That's an excellent post. There was a recent scandal in the UK about vulnerable people having their gas supplies cut off, and it left me nonplussed because decades ago I worked in that business and for every vulnerable person there were five people just not bothering paying their bills. Do we just give them free heating for life? Or do we have to enforce, and police, and require the vulnerable to jump through hoops?
I've said this about the conduct of the local homeless population. It's male aggression and male entitlement. Economic deprivation does not absolve anyone of responsibility, nor does it nullify anyone else's expectations that other people follow rules. Mental illness is different, but that's not the topic.
Middle-class people have a right to expect that the rules they follow will be enforced. Their expectations are valid, and constantly telling them to follow rules when there are so many exceptions undermines the whole social contract. It's a power game, and it's obvious.
There's an implicit accusation that middle class people are somehow responsible for homelessness, and dealing with the discomfort is their penance. This is nonsense.
That's a shell game. Homelessness is a separate issue from beating off on the subway. No one is entitled to indulge their antisocial behaviors just because they're unhoused.
No one is homeless in downtown Houston because the residents of Friendswood, Tx declined to build an apartment building. It’s slightly more complicated than that.
There are moral expectations and then there are predictions of the future. And while homelessness doesn't make unpleasant behaviour okay, it does make it inevitable.
Homelessness, like extreme wealth, makes it very difficult to impose consequences on a person. So naturally it leads to increased rates of bad behaviour. Especially in small and petty ways, ways too small to reasonably get the police involved.
You can argue that the homeless should behave better anyway, and on some level you'll be right, but "should" doesn't count for much. If you leave a pile of money outside with a note saying "please do not steal", you're going to lose it all.
Opportunity makes the thief. Or the vandal, or the public harasser. Every population contains people who would be behaving terribly if not for their fear of consequences; remove the consequences from the population, and you'll get a good look at those people.
I don't understand the logic here. If someone is found breaking, let's say, the laws of public decency, how does their status as a homeowner impede the consequences of breaking said laws?
To be clear I support enforcing the law regardless of one's housing status, race, gender, age, etc. With that said they're commenting that for a homeless person 3 hots and a cot isn't a real threat vs for you or I getting arrested would cause all sorts of issues.
That part, I understand. It's the unwillingness to enforce laws I don't. In this scenario, the basic living conditions of food and shelter sound more like an enticement, and not a threat, imprisonment notwithstanding. You're right that a personal arrest would cause me a few issues. But, as to the question of basic expectations: I don't expect behaviors as much as I expect that laws attempting to shape them should be enforced.
Who said anything about being unwilling to enforce laws?
Homeless people get arrested all the time. It just doesn't accomplish much. And it's never going to accomplish much, either.
You can arrest someone for pooping on the street. But that action won't actually reduce the amount of poop on the street in the future unless it scares the arrestee, the bystanders, or both.
And bear in mind, there's a lot of stuff we'd like to discourage that doesn't rise to the level of real crime. Stuff that's normally "punished" by other people thinking ill of you. The chronically homeless generally don't have to worry about offending friends, family, or colleagues, so the normal social pressures aren't in place for them.
Right, I understand what you’re saying about social consequences. You said it was difficult to impose consequences. But I don’t understand how it’s difficult to enforce legal consequences on the basis of home ownership.
I don’t expect anyone to legislate against shamelessness as it relates to things which are not criminal, but enforcing the law acts to realize the law itself as real, and legitimate, and actionable. I wish more people lived above the scope of most societal pressure, frankly.
So if I move to NYC, not only are there mice and rats galore, I can at least wash my ass in the conference room without someone complaining to Feline Resources that i am making her uncomfortable?!?
I'm admittedly spitballing here, but it doesn't seem that long ago that the left believed their ideas could not only withstand debate but would triumph. The plan seemed to be to win people over with the power of their ideas. For whatever reason, that strategy seems to have been abandoned in favor of bumper sticker propaganda. It's as though someone decided winning on the merits is just not worth pursuing anymore. Not sure how we got here.
Once you start identifying as the party of the college educated the next step is to realize that college graduates are a minority of the population. Somehow the gap was supposed to be made up by working class minorities (because working class whites were the apotheosis of the opposition). Of course, that's not really working out.
This is, no doubt, true. But I just find it extremely odd that academics, of all people, now seem to be the most dedicated to sticking their fingers in their ears and refusing to listen, debate, learn, etc. It's almost as though a significant subset of higher ed has decided that learning itself is a fool's errand.
"For one thing, there is something about getting too involved in theoretical work that makes you absolutely unable to deal with physical reality or even things outside your area of expertise."
