a community meeting. So, total randos, with no impact on police practice. The issue here is that the police response to this is to, what, occasionally take this lady on a ride-along to Id random dreadlocked Black men?
I fully identify as "defund the police." This is not because I think a dog should be sacrificed on the alter of "social justice." It's because they clearly have not even bothered to find surveillance of the attack that could ID this guy.
If the "defund" movement had never happened, do you think cops across multiple buroughs would be prioritizing catching a guy, who, again, is not a criminal genius, but a psychologically unregulated violent person that would stick out in Park Slope?
You don’t think there’d be a gaggle of people with their iPhones out questioning the cops about why they’re hassling a guy with dreadlocks in Park Slope? Three people showed up to what was essentially a neighborhood watch meeting to protest the idea of “let’s not let unwell homeless people kill dogs.” How many more would show up for actual cops?
First off, the headline: 573 per 100,000 US residents are locked up. If I can remember how to do basic algebra, that works out to 1 in 175 or so.
My high school graduating class size was about 300. I went to school in a boring, middle-class suburb of a smallish city. We did not have a major gang or drug problem. And yet I can think of way more than two shitheels I went to school with that I have no trouble imagining doing something as adults that they should be locked up for, for the benefit of the rest of us.
A lot of hay is made out of the fact that the USA incarcerates its citizens at a higher rate than any other country, and it's always blamed on racism, or capitalism, or some combination of both. Why doesn't anybody ever consider the null hypothesis - that the United States simply has more violent, misbehaved people than other countries? Is that really so hard to believe, when you consider things like our ongoing love of guns, and the fact that our most popular spectator sport has been described as "violence punctuated by committee meetings"? Is there any other country in the world whose public schools are known for the kinds of violence and open defiance of authority that America's are?
The other big takeaway from that website is, boy howdy, has the left been telling fibs with the "most people in jail are there for non-violent drug offenses" talking point. Only 40,000 people are in state prisons for simple drug possession, which I think is 40,000 too many, but that's not a significant portion of the 1.9 million people incarcerated. Even eliminating all drug-related convictions would only move the needle so far.
The point of the criminal justice system is to manage defectors so that the rest of us can default to cooperation and have a reasonably peaceful, prosperous society.
I think we can make an American society with which more people are intrinsically moved to cooperate. But ignoring defection isn’t it. The number of people we should have incarcerated at any given moment is the number of people who, given the capacity to do so, would be out there defecting against us.
No. He’s just using standard game-theory terminology. The phrase comes from The Prisoner’s Dilemma, where two prisoners are given a choice to either rat on each other (defect) or refuse to say anything (cooperate).
If they both cooperate, then they both get the best outcome. But, if only one defects, the other gets the absolute worst possible outcome. The idea is that if they can’t trust each other, they’ll both defect and get sub-optimal outcomes.
unreliabletags was saying that the point of the criminal justice system is to remove from society the people who are ruining it for everyone else.
Unless your baseline belief is that Americans are inherently criminal, there is no reason that our crime and incarceration numbers should be so much vastly higher than every other industrialized nation.
Not inevitable, and I think we should experiment with ideas to reduce criminality, but most of those are long term, and if we can, we should also help crime victims in the short and medium term.
Maybe improvements in the amount of environmental lead or some other reform will get our levels of criminality to a Canadian level in two generations, but we still need a plan for now.
You're right, I read too fast. So are Americans just genetically predisposed to violence compared to like, Australians? Seems unlikely to me. Without an explanation, it's not a scientifically sound hypothesis in a way that would be helpful for addressing the issue. Unless you're just trying to vent and have no interest in solving the problem, but it seems like you are. So, how do you explain this inherent urge to violence that you're describing?
You're trying to goad him as well as me into saying something you don't like because you don't like the premise but can't argue against it. It isn't actually incumbent on Alex - or me - to demarcate with 100% certainty the cause for any given kind of criminal behavior. In fact if I took it upon myself to do so you'd accuse me of speaking without the proper credentials or sensitivity, 100% guaranteed.
It would be far better, granted, if we could have prevention rather than cure. It would be far better, and is far better, if we do know that there are positive steps we can take, especially early in life, that help reduce crime rates. The de-leading (to rhyme with red, not seed) of the environment helped a lot. Let's find more things like that and keep doing them, 100%.
But we cannot let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Our inability to say *why* certain groups just do more crimes doesn't prevent it from being true, and it certainly doesn't lessen our responsibility as a society to protect the law-abiding majority from criminals of all kinds. If that means the impact is disproportionate to the population, so be it. It still has to be done. Incarceration, then, is in fact one way of "solving the problem". It's not the best one, nor even a particularly good one. But it's one that buys society a temporary respite from the behavior of criminals.
So let's take your premise for granted that black criminality is the problem. Given what we know about the effect of socioeconomic status on crime rates, I assume you'd support a massive race-based reparations program?
"1) that if it's poverty, then the causal relationship between poverty and crime is vastly more explanatory for Blacks than any other population group in the country. If we take murder as an example, Hispanics are only slightly wealthier than Blacks in the US but have murder rates vastly lower than them (and in fact not much higher than NHWs in some parts of the country.)"
To put it another way: the wealthiest Black counties are dramatically more violent than the poorest White counties. (They're geographically not that far separated; Maryland and Kentucky contain them, respectively.) You can make a case - and it's not a terrible case - that this is a product of the Black population's concentration in urban areas. This is definitely, absolutely a factor. It's been shown in more than one state that while murder rates for all races are higher in urban areas than rural (even when controlling for HHI), the division is more stark among Black populations yet. But once again, even allowing for that, the differences remain stark. You are mitigating the problem by a measurable percentage, but it remains a massive problem.
On reparations: If I supported reparations - I don't - based on socioeconomic status and our efforts therein, they would in fact be from the Black community to the rest of us given the untold trillions we have spent specifically and deliberately on the Black community since the 1960s. Black people get preference in public education, in public employment, and in some parts of the country even public assistance. The impact on the difference in their criminality has been, at best, inconclusive (and in my view it's been virtually zero.)
Obviously, however, I don't support reparations. It would be needlessly punitive. It would (justifiably) inflame tensions and create resentment. It would be a naked display of power, of having conquered a population so thoroughly that their wealth can be confiscated and given to another.
Which is precisely why liberals are so gung-ho about giving them in the other direction. If they actually believed this horseshit about socioeconomic factors they'd be at least conversant with two facts: we have spent, are spending, and keep spending incredible amounts of money on trying to decrease this gap, to little avail; and even when it does work the rates of criminality among the Black community are still vastly out of line with all other races in this country.
I'll repeat it from my other post to you: the United States' outlying status in crime statistics among wealthy, developed, industrialized, urbanized, democratic countries is a product of its Black population. No amount of spending, thus far, has changed that. Punitive confiscation to enable yet more of it is, in my view, a fool's errand.
Now I'm the one who read (and replied) too fast. I should have taken issue with the phrase "inherently criminal". "Inherently" is easily taken to mean "born that way", i.e. that some individuals are more genetically predisposed to violence and criminal behavior than others. That whole argument is radioactive, and I am not making any claims or statements of belief about American genetics. Culturally, however, I do believe that, for whatever reason, America has a greater percentage of individuals who embrace violence and other anti-social behaviors than other developed countries.
Edited for clarity: nothing, zero, zip, zilch, nada, 0% of what I've been saying is a racist dogwhistle about Black Americans. I live in the PNW and I can find plenty of examples of violent, anti-social white people, thank you very much.
We could argue until the cows come home about why, including both historical and present-day causes. However, despite the best efforts of schools and government-funded PSAs, people tend to end up absorbing the values and behaviors of their immediate family and their peer group, mostly during childhood, and so America's population percentage of maladjusted honor-culture assholes remains steady. And when one of them crosses the path of one of us well-behaved folks and starts threatening us with violence due to some perceived slight, or because they're drunk or high, or because they just goddamn well feel like it, I want cops with guns and nightsticks and handcuffs to show up and throw them in jail, because that's what keeps civilization civilized.
And yet other civilizations have managed to stay far more civilized with far fewer cops. Iceland has roughly the population of New Orleans and has a murder rate about 50x less with a police force half the size that has killed exactly one person in its entire history. So either you think Americans being more likely die of both criminal and cop violence is inevitable, or you think we can do better. Personally I think we can do better.
I fail to see how continuing to point out that other countries have lower rates of both crime and incarceration does anything to gainsay my thesis that America’s high incarceration rate is caused by America’s high rates of violence and antisocial behavior.