Absolutely! Most of the academics I know are extremely smart and interesting people but I'm often surprised by how hard of a time they have with the type of practical but necessary bullshit I spend most of my time dealing with at my office job. Academics are like one of those weird animal species that's uniquely suited to some extreme environment that most species would not survive, but those same adaptations make them uniquely unsuited to the rest of the world that's more hospitable to everyone else.
The numbers just aren't there. And a good part of how the left identifies itself these days is as a self conscious elite. The very definition of the term "elite" implies that the numbers just aren't there. In a democracy that means perpetual banishment to the fringes of power.
That's the first half. What about widening the base by persuasion, perhaps dialogue with those working class white voters and their allies? That unfortunately is where the term "deplorables" comes into play.
Of course people who have spent their entire professional lives defending and developing particular ideas will be very reluctant to admit that those ideas, when implemented, produced bad results. What about that would be unintuitive? Their credibility and their careers aren't about some abstract *learning*; they're about having access to correct information, which can be imparted to others. If they don't have correct information, why should they have their privileged positions and status?
The more I think about it the more strange it seems that the people in our society who have the highest level of theoretical knowledge of any given subject are the least likely to have any practical knowledge of it since they've spent their entire lives in school and have never actually worked in any industry or actively participated in the running of society. That doesn't really matter for something like biochemistry or physics or literature where the subject itself is mostly confined to academic research but it seems like it would matter a hell of a lot for anything involving public policy.
Never underestimate the conformism of academics. In our particular meritocracy, one’s merit is fundamentally defined by the opinions of one’s colleagues. Stepping out of line and even implying that one is a member of the out group can be a death sentence to an academic career.
Historically the socialist and labour movements in advanced capitalist societies were a coalition of two social types - the humanistic intellectual and the politicised industrial worker. The most successful such movements were those that managed to get the balance right between, and positively managed the tensions between, these two groups.
Any such coalition based on dividing the economic spoils is not possible in the US in the present day because a core goal of the professional managerial class is economic self interest. Look at the rise of credentialism for example as a defense mechanism designed to raise barriers against class promotion and keep the money where it is.
Credentialism isn't a barrier against class promotion; it's an ass-covering move by risk-averse HR types ("Don't fire me, there was no way of knowing that Jones was so incompetent - he went to Brown!") and in some cases a bad substitute for the competency and/or IQ tests which used to be administered to job candidates, but have increasingly run afoul of hyper-aggressive "civil rights" lawyers.
Both sides largely gave up on winning over undecideds, based on political theory saying it was more effective to rile up the base, and by rhetoric that branded the other side as racist misogynistic theocratic fascists/atheistic queer baby-murdering groomers. Its far easier to stir up hate than to have a nuanced conversation, and now we have *strategies* telling us it works better. (It may, in the short run, but it's killing democracy over time).
It doesn't even make sense because there is every indication that raising one party's turnout just drives turnout in the opposing party. When the country is evenly divided between left and right the only path to victory is persuading the middle.
Yes! Thank you! I am old enough that I remember a time when smoking was ubiquitous. My mom had eye surgery in the late 70s, and her roommate in the hospital was a chain smoker. People on the left worked hard to get smoking banned in indoor spaces so that people would be protected from smelly, toxic fumes on the job.
And now we seem to have backslid, to the point where some people on the left think it’s wrong to object to nasty behavior in public. But it is not a left position to allow some people to hurt other people; quite the contrary, we on the left should be speaking out against bullies, and praising those who, like this woman, spoke up for regular people who would like to get to work unmolested, by smoke, by harassment, or by anything else.
Making a post on twitter does not constitute "speaking up" in any sense. This fundamental misunderstanding is a huge part of why left "activists" have become such a joke.
Of course it does. This is exactly the kind of thing that gets a bucket of hot gooey shit dumped on someone's desk at SEPTA. What relevant alternative for "speaking up" would you suggest? Should she buy a soapbox and stand on it in the market square? Write a strongly worded letter to the editor?
It's also nuts that someone says "I would like people to not engage in behaviour that is actively harmful to the people around them" and everyone jumps to "so you're saying we need cops???" as if there is *no* other way to enforce or influence standards of behaviour than gun-toting agents of the state.
In Toronto, we used to have these models of streetcars wherein if you stood on the steps, the doors could not close. When it was really busy & full during rush hour, you'd sometimes have people jam themselves up onto the steps anyway because they didn't want to wait for the next streetcar, and obviously the streetcar cannot proceed if the door is just hanging open.
Very quickly, you would have half the people on the streetcar all yelling and shaming this person to "get the FUCK off the steps so we can all get to work" which had a 90% success rate. The other 10% were taken care of by the streetcar driver joining in on yelling at the person over the intercom. Never saw a cop called.