If you have any idea of how Iceland manages to “do better” other than being populated by Icelanders instead of Americans, please let us know.
Indeed, how could we NOT be more criminal? Our DNA is people who were kicked out, run out, or otherwise mostly not wanted in their home nations. Or who had particularly individualistic and risk-taking personalities, to move from everything they knew and their embedded communities, to take a huge risk on an unknown. Lots of the original Europeans at our nation's founding were sent here as criminal punishment, or were otherwise undesirables who couldn't make it in Europe. I would expect any nation of immigrants to be far more prone to criminality, just given the propensity for risk-taking and the likely less sociable/agreeable temperaments that come along with one's homeland trying to get rid of you.
I wonder though, is Australia similar in criminality? Because they should have a similar profile.
For one thing a much higher proportion (compared to the US) of the original British immigrants were sent here as criminal punishment. Then, there were many fewer organised groups of religious and/or political dissidents who voluntarily emigrated here. And because so much of the country is just rubbish (especially to Europeans) for agriculture and Western-style settlement, there were no big frontiers for masses of people to move into. We did have some gold rushes and some mining settlements that still today (Lightning Ridge, Coober Pedy) have some of the same libertarian flavour as you get in the US, but it's very niche in comparison.
We also didn't import anywhere near as much slave labour (not none, but almost none, and most were seasonal rather than permanent) and there were fewer indigenous inhabitants to start with and even fewer when we finished subjugating them, so no large numbers of inconvenient people to oppress and degrade into a minority with few prospects for a good life compared to their white neighbours (not to dismiss the experiences of the much smaller numbers who are in that situation in this country, who do make up a large proportion of our prison population, just to point out the numbers are much smaller).
So Australia is much more communitarian than the US, has much deeper roots in labour organisation, and greater social cohesion as a result. Higher trust in institutions (and generally, much better institutions), lower gun ownership, all that good stuff.
Very interesting. I think up til a decade or two ago, most Americans' perception of Australians was as sort of like wild west cowboy on steroids. They were seen as heavy drinkers, tough (rugby etc), willing to fight, kind of wild and crazy libertines. Blame Crocodile Dundee and Foster's beer commercials I guess. But it's now clear it's a much more communitarian and socially-minded country. A close friend of mind emigrated to Australia and when he tells me about the various tax, labor, welfare, gun policies compared to here, it's a stark difference and he is stunned at what is going on in the US. Turns out AU isn't a country of drunken brawlers with hunting knives on their belts. They're more akin to Canada, with way cooler accents and more killer animals. :)
This is a violent society in aggregate for many reasons. First being the idea that individual is sovereign over the community. None of us want to give that up; but it produces alienated and violent people at a higher rate than societies that many effective means of social leverage against individual "acting out" before the boundary of the law is reached. Here, we got nothing until the crime is committed. The lunatic can wander around wherever he wants, ranting and raving, shitting his pants, abusing others, stealing...and nothing can be done; unless a potential victim is forced to defend themselves or their property.
This is why we put more people in jail than others.
Most places in the country aggressively prosecuted things like vagrancy and disorderly conduct well into the latter half of the twentieth century - a time when the US was becoming more urbanized, more interconnected, and less about free-standing homesteaders who were rugged individuals.
So, back here in reality, we can instead just tell the truth: that the US is vastly more criminal than other wealthy, industrialized, advanced democratic states is because America has a large Black population; a population responsible for a jaw-dropping percentage of those crimes against person and property.
This has been shown time and again for decades via every single measurement anyone's been able to devise. We can debate the cause of why it's true - we can't debate the fact that America's crime problem is in fact a Black criminality problem.
I don't know. What I can say with certainty, however, are the following:
1) that if it's poverty, then the causal relationship between poverty and crime is vastly more explanatory for Blacks than any other population group in the country. If we take murder as an example, Hispanics are only slightly wealthier than Blacks in the US but have murder rates vastly lower than them (and in fact not much higher than NHWs in some parts of the country.)
2) that if it's urbanity, then the causal relationship is somewhat more striking (i.e. the divisions between rural crime and urban crime exist for all races, but for Black people especially) but even if we moved every Black person in the country to a rural area of their state, their murder rate would still dwarf that of every other race (and still outnumber all other murders - and murder victims - put together, in fact)
3) that if it's low education, then explanations must be found for the relative lack of murders by other races when you look at their poorly-educated cohorts
4) that if it's lack of home ownership, then the above is true here as well
5) that if it's single parenthood, then the above is true here as well, albeit to a lesser extent than the other examples.
These have been demonstrated countless times by Steve Sailer and others for decades now, and while many are quick to adopt a biological determinist position, I am not personally able to do so for crime because I just don't know enough to say. (For certain other phenomena I'm more informed.)
One thing to look at is (and this might seem counter-intuitive) how Irish people have acted since the potato famine and Koreans post Japanese rule. There is a field of study called epigenetics which might help explain this, but to put it simply (and I am not any sort of geneticist) the mass trauma inflicted on the entire population of that group (and slavery would count for black Americans) causes such profound depression and trauma as to become a physical marker.
Or maybe those variables are all mutually confounding in ways that resist easy study, particularly in a country whose socioeconomic system was undergirded by the widespread theft of black labor and black wealth until the very recent past. Race-based chattel slavery was, as John C. Calhoun said, a "peculiar institution," is it any wonder that assessing the damage is complicated?
Americans raised on the myths of the well-armed rugged individual and cowboy vigilantism is why it's ingrained into many a hot-heads and shitheels that the way to solve a beef or slight is to arm one's self and commence firing.
I happen to live and work in the "Murder Capital of the US" right now. The crime in New Orleans appears to be out-of-control. And while the crime rate started rising in 2020, it's been on a rocket to the moon for the last 2 years. Louisiana also leads the nation in its incarceration rate, which means that what little justice reform that does take place occurs around the edges of an over-whelmed judicial system.
The biggest problem in addressing crime at the moment, at least as most of the city can agree, is fixing the understaffed and underpaid NOPD. But it requires more than just a pay raise. Training the police to be proactive on violent crime in poorer neighborhoods and less over-policing in those same neighborhoods for minor stuff like loitering and public intoxication.
NOLA and Louisiana as a whole, has long had a spectacularly underperforming education system (both public and charter schools) and the job opportunities offer little in the way for many young black men & women to overcome long-term socio-economic problems. Beefs are solved with easily accessible guns in a state with liberal gun laws in a state with a long history of violence.
There was some traction gained here in NOLA with regards to reform but it was primarily focused on not policing and prosecuting non-violent crimes. But just led to revolving doors for many offenders who then escalated. The most heinous crimes get prosecuted. Car jackings and random drive-by shootings are the biggest issues it seems right now.
There was a fairly recent incident where an elderly lady was dragged to her death by a group of young kids who carjacked her. Her arm got caught in the seatbelt as they threw her out of the car. They were caught and now face murder charges as adults.
If anything, the last 2 years has taught the New Orleans metro area & Louisiana as a whole, that fighting crime and criminal justice reform are far too complex for the jingoism of the "abolish the police crowd." Not even the most liberal people I know here in NOLA advocate for that because they know its just outright dumb.
Louisiana's crime rate is a counter argument to the folks saying we need more policing and more jailing for sure. But criminal justice reform has to have buy-in at the state level for it to work in my opinion. Diversion programs for non-violent crimes can help, increase resources for mental health services. Police tactic reforms help as well. There's no one single solution. It has to be multi-pronged. And addressing the socio-economic problems facing America would help as well.
There’s a lot of things conservatives do to cause people to distrust them. This is one of the biggest for the Left - an abject refusal to see the realities of crime and the way it effects people who live in the communities it affects.
Also, there *was* a decline in crime until 2020, when the homicide rate shot up. Why this happened is the subject of lively debate, but I think once we get this year's numbers it will likely be safe (so to speak) to say this is not a blip but a trend. To your question, the decline too is still the subject of debate. My understanding is that there is no clear consensus about why it occurred.
Underreporting, in the cases of shootings, vastly improved trauma medicine. Look at the number of shootings and compute old mortality rates. Today Lee Harvey Oswald would have been alive to stand trial for his crime. A single round from a .38 SPL today is very unlikely to be fatal in the abdomen.
It matters not one bit to the victim of a crime how much company they have in their victimization. We need to stop hassling about worthless statistics. Crime victims are people.
So the solution is, what, do literally nothing?
And you think that's a standard we should apply generally? No legal punishment for killing dogs?
“One time he attacked a woman unprovoked and killed her dog” is, in fact, evidence that he is particularly disposed to violence. The vast majority of people have never committed a violent crime. So it is also evidence that it will recur (at least, it is more likely to recur than for an average citizen)
If you read the NY Times article, it appears he has in fact attacked another woman and her dog (at least, another alleges that he did).
Cities that took a tough "law and order" approach and hired a bunch of police and locked a bunch of people up saw the same exactly drop in crime rates that more lenient jurisdictions did.
And the urban renaissance coughs up some blood and expires.
When the cities wind down that means the suburbs and rural America rule supreme.
And yet major metropolitan police departments are typically hundreds of cops short of their allocated head counts. Defunding is one thing but the strangely high levels of resignations/retirements suggests to me that something is going on.
I imagine there is. Certainly there is talk now about raising salaries in an attempt to get back to full staffing.
I have not yet summoned the courage to write my "how is Chesa Boudin different from the Brock Turner Judge?" piece, but I'm frequently tempted
I’m fine with it, they were both removed from office by people who cared more about shallow symbolic victories than the empirical realities of mass incarceration and community safety.
LOL!
Another classic MarkS contribution to the discourse
After you attack people with totally legit concerns for personal safety as seeking "shallow symbolic victories", you should consider yourself lucky that all you got from me was a LOL.
Ah yes, now that Chesa is gone, San Francisco is back to being the crime-free paradise it was before he got there. Life ain't that simple, sorry. The people who are most concerned with personal safety--crime victims--are, on average, overwhelmingly more likely to support less carceral approaches to violence.
Lol. I got this. "The Brock Turner Judge was right. So was Chesa Boudin."
This reductio ad absurdum you're trying to do would be more compelling if you actually put in the work to flesh it out.
Abolitionists offering a multitude of alternatives to our current system of policing and incarceration: https://defundthepolice.org/alternatives-to-police-services/
You: No that doesn't count
I find it hard to take seriously the claim “chesa boudin was right” from anyone who doesn’t live in San Francisco
OK. I lived in SF and still visit friends there every year. It's ... fine. And violent crime fell under Boudin.
Yes, there are visibly unhoused people. It's a city. But crime is not, and has never been, out of control there. Juristictions in CA with "tough" DAs have way worse crime rates. Ever hear of Sacramento under Anne Marie Schubert?
How often do you visit your friends? Anyway you lost me at “there are visibly unhoused people. It's a city“
Actually you lost me at “unhoused.” I tend not to believe people who indulge in fashionable euphemisms. that said, I can’t deny you might be right.
Oh, please do!
Both situations are outliers compared to the rampant abuse of the Brady Rule, and the impunity with which alot of DAs seem to operate.
I'd subscribe for that piece. Oh, wait, I already have subscribed :)
I mean, some rather obvious differences have to do with Chesa Boudin's parentage, and the skin melanin content (also SES, but of course melanin Trumps SES whenever the two conflict) of Turner, his victim, and Judge Persky.
If/when you do write that piece, it might be worthwhile for you to include a link to
https://www.change.org/p/california-commission-on-judicial-performance-a-letter-in-support-of-judge-aaron-persky-and-judicial-discretion
Signed by, among other people, more than 30 San Jose deputy public defenders (how many deputy public defenders did Santa Clara Country even *have* in 2016?):
"We fear that this shift will disproportionately impact the underprivileged and minorities in our communities and perpetuate mass incarceration."
The not so quiet part was said very much out load in a secondary article inspired by that petition:
https://www.themarshallproject.org/2016/06/16/could-removing-brock-turner-s-judge-hurt-poor-and-minority-defendants#.FvZfuvyIL
"But the judge is finding support from a number of public defenders, who argue that punishing him will ultimately hurt their own clients — most of them, unlike Turner, poor people of color."
Poor people of pallor need not apply.
Melanin Trump - I like that
Brock Turner was wealthy. In my experience, progressives do want to see vigorous punishment when the wealth and powerful misbehave. If a homeless addict had done the same crime then it might be different.
Maybe after you leave Brooklyn. ;)
There's an old joke that theres a reason it's called the CRIMINAL justice system, not the VICTIM justice system.
The police exist as much to protect criminals from the community as they to protect the community from criminals. Community-administered justice would be swift, harsh and unlikely to distinguish between the accused and convicted.
Consider that if the people enact a private justice system to fill the gaps perceived existing in the public funded justice system.
Also, our current criminal punishment system is not great at engaging with victims. (It has been improving in some places where a concerted investment has been made, but this is more the exception than the rule.) Interpersonal violence is treated as an offense against the state, rather than against a victim and a community. As such, it is quite common for victims to report feeling re-victimized by the criminal legal system. That's why abolitionists advocate for alternative systems that actually center the needs of the victim and the community, rather than treating them as peripheral to the process.
People and govt like to do the easy part first, like reducing sentences or eliminating prosecution and don’t do the hard part, which is make the kind of system you describe work.
Agreed! That's why abolitionism is just as much about building alternatives than it is about critiquing our current system.
You might want to check the stats on crime rates between cities with “reform” DAs and those with carceral DAs—it might not turn out how you think!
the counterargument is that people don't bother reporting crime if they don't think it will be taken seriously, or offenders prosecuted.
Yes, witness Seattle or Portland's skyrocketing homicide rate and declining number of police.
In 2021, SPD overtime budget ALONE (about 7% of their total budget) was more than the entire budget of the Communications and Community Safety Department, which answers all 911 calls and directs them to either the police or other emergency response services and government agencies. Currently they have a severe shortage of dispatchers.
Homicides. IE people were killed. Yes, it is post facto, but someone did the most mortal of deeds, and the number of police to look into it is diminishing. There is no one to investigate, and I really don't care if the killer is mentally disturbed, high as a kite, or what. They already did it. And there is no one to follow up, no one to look into it, no one to help the family of those killed.
The numbers of one went up, while the numbers of the other went down. I know correlation is not causation, but the timing is a little bit suspect. And all the community involvement in the world goes out the window when someone is dead.
Or maybe our folk beliefs about community safety have more to do with our prior political commitments and lizard-brain emotional responses than with empirical reality! Crazy idea, I know
Your points are reasonable (I don’t like Boudin but not obvious he was responsible for the rise in crime in SF given spikes happened elsewhere too) but the sarcasm directed towards people engaging with you earnestly is unpleasant.
Like, I get that it’s the norm on the internet but why bring that energy here? I doubt it is helpful for persuasion, for instance
When you spend all day visiting people in jail and trying to get them the resources they need to survive in the face of the grinding indifference of the state, you can talk to me about social etiquette in online discourse.
What would you identify as folk beliefs?
Off the top of my head:
That cash bail enhances community safety. (Empirically false!)
That alternatives to policing are ineffective. (They're rarely been tried on a scale large enough to draw scientifically valid conclusions, and what research we do have is very positive.)
That violent criminals have high rates of recidivism. (When given support post-incarceration, the levels of recidivism are remarkably low.)
etc etc
Well we agree on cash bail. That’s a racket. But the homeless man isn’t getting out on cash bail.
I agree we don’t have enough quality data on alternatives to policing, but also, what are those alternatives?
And finally, that last one I’d need to see actual data on violent criminals and recidivism. A 19 year old who gets 5 years is way more likely to be violent again, I’d wager, because young men are far more violent than older men. Whereas my friend was in prison in New York for 13 years, and now he’s a father (to my kid’s best friend) and has a good job. But he was also in his early 30s by the time he got out.
I have a voodoo doll of you – does that count? ;)
Yes.
The rise in violent crime rates after the pandemic has been stunning and literally unprecedented--the largest year on year increase in the homicide rate ever in the history of modern record keeping. At the very least the timing, and the optics, are pretty unfortunate.
We have specific, identifiable people in the community - generally experiencing homelessness, mental illness, substance abuse, and other problems - who do crimes all day. Eventually they get around to doing a crime on you. If we had bothered to investigate, arrest, prosecute, and incarcerate for any of their dozens of prior crimes then they would not be in a position to do that next one to you.
These people are out there, everyone knows they’re out there, and still nothing is done and nothing is going to be done. I empathize with the position that these people ought not to be punished - my personal hot take is the criminal justice system should rarely if ever engage in punishment. I would like every effort made for them to be rehabilitated, even if I’m not super optimistic that it’s in the cards for every individual. But they absolutely need to be incapacitated. I don’t even think it matters what impact that incapacitation will or won’t have on the crime stats. It is as core a function of government as water and sewer - without it we don’t have a society. We can’t have people constantly defecting against their neighbors with total impunity.
You might want to take a look at the state of Louisiana where the murder rate in rural parishes is 2x higher than the urban areas. A rural sheriff's idea of reform is not beating you to death before they put you in the squad car.
The bulk of the murders in these rural parishes aren't intruders or random break-ins. It's acquaintances/friends/family members shooting each other over mundane crap and disagreements.
This is exactly why a fundamental distinction needs to be made between predatory crime and this score settling that seems to be part of the lives of some communities.
Predatory crime needs to be treated differently; and much more harshly than community based conflicts that escalate.
You hunt your fellow citizen; you are going to pay a very steep price.
Yeah that's bullshit. Chesa Boudin never pushed for not arrested and prosecuting violent criminals. He actually argued for focusing more of our scarce criminal justice resources on attacking violent crime (and less on quality of life crimes). But you lapped up the propaganda really well, didn't you?
Second to last paragraph typo - should have been entirely UNclear
This is an odd example to make an anti-defund point because you could just as easily argue that this is an example of why the police aren’t actually helpful at deterring crime unless there happens to be an officer right there at the moment of a crime occurring. And warehousing the mentally ill in prisons conclusively doesn’t help anybody. Seems like the solution here is exactly what abolitionists have been proposing (as Freddie notes): vastly more resources diverted from policing to mental health care, social housing, nonviolent emergency response, etc etc.
Unless you’re advocating locking people up indefinitely for minor offenses, he’s always going to get out again.
No, I think that incarcerating people without attempting to rehabilitate them is an approach that is doomed to failure, because except in extremely rare cases they will be released back into our communities. What kind of neighbors would you like to have? Ones whose underlying problems had been addressed, or ones who had been left in a cage for years to fend for themselves?
Except most of the time we only do incarceration and then release. If you skip the rehabilitation part, then you’re barely even putting a band-aid on the problem.
The neighbors you have in fact fought for, promised, and delivered are ones who can and will do anything to anyone and never meet a representative of the state in response.
So beating someone’s dog to death is a “minor offense”? There will be a human victim you know.
Not sure who you were trying to respond to, because I said nothing of the kind.
I don't agree, at all. Police can compel this guy to get treatment or to gave legal consequence. Social workers can't. It's a totally romanticized notion of homelessness and mental illness, that everyone that so suffers is merely waiting to be offered help and will gladly accept it when offered. That's totally contrary to the actual problems of the perpetually-homeless and treatment-resistant mentally ill.
I just finished "San Fransicko: How Progressives Ruin Cities", by Michael Shellenberger, which makes a similar point. I can't say I agree with everything Shellenberger says, but he is dead-on that not all homeless people have the same kinds of problems. Some are simply poor, some are mentally ill, and some are drug-addicted, and when activists pretend that one solution will serve them all...well, it's the old everything-looks-like-a-nail situation.
Well the criminal legal system can do that, cops can’t. A patrol officer with a gun can’t do much to help in this situation except either shoot the guy or arrest him and turn him over to the legal system, which will most likely jail him temporarily and spit him out again or imprison him for longer and then spit him out again. Maybe a judge will 5150 him—or whatever the NY version is—but barring concrete and long-term psychiatric intervention the problem isn’t actually solved.
Except for the woman who was hit with a stick and whose dog was killed. His arrest is all the justice she can expect, since nothing can bring the dog back.
Exactly, which is about as shallow a measure of justice as we can have, especially given that even under the most punitive regime this man will be released from incarceration within a couple years at most. Will he have been offered—or even compelled—psychiatric treatment in the meantime? I don’t know, but I know that we spend a lot more money on punishment than we do on rehabilitation, so I wouldn’t bet on it!
I believe psychiatric medications are indeed offered in prisons, because unmedicated mentally ill inmates would be a recipe for disaster.
I don’t believe the state can compel people to take medication when they’re not incarcerated (either in an institution or a prison) which is one of the big problems. But radical progressives don’t like that idea anyway.
You kill a dog, you get arrested seems fair to me, regardless of how far it goes next. And at least that woman would know she could walk through the park for a few days without fear of meeting him again.
Sadly, time in jail would probably be better conditions for him than living in the park, unmedicated, scrounging for food.
Some state facilities are up to the task of providing limited psychiatric treatment and some rehabilitation programs, but municipal jails never are. Riker’s Island is essentially Bedlam Asylum only it’s in a nominally progressive 21st-century city, so it’s even more of a moral abomination. Wouldn’t wish a stay there on my worst enemy.
> because unmedicated mentally ill inmates would be a recipe for disaster.
Not when you can warehouse them in psych or solitary.
Seriously, what inmates receive is well below standard of care for their conditions. Just as you wouldn't say "well, some of them do get physical medications for some things, so the medical care must be ok," you wouldn't say that "medications are offered" is evidence of good or even adequate psychiatric care.
The process takes time, during which other people are not being attacked and other dogs are not being killed. You are declaring that this “doesn’t solve anything” but clearly it mitigates somewhat - the alternative of leaving the guy alone doesn’t even do that.
Counterpoint - progressives have been pushing this stuff for years in their strongholds and they're still in power, so why change? Are the people of Seattle yearning for the next Sherriff Arpaio?
You can adjust the allocation of resources to (appropriately) prioritize those solutions, while also recognizing the need for a last resort option. Which is what armed law enforcement should be; a last resort in cases of violence or threat of violence.
I agree, but that doesn't address the question: how does this story demonstrate the necessity of armed law enforcement? The NYPD is the best-funded police force in the world, and they couldn't prevent this from happening. How much more money has to be shoveled into the maw of policing before we acknowledge that this system is not designed to protect ordinary people?
Removing police and abolishing prisons is the definitional "luxury belief". The people most impacted as victims of crime are those who are already in disadvantaged groups, and it's disgusting how many "compassionate" people on the left are willing to throw them under the bus.
(See also the condemnation of women who want domestic abusers or sexual predators locked up as displaying "carceral feminism". In this case too there seems to be among the responses a vein of thought that the victim should somehow "take one for the team" and ignore the crime, to be a good liberal).
Are there police forces that need cleaning out? 100%. Should some offenders be diverted away from incarceration? No doubt. That doesn't mean there aren't some people who Deserve Prison. The system by which we punish offenders is not just about sticking it to criminals (or enforcing racial systems, etc). It's about the dignity of victims, and showing that we take their suffering seriously - and that we recognise the right of the average citizen to want to be safe.
Spouse was a beat officer for five years. I asked him about this recently and he said the only physical altercations he ever got in (he never had an arrestee fight him) were with the mentally ill and drug users. They’re dangerous because they’re untethered from reality and often even their nervous system pain signaling is jacked up. It once took three officers to carry a tiny woman with dementia out of her nursing home after she attacked other residents. She screamed the whole time, threatening to sue the entire city of Baltimore. (We don’t live in Baltimore.)
Seems like we should spend more resources on addressing issues of drug abuse, mental illness, and homelessness so officers like your spouse can focus on doing other stuff!
I agree. What to do with offenders in the meantime?
Contrary to popular belief, social workers can’t often talk a person having a mental break out of it. They are dangerous, and police, who are trained in subject control, would be called on most of the time anyway.
I'm not an emergency room doctor, but I'm pretty sure they'd say you need to stop the bleeding first.
I agree. Unclear to me how putting people in cages for just long enough to vaporize any social ties and then releasing them back into the community accomplishes that.
It's not clear, and it shouldn't be a binary choice, but lack of political will on all sides, left and right, have seemed to make it so. The first duty of society is to provide public safety. The woman and her dog are completely blameless, as undoubtedly are others. They deserve the first measure of society's protection.
And since we are forced into this binary choice, think of this: if this had happened to someone else, somewhere else instead of her and there, that man might well be dead.
Is that doing him or her any favors?
We put them in cages until they're old enough to stop predatory behavior. Perhaps you're comfortable with predators prowling children and the vulnerable, but I'd rather live happily free with predators locked safely away.
"I'm not an emergency room doctor, but ..."
You have stayed at a Holiday Inn???
Not just that, but I've been hauled into an emergency room or two............so somewhat of a domain expert.
We need to make it much easier to institutionalize people for longer periods of time. Right now hippies convinced almost every state to make it impossible to keep someone in a hospital (asylums barely exist anymore) for longer than a week or two
I think some of the impulse on the Left (or at least the Anarchist Left) comes from the same place that inspired Ursula Le Guin to write in 'The Dispossessed':
"For we each deserve everything, every luxury that was ever piled in the tombs of dead kings, and we each of us deserve nothing, not a mouthful of bread in hunger. Have we not eaten while another starved? Will you punish us for that? Will you reward us for the virtue of starving while others ate? No man earns punishment, no man earns reward. Free your mind of the idea of deserving, the idea of earning, and you will begin to be able to think."
I don't know if I agree, but it's a provocation. And is a vision of a society radically different to the USA as it currently exists.
"is a vision of a society radically different to the USA as it currently exists."
This is a vision radically departed from reality.
Oh that may be true, but nonetheless I strongly recommend reading it. I came across it forty years ago and still re-read it every few years. It makes you think rather differently about things you take for granted, and that's not a bad thing.
Given that the NYPD's systemic mishandling of sexual assault cases is currently under federal investigation--again, we are talking about the most well-funded police force in the world--I don't think bringing up sexual violence is really a point in favor of our current police system.
Poor people are the ones most in favor of police and criminal justice reform. Poor people are the ones most impacted by our carceral society and the lives it ruins.
Almost no one believes in abolishing the police and prisons. You did a great job beating that straw man to death.
Yeah. I actually think the folks who say we need MORE police, not fewer, are onto something. There are a few people working in this vein, but some of the key arguments are summarized in this pair of posts by Alex Tabarrok:
https://marginalrevolution.com/?s=under%20policed&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2015/09/what-was-gary-beckers-biggest-mistake.html
The basic argument is that criminals actually respond better to a greater likelihood of being caught than they do to increased prison sentences. But we’re doing it backwards: instead of moderate penalties applied consistently, we let a lot of crimes go unprevented or unsolved, but when we DO catch someone we put them in prison for a long time. Because criminals don’t have a strong sense that a penalty is coming, prison is not a very effective deterrent. But we do nonetheless end up with a ginormous population of people who spend their prime years in prison.
And even if you think some policing should ultimately be made unnecessary by mental health treatment, poverty reduction, etc. — those things would take years or decades to become effective, and you still need to protect people in the meantime. (And if we need a social justice sweetener — victims of crime are disproportionately black, poor, mentally ill, homeless… pick your favorite.)
So, IMO — more and better policing is the place to start.
Yes, I've read this before. basic idea being that we are under-policed but over-incarcerated.
If we were willing to disarm the police, I could be persuaded that having more of them walking around could be a net social good. But in a society as heavily-armed as ours, good luck getting anybody to agree to that.
Whether or not they're armed is a separate issue as to whether there are enough of them.
1. That we badly need criminal justice reform.
True - we need to punish and incarcerate more criminals.
2. That we are a vastly over-incarcerated nation.
False - we are a vastly high-crime nation. There is no material number of non-criminals that are being incarcerated. We can ask if the punishment is fair, but the rate of incarceration correlates with the rate of crime.
3. That existing police departments exhibit endemic racism, corruption, unequal enforcement, and impunity from consequences.
False - If based on statistics. Cops are more prevalent and attentive in areas of high crime. Cops are no more racist, corrupt or biased than is the general population, and are likely much less so today given the consequences. I do think there is class-bias with police. They are upper-middle class professionals and they deal with the dregs of society. I don't know what to do about that in an era where uppity upper class liberals do the same.
4. That those who are mentally ill deserve special dispensation within the criminal justice system, as their condition complicates questions of culpability.
Yes - build facilities for them and commit then to care.
5. That ordinary citizens should be careful about when and why they contact the police, and should do so understanding the potential for violence and racism that so often stem from police interactions with people of color.
Huh? This does not seem good advice. People need to contact the police if they believe that there is a crime or threat that warrants law enforcement. It is up to the police to decide what is appropriate or not.
I would argue that police are not upper middle class. MAYBE middle class once they have seniority. But the pay in average sized cities is not great.
And police departments are often very racially diverse. I don’t buy “internalized racism” as a cop out (pun intended!) for every POC who is politically center or right. Experiencing what cops see on a regular basis makes anyone and everyone jaded and less sympathetic to the perpetrators of crime.
In terms of total compensation, in my area, the police are absolutely upper middle class. I would put them on the bottom of the professional class. Most have college degrees these days. Some are true blue-collar but certainly don't fit into the class of the typical "client:" they deal with. When you consider the rules-following life of a cop having to deal with people that reject all the rules... it makes complete sense that the cops will be irritated having to deal with the people that just ignore the rules.
That has been the point. It isn't racism that we see so much as classism, but because certain races as underrepresented in lower socioeconomic circumstances, it can look like racism.
I agree on that last point for sure.
This is why talking about problems as if they're national is pointless. In some places with similar cost of living, police and other public employees make literally 2-3 times as much as others. The circumstances are entirely different everywhere. Police in New Jersey making six figures are not the same as police in Utah making $35k and are not the same as police in rural Alabama and there's no common thread in culture, economics, demographic being policed, or anything else.
Yes. This drives me crazy.
Acceptable point... but then the national media and Democrat narrative of racist cops? Cities looted and burned because of George Floyd?
If we are to accept these broad claims, then it seems broad arguments against them should be acceptable.
The median salary of a police officer in St Louis is $60k. But that is just the salary. Including the value of benefits, including retirement benefits, puts it over $85k. Many of them are well into six figure total compensation.
I don’t accept the broad claims of widespread racism by cops. And I still don’t think it’s wise to paint them with a broad brush nationally, on any front.
And re: the $60,000 figure: there’s a very wide gap between 20+ year veterans’ pay and new hire pay (though many departments are desperate for new hires and offer signing bonuses). Would you do the job for even $60,000 a year? If that’s what cops are getting paid and that’s a fair salary, you’d think it’d be easier to hire and keep them.
I would not do the job for $60k but not for the pay... for the conflict with Democrat politics.
I have cops in my family. Recent brother inlaw retired at 55 with a six figure pension and full healthcare. He has a BS degree. He retired earlier than he was planning due to the stress of the Democrat-run city he worked in. He and his wife just bought a beautiful home on the coast. I am 6 years older than him and still working and need to fund my own retirement and healthcare. So, yeah, at this point that job looks okay.
I agree. It was and is ridiculous for single incidents in particular places to be generalized to the whole country. As an aside, I live in a place that is very white, and we had the violent demonstrations with (mostly white) teenagers turning over cars and setting things on fire and graffing Kill the Pigs and smashing windows. The same month that George Floyd was killed, the police here shot a 12 year-old white, unarmed, autistic boy who was running away more than seven times, after his mother called and asked them to check on him and he got scared and ran (and he looked his age...small and skinny). However, his mother was poor and unconnected and had no social movement supporting her, so no one cared and it didn't make a blip as a national story.
One of the issues with police, historically, is that they came from a very narrow social band of the upper-working, and lower-middle classes. Tended to be related to other cops, created very much a clannish situation. As you note, they've become more racially diverse but I'd bet they still come from the same socioeconomic band.
One thing a lawyer and his felon client have in common, is that neither of their kids will become a cop.
Ha! That's a fine last line, Gulliver.
What do you attribute America's "high crime" to, and how do you propose solving it?
(Also, isn't the crime rate rather low these days relative to the 1960s-1990s?)
The crime rate dropped after the trough on crime politics of the 1990s. It dropped from there but has been on the increase for the last several years.
Our high crime is due to a diverse immigrant population from places where crime is high, a lack of sufficient economic opportunity in urban poor neighborhoods, too few police officers, no asylums and too few drug treatment centers. The lack of economic opportunity has decimated families, sent people to the illegal drug business and gangs. The solution is more cops, asylums and involuntary commitment, drug treatment centers and most of all... and infusion of increased economic opportunity in the poor urban areas including education reform.
I don't even like dogs, but I agree.
"I know serious lefties who believe that we can abolish the police, but only after the end of capitalism."
Wow. The "end of capitalism" really is like heaven for these folks.
Of course they won't ever write down the rules for what should happen if somebody does beat a dog to death in one of their magical utopias. They just assure us that it will all be peachy keen.
The word "serious" really should not be used to describe such people.
Everyone needs to understand that they are on their own now. No one is coming to save you when you are attacked. You had better take your obligation to be your own first responder seriously. Our city has started going downhill after it became clear that crime was no longer going to be punished. After every serious crime, our local young lefties talk about how "we cannot tolerate this". Well, what does no toleration look like, angry posts on the neighborhood facebook or nextdoor pages? A hard stare for the dude who murdered my neighbor in front of his toddler and wife while he was taking out the trash?
Sadly, long after I left an occupation that involved carrying a gun for living; I bought a recent, improved model of CCW pistol (talk about innovation!!); joined a range; and now regularly practice combat pistol and shotgun for home defense. I am always armed now with spectrum of force options when in public. Spray (always), often an impact weapon, and pistol. It is amazing how quickly this just becomes second nature.
Homeless lunatics are everywhere around here now. They have potent recreational drugs and no one will stop them. They wander around an menace people routinely. Many knife attacks also. You do not want ot be on the wrong end of one of these knife attacks by a mentally ill person. They just keep stabbing.
Oh well, we all get to enjoy our rich and vibrant neighborhoods now.
I love these wannabe operators, just waiting for The Purge to happen so they have an excuse to do violence.
Nothing of the sort. Let me know when the local pols decide the humane thing to do for our "unhoused neighbors" is to let them set up a large tent camp with your house between it and a large urban park. You may actually get over your own cowardice and take your responsibility for your own preservation seriously.
"Plinking" the homeless people until they move to the other side of the park
That's a thought. A .22 rifle and a suppressor would do that job nicely.
Where on earth do you live where you feel the need to be fully armed as you bravely make your way to the Starbucks to order a half-cafe-decafe machiatto with caramel drizzles.?
Next door to you. You just don't want to admit it.
Kim, is that you?
The majority of the people I know who pack heat don't even work in the city. They live out in the burbs or exurbs where crime is low.
A friend is a court reporter. She told us the most brutal murder she ever worked was a rural family who suffered a home invasion. They were tortured and butchered; after the rapes of course. Our problems are simpler, but more pervasive. Street robbery, beatings, car jackings, assault by drugged up and mentally ill people.
No that could well be true, but it's unclear what bearing it has on whether carrying a small arsenal around makes you or your community any safer.
Yeah right. That has never happened. Talk to older court reporters. You obviously don't know one.
Really, what about the teacher in Memphis? The family in Cali recently? My neighbor who shot in the head for no discernible reason while taking out the trash? He was a very nice civilized man. I bet he would given anything to have been armed and trained in that moment.
Many of you mask cowardice as moral superiority.
One thing I've learned living in several cities in the U.S., of which 2 have been called Murder Capitals, is knowing what neighborhoods to avoid and at what times. Harder to do when you live in or adjacent to a high-crime neighborhood. The one thing my neighborhood did was make enough noise w/ the local PD station to do more evening patrols, and put up private crime cameras after a brutal shooting of a father who was walking his kids to school and tried to stop a carjacking of his elderly neighbor. Crime fell and the neighborhood slowly turned into one of the safer neighborhoods in city.
And I will add, in a very sizable US city that you would immediately recognize as "troubled" by gangs and drugs (like all of them). I live in the most integrated neighborhood in that city.
I train with several black ladies who are my neighbors and realize that they need to take care of themselves. This is way more complicated than you can understand. Oh, and our Starbucks closed, due to... We have hardy locals we like better anyway.
I'm not denying the complexity of the crime issue. New Orleans is no stranger to gangs and drugs and a regrettably poorly performing NOPD.
Every inch of New York City is covered by NYPD and business cameras. If the police gave a shit about catching this guy, they would have. What "Crystal in a community meeting thinks about crime being a construct" or whatever has literally 0 bearing on police practices. The dog's owner wants to press charges. Nextdoor has no bearing on this process.
We should defund the police because the VERY amply funded NYPD hasn't been able to catch a mentally ill, violent, dreadlocked man, in Park Slope, where they have nothing to do all day since there's almost no crime compared to the rest of the city.
Defund is not about thinking we can solve violent crimes with wishful thinking. It's about pointing out that in the absence of any mechanisms of accountability, police will keep doing what they do, which is not much to prevent or solve violent crime.
The cops did not give a shit about solving this because in Compstat metrics, there is no category for "killing a woman's dog," so if this guy were caught, the worst it'd clock in as is misdemeanor assault because he apparently flung piss at the woman.
Yes, it's funny to poke at dumb ass progressives blathering with a high-school stoner's understanding of social justice.
But the headline of that story should have been, "WTF do cops in Park Slope do all day?"
But how do progressives survive politically as the "sorry, nothing you be done about a dog murder" party? The public is very sensitive to this stuff. And I don't think there's a coherent message behind the guilty white liberal segment that doesn't want crimes like this prosecuted but also doesn't have a plan for alternative approaches to community safety.
The police aren’t stupid. They know crimes like this are sensationalized and politically charged. They have been told, directly or indirectly, not to pursue crimes like this.
Yeah I get that. One of the barriers is that often it’s the progressive DA who sent that message to police, and threatening the police if they don’t ignore it is neither practical nor productive.
The perp needs to be shot in the act. There is no other way anymore. Every woman in this society needs to be trained to combat pistol capability and given the option of being armed when unprotected. And none of us are protected anymore.
"There's far more men that need killing than dogs that need beating."
Duly noted. However, successful defense against a lethal force attack is not capital punishment. It is justified self defense.
Even if there are men that need killing, the idea that we are equipped to figure out who they are is laughable. But if you insist, let's start with the Sacklers and work our way down the list.
Since I don’t spend my time worrying about people who have more money than me, I had to look up who the Sacklers are.
Anyway, the context for my remark is the discussion of whether it is justified for an armed individual to employ violence to stop a violent aggressive attack. So, by all means, if you happen to be armed when the owners of a pharma company start beating your pet dog to death, kill away.
This is one of those great eternal truths that we are no longer welcome to express in this sensitive age.
Yep, you’re just a real badass teller of hard truths. Very cool!
It was a predatory violent attack. The woman was being attacked. It is not about punishing about a dog. It is about ending a violent attack. Violent predators need to be dealt with in the moment when they are attacking. That is the only way to prevent being a victim. In this case he killed the dog; it could have just as easily been her. We don't know in the moment. You cannot put yourself at the mercy of a violent predator.
That teacher jogger who was just murdered in Memphis fought back; but she had no tools.
I guess it is according to which dog and which person. This is up to each individual person. I do not know the intimate facts of this case; but there is an indication that she was under attack also, that could be a misunderstanding on my part. If you attack my leashed and properly behaving dog unprovoked and I intervene to protect my dog; you have to break off the attack to prevent attacking me, that changes the legal context. I know the law; dogs, however beloved, are but "simple property" under the law.
Progressives are not the "sorry, nothing to be done about a dog murder" party. The reporter emphasized chatter on Nextdoor and a community meeting. So, total randos, with no impact on police practice. The issue here is that the police response to this is to, what, occasionally take this lady on a ride-along to Id random dreadlocked Black men?
I fully identify as "defund the police." This is not because I think a dog should be sacrificed on the alter of "social justice." It's because they clearly have not even bothered to find surveillance of the attack that could ID this guy.
If the "defund" movement had never happened, do you think cops across multiple buroughs would be prioritizing catching a guy, who, again, is not a criminal genius, but a psychologically unregulated violent person that would stick out in Park Slope?
NYT really is dogshit at covering the left.
You don’t think there’d be a gaggle of people with their iPhones out questioning the cops about why they’re hassling a guy with dreadlocks in Park Slope? Three people showed up to what was essentially a neighborhood watch meeting to protest the idea of “let’s not let unwell homeless people kill dogs.” How many more would show up for actual cops?
I am going to push back a little on the "we are a vastly over-incarcerated nation" idea.
I'm looking at stats from this source: https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2022.html By all appearances, this is a progressive organization that wants to reduce mass incarceration.
First off, the headline: 573 per 100,000 US residents are locked up. If I can remember how to do basic algebra, that works out to 1 in 175 or so.
My high school graduating class size was about 300. I went to school in a boring, middle-class suburb of a smallish city. We did not have a major gang or drug problem. And yet I can think of way more than two shitheels I went to school with that I have no trouble imagining doing something as adults that they should be locked up for, for the benefit of the rest of us.
A lot of hay is made out of the fact that the USA incarcerates its citizens at a higher rate than any other country, and it's always blamed on racism, or capitalism, or some combination of both. Why doesn't anybody ever consider the null hypothesis - that the United States simply has more violent, misbehaved people than other countries? Is that really so hard to believe, when you consider things like our ongoing love of guns, and the fact that our most popular spectator sport has been described as "violence punctuated by committee meetings"? Is there any other country in the world whose public schools are known for the kinds of violence and open defiance of authority that America's are?
The other big takeaway from that website is, boy howdy, has the left been telling fibs with the "most people in jail are there for non-violent drug offenses" talking point. Only 40,000 people are in state prisons for simple drug possession, which I think is 40,000 too many, but that's not a significant portion of the 1.9 million people incarcerated. Even eliminating all drug-related convictions would only move the needle so far.
The point of the criminal justice system is to manage defectors so that the rest of us can default to cooperation and have a reasonably peaceful, prosperous society.
I think we can make an American society with which more people are intrinsically moved to cooperate. But ignoring defection isn’t it. The number of people we should have incarcerated at any given moment is the number of people who, given the capacity to do so, would be out there defecting against us.
No. He’s just using standard game-theory terminology. The phrase comes from The Prisoner’s Dilemma, where two prisoners are given a choice to either rat on each other (defect) or refuse to say anything (cooperate).
If they both cooperate, then they both get the best outcome. But, if only one defects, the other gets the absolute worst possible outcome. The idea is that if they can’t trust each other, they’ll both defect and get sub-optimal outcomes.
unreliabletags was saying that the point of the criminal justice system is to remove from society the people who are ruining it for everyone else.
Unless your baseline belief is that Americans are inherently criminal, there is no reason that our crime and incarceration numbers should be so much vastly higher than every other industrialized nation.
So we should just accept that as inevitable? Why?
Not inevitable, and I think we should experiment with ideas to reduce criminality, but most of those are long term, and if we can, we should also help crime victims in the short and medium term.
Maybe improvements in the amount of environmental lead or some other reform will get our levels of criminality to a Canadian level in two generations, but we still need a plan for now.
I thought I just made it clear that my baseline belief is that yes, a greater percentage of Americans are inherently criminal than in other nations.
You do understand what the word "percentage" means, right?
You're right, I read too fast. So are Americans just genetically predisposed to violence compared to like, Australians? Seems unlikely to me. Without an explanation, it's not a scientifically sound hypothesis in a way that would be helpful for addressing the issue. Unless you're just trying to vent and have no interest in solving the problem, but it seems like you are. So, how do you explain this inherent urge to violence that you're describing?
You're trying to goad him as well as me into saying something you don't like because you don't like the premise but can't argue against it. It isn't actually incumbent on Alex - or me - to demarcate with 100% certainty the cause for any given kind of criminal behavior. In fact if I took it upon myself to do so you'd accuse me of speaking without the proper credentials or sensitivity, 100% guaranteed.
It would be far better, granted, if we could have prevention rather than cure. It would be far better, and is far better, if we do know that there are positive steps we can take, especially early in life, that help reduce crime rates. The de-leading (to rhyme with red, not seed) of the environment helped a lot. Let's find more things like that and keep doing them, 100%.
But we cannot let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Our inability to say *why* certain groups just do more crimes doesn't prevent it from being true, and it certainly doesn't lessen our responsibility as a society to protect the law-abiding majority from criminals of all kinds. If that means the impact is disproportionate to the population, so be it. It still has to be done. Incarceration, then, is in fact one way of "solving the problem". It's not the best one, nor even a particularly good one. But it's one that buys society a temporary respite from the behavior of criminals.
So let's take your premise for granted that black criminality is the problem. Given what we know about the effect of socioeconomic status on crime rates, I assume you'd support a massive race-based reparations program?
I will paste from my response to you:
"1) that if it's poverty, then the causal relationship between poverty and crime is vastly more explanatory for Blacks than any other population group in the country. If we take murder as an example, Hispanics are only slightly wealthier than Blacks in the US but have murder rates vastly lower than them (and in fact not much higher than NHWs in some parts of the country.)"
To put it another way: the wealthiest Black counties are dramatically more violent than the poorest White counties. (They're geographically not that far separated; Maryland and Kentucky contain them, respectively.) You can make a case - and it's not a terrible case - that this is a product of the Black population's concentration in urban areas. This is definitely, absolutely a factor. It's been shown in more than one state that while murder rates for all races are higher in urban areas than rural (even when controlling for HHI), the division is more stark among Black populations yet. But once again, even allowing for that, the differences remain stark. You are mitigating the problem by a measurable percentage, but it remains a massive problem.
On reparations: If I supported reparations - I don't - based on socioeconomic status and our efforts therein, they would in fact be from the Black community to the rest of us given the untold trillions we have spent specifically and deliberately on the Black community since the 1960s. Black people get preference in public education, in public employment, and in some parts of the country even public assistance. The impact on the difference in their criminality has been, at best, inconclusive (and in my view it's been virtually zero.)
Obviously, however, I don't support reparations. It would be needlessly punitive. It would (justifiably) inflame tensions and create resentment. It would be a naked display of power, of having conquered a population so thoroughly that their wealth can be confiscated and given to another.
Which is precisely why liberals are so gung-ho about giving them in the other direction. If they actually believed this horseshit about socioeconomic factors they'd be at least conversant with two facts: we have spent, are spending, and keep spending incredible amounts of money on trying to decrease this gap, to little avail; and even when it does work the rates of criminality among the Black community are still vastly out of line with all other races in this country.
I'll repeat it from my other post to you: the United States' outlying status in crime statistics among wealthy, developed, industrialized, urbanized, democratic countries is a product of its Black population. No amount of spending, thus far, has changed that. Punitive confiscation to enable yet more of it is, in my view, a fool's errand.
Now I'm the one who read (and replied) too fast. I should have taken issue with the phrase "inherently criminal". "Inherently" is easily taken to mean "born that way", i.e. that some individuals are more genetically predisposed to violence and criminal behavior than others. That whole argument is radioactive, and I am not making any claims or statements of belief about American genetics. Culturally, however, I do believe that, for whatever reason, America has a greater percentage of individuals who embrace violence and other anti-social behaviors than other developed countries.
Edited for clarity: nothing, zero, zip, zilch, nada, 0% of what I've been saying is a racist dogwhistle about Black Americans. I live in the PNW and I can find plenty of examples of violent, anti-social white people, thank you very much.
We could argue until the cows come home about why, including both historical and present-day causes. However, despite the best efforts of schools and government-funded PSAs, people tend to end up absorbing the values and behaviors of their immediate family and their peer group, mostly during childhood, and so America's population percentage of maladjusted honor-culture assholes remains steady. And when one of them crosses the path of one of us well-behaved folks and starts threatening us with violence due to some perceived slight, or because they're drunk or high, or because they just goddamn well feel like it, I want cops with guns and nightsticks and handcuffs to show up and throw them in jail, because that's what keeps civilization civilized.
And yet other civilizations have managed to stay far more civilized with far fewer cops. Iceland has roughly the population of New Orleans and has a murder rate about 50x less with a police force half the size that has killed exactly one person in its entire history. So either you think Americans being more likely die of both criminal and cop violence is inevitable, or you think we can do better. Personally I think we can do better.
I fail to see how continuing to point out that other countries have lower rates of both crime and incarceration does anything to gainsay my thesis that America’s high incarceration rate is caused by America’s high rates of violence and antisocial behavior.
If you have any idea of how Iceland manages to “do better” other than being populated by Icelanders instead of Americans, please let us know.
Indeed, how could we NOT be more criminal? Our DNA is people who were kicked out, run out, or otherwise mostly not wanted in their home nations. Or who had particularly individualistic and risk-taking personalities, to move from everything they knew and their embedded communities, to take a huge risk on an unknown. Lots of the original Europeans at our nation's founding were sent here as criminal punishment, or were otherwise undesirables who couldn't make it in Europe. I would expect any nation of immigrants to be far more prone to criminality, just given the propensity for risk-taking and the likely less sociable/agreeable temperaments that come along with one's homeland trying to get rid of you.
I wonder though, is Australia similar in criminality? Because they should have a similar profile.
Nope, rates of crime in Australia are considerably lower, as they are in every other developed country in the world compared to ours.
https://theconversation.com/how-safe-is-australia-the-numbers-show-public-attacks-are-rare-and-on-the-decline-110276
For one thing a much higher proportion (compared to the US) of the original British immigrants were sent here as criminal punishment. Then, there were many fewer organised groups of religious and/or political dissidents who voluntarily emigrated here. And because so much of the country is just rubbish (especially to Europeans) for agriculture and Western-style settlement, there were no big frontiers for masses of people to move into. We did have some gold rushes and some mining settlements that still today (Lightning Ridge, Coober Pedy) have some of the same libertarian flavour as you get in the US, but it's very niche in comparison.
We also didn't import anywhere near as much slave labour (not none, but almost none, and most were seasonal rather than permanent) and there were fewer indigenous inhabitants to start with and even fewer when we finished subjugating them, so no large numbers of inconvenient people to oppress and degrade into a minority with few prospects for a good life compared to their white neighbours (not to dismiss the experiences of the much smaller numbers who are in that situation in this country, who do make up a large proportion of our prison population, just to point out the numbers are much smaller).
So Australia is much more communitarian than the US, has much deeper roots in labour organisation, and greater social cohesion as a result. Higher trust in institutions (and generally, much better institutions), lower gun ownership, all that good stuff.
Very interesting. I think up til a decade or two ago, most Americans' perception of Australians was as sort of like wild west cowboy on steroids. They were seen as heavy drinkers, tough (rugby etc), willing to fight, kind of wild and crazy libertines. Blame Crocodile Dundee and Foster's beer commercials I guess. But it's now clear it's a much more communitarian and socially-minded country. A close friend of mind emigrated to Australia and when he tells me about the various tax, labor, welfare, gun policies compared to here, it's a stark difference and he is stunned at what is going on in the US. Turns out AU isn't a country of drunken brawlers with hunting knives on their belts. They're more akin to Canada, with way cooler accents and more killer animals. :)
The comparison to Canada is a great point. Very different social arrangements to the US despite a lot of similarity in origins.
This is a violent society in aggregate for many reasons. First being the idea that individual is sovereign over the community. None of us want to give that up; but it produces alienated and violent people at a higher rate than societies that many effective means of social leverage against individual "acting out" before the boundary of the law is reached. Here, we got nothing until the crime is committed. The lunatic can wander around wherever he wants, ranting and raving, shitting his pants, abusing others, stealing...and nothing can be done; unless a potential victim is forced to defend themselves or their property.
This is why we put more people in jail than others.
Most places in the country aggressively prosecuted things like vagrancy and disorderly conduct well into the latter half of the twentieth century - a time when the US was becoming more urbanized, more interconnected, and less about free-standing homesteaders who were rugged individuals.
So, back here in reality, we can instead just tell the truth: that the US is vastly more criminal than other wealthy, industrialized, advanced democratic states is because America has a large Black population; a population responsible for a jaw-dropping percentage of those crimes against person and property.
This has been shown time and again for decades via every single measurement anyone's been able to devise. We can debate the cause of why it's true - we can't debate the fact that America's crime problem is in fact a Black criminality problem.
Okay, then let's grant your premises for a moment and debate the cause--what's your explanation?
I don't know. What I can say with certainty, however, are the following:
1) that if it's poverty, then the causal relationship between poverty and crime is vastly more explanatory for Blacks than any other population group in the country. If we take murder as an example, Hispanics are only slightly wealthier than Blacks in the US but have murder rates vastly lower than them (and in fact not much higher than NHWs in some parts of the country.)
2) that if it's urbanity, then the causal relationship is somewhat more striking (i.e. the divisions between rural crime and urban crime exist for all races, but for Black people especially) but even if we moved every Black person in the country to a rural area of their state, their murder rate would still dwarf that of every other race (and still outnumber all other murders - and murder victims - put together, in fact)
3) that if it's low education, then explanations must be found for the relative lack of murders by other races when you look at their poorly-educated cohorts
4) that if it's lack of home ownership, then the above is true here as well
5) that if it's single parenthood, then the above is true here as well, albeit to a lesser extent than the other examples.
These have been demonstrated countless times by Steve Sailer and others for decades now, and while many are quick to adopt a biological determinist position, I am not personally able to do so for crime because I just don't know enough to say. (For certain other phenomena I'm more informed.)
I suppose I can't rule out lead paint.
One thing to look at is (and this might seem counter-intuitive) how Irish people have acted since the potato famine and Koreans post Japanese rule. There is a field of study called epigenetics which might help explain this, but to put it simply (and I am not any sort of geneticist) the mass trauma inflicted on the entire population of that group (and slavery would count for black Americans) causes such profound depression and trauma as to become a physical marker.
Here is an article about it: https://vocal.media/longevity/the-irish-potato-famine-and-epigenetics
Not sure if I buy into it, but it is something to look into.
Or maybe those variables are all mutually confounding in ways that resist easy study, particularly in a country whose socioeconomic system was undergirded by the widespread theft of black labor and black wealth until the very recent past. Race-based chattel slavery was, as John C. Calhoun said, a "peculiar institution," is it any wonder that assessing the damage is complicated?
Americans raised on the myths of the well-armed rugged individual and cowboy vigilantism is why it's ingrained into many a hot-heads and shitheels that the way to solve a beef or slight is to arm one's self and commence firing.
I happen to live and work in the "Murder Capital of the US" right now. The crime in New Orleans appears to be out-of-control. And while the crime rate started rising in 2020, it's been on a rocket to the moon for the last 2 years. Louisiana also leads the nation in its incarceration rate, which means that what little justice reform that does take place occurs around the edges of an over-whelmed judicial system.
The biggest problem in addressing crime at the moment, at least as most of the city can agree, is fixing the understaffed and underpaid NOPD. But it requires more than just a pay raise. Training the police to be proactive on violent crime in poorer neighborhoods and less over-policing in those same neighborhoods for minor stuff like loitering and public intoxication.
NOLA and Louisiana as a whole, has long had a spectacularly underperforming education system (both public and charter schools) and the job opportunities offer little in the way for many young black men & women to overcome long-term socio-economic problems. Beefs are solved with easily accessible guns in a state with liberal gun laws in a state with a long history of violence.
There was some traction gained here in NOLA with regards to reform but it was primarily focused on not policing and prosecuting non-violent crimes. But just led to revolving doors for many offenders who then escalated. The most heinous crimes get prosecuted. Car jackings and random drive-by shootings are the biggest issues it seems right now.
There was a fairly recent incident where an elderly lady was dragged to her death by a group of young kids who carjacked her. Her arm got caught in the seatbelt as they threw her out of the car. They were caught and now face murder charges as adults.
If anything, the last 2 years has taught the New Orleans metro area & Louisiana as a whole, that fighting crime and criminal justice reform are far too complex for the jingoism of the "abolish the police crowd." Not even the most liberal people I know here in NOLA advocate for that because they know its just outright dumb.
And how has the jingoism of the lock everyone up and throw away the key crowd been working out? Numbers say, not great.
Louisiana's crime rate is a counter argument to the folks saying we need more policing and more jailing for sure. But criminal justice reform has to have buy-in at the state level for it to work in my opinion. Diversion programs for non-violent crimes can help, increase resources for mental health services. Police tactic reforms help as well. There's no one single solution. It has to be multi-pronged. And addressing the socio-economic problems facing America would help as well.
Agreed
There’s a lot of things conservatives do to cause people to distrust them. This is one of the biggest for the Left - an abject refusal to see the realities of crime and the way it effects people who live in the communities it affects.
I can't believe you have to write this.
What plausible theories have been advanced for decline in crime?
Also, there *was* a decline in crime until 2020, when the homicide rate shot up. Why this happened is the subject of lively debate, but I think once we get this year's numbers it will likely be safe (so to speak) to say this is not a blip but a trend. To your question, the decline too is still the subject of debate. My understanding is that there is no clear consensus about why it occurred.
It’s still 40% below what it was in the early 90s.
So far, it is still well below what it was then, yes.
The ban on lead in gasoline.
Aging out.
And one they don't mention is that everyone is totally brainwashed, except the criminals. And a few others.
Brainwashed to believe what?
I remember reading something about that in Mother Jones. I also remember Freakanomics suggesting that the legalization of abortion played a role.
Underreporting, in the cases of shootings, vastly improved trauma medicine. Look at the number of shootings and compute old mortality rates. Today Lee Harvey Oswald would have been alive to stand trial for his crime. A single round from a .38 SPL today is very unlikely to be fatal in the abdomen.
If I'm not mistaken, property crimes and non-lethal violent crime declined since the 1990s too, not just homicides.
It matters not one bit to the victim of a crime how much company they have in their victimization. We need to stop hassling about worthless statistics. Crime victims are people.