This of course does not apply to every situation and every person, but I think there is a normal distribution of people who respond to different structures, incentives, social norms, etc and calling for more "middle" tactics to influence behaviour isn't necessarily calling for more policing.
If I was to tweet "I would like to be able to ride my bicycle down the street without fearing being hit by a car," I (personally) wouldn't be calling for more police, but rather for better cycling infrastructure, better-designed roads, more transit to get people out of cars, education campaigns, etc.
I worked at Starbucks for a couple years that was located beside a strip club, homeless shelter, subway station, weed store, and worst of all, 24/7 McDonalds.
We had a really nice homeless guy that came in every morning for a tea, until my manager (a 5"2 wisp of a woman) had to ban him from the store because another customer saw him jack off under the table into a Christmas cup, and then....he never came back.
I had to kick a guy out who was harassing a table of teenage girls and he got up in my face to yell racist, sexist slurs at me. I gave him a dead-eye stare and didn't really react, and then...he left and didn't come back.
I told off the bouncer who worked next door at the strip club who kept asking my co-worker out to have a threesome with him & his wife, and...he stopped.
I set boundaries with the creepy regular who always wanted to "help us close" who turned out to be a legit murderer/rapist who'd been in jail for 15 years. For that one, he stopped coming because he got arrested again for child porn and trying to lure a 14 y/o girl over the internet, which is a use case of the police that I support.
The only times I ever needed to call the cops was when I was required to by store policy, i.e. to file an incident report because a customer was sitting on the patio and got punched by some random walking by who ran away. Otherwise, our liberal arts major barista team of girls and gays did a decent job at managing people's shitty behaviour on our own.
The other day, I was waiting at a bus shelter (the little ones that are on the street and have three sides) and a guy joined, smoking, and I said, "sorry, can you not smoke in here?" and he apologized and stepped onto the sidewalk.
But yes, thankfully I am not American and don't have to worry about everyone around me being armed to the teeth. I do get threats from drivers for telling them off when they park in the bike lane, though.
With regards to prevention, IDK about cigarettes, but I've seen people do drugs on the subway or in parks, and (to an extent) safe consumption sites can help prevent that. For people jerking off in public, (some) percentage of that can likely be cut down by access to housing or mental health/addiction supports.
A few years back I was hanging out with friends at the downtown pedestrian mall. Some homeless guy catcalled a girl walking by, my friend told him off, they went chest to chest and neither wanted to back down and then we brawled up and down the mall. And when I say up and down the mall I mean it because one of those homeless guys ran off to get some buddies, resulting in two separate fights over the course of two or three blocks. Another friend got hit in the head with a bike lock a couple of times, I pinned some guy to the ground with a knee in his chest and punched him in the head a bunch of times and one of the homeless guys almost died because my friend stabbed him in the throat with a pocket knife. Good times, good times.
This is a significant point. Anti-social behaviour in public spaces is often a result of a psychiatric impairment and/or some form of intoxication. People in such a condition will generally be beyond the reach of peer group pressure, and it could be dangerous for ordinary members of the public to intervene with them. Such people will require some form of management by a cadre of professional people with the specialised skills required for that task - if not the police, then some other duly constituted and immediately recognisable compliance agency.
I agree, civilians confronting people who aren't in their right minds isn't a great idea. That's where the various non-police mental health crisis intervention teams come in, of trained, unarmed professionals who are there respond to people in crisis. Toronto started a pilot last year and it's shown really good results so far.
Even the cops have admitted that their presence alone will often escalate situations and makes them worse (https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/toronto-community-crisis-service-mental-health-1.6548427). I had a conversation with an acquaintance that's married to a cop back in 2020, and we didn't agree on much, but she did say that an absurd amount of her husband's time was devoted to responding to mental health calls that he wasn't really trained or equipped to deal with.
Most of the incarcerated end up on the streets again. Some more damaged than before. Many of them having been taught all the wrong lessons of the power of threat, intimidation, and violence.
I've met some shining lights, too, individuals who didn't let it break them, and members of groups in prison who refused to degrade themselves and kept both inward and outward sense of discipline while imprisoned. (Fwiw, the people I met like that were African Americans; I only have a small number of anecdotes of any sort about convicts relating their experiences to me, and my sample was not random.) And the outside society often has nothing to reward them for that, on their return to the free world.
It's a broken system. But we're stuck with it, until we find the fortitude to stop the criminogenic Prohibition regime and improve conditions for the people who are living inside the walls (and this includes the COs.) If the only alternative is to allow impunity to perpetrators of serious and violent offenses, prison is still a vast improvement over nothing. Even given its potential to make matters worse in some ways.
`People on the left worked hard to get smoking banned...indoor[s]' and `we on the left should be speaking out against bullies'
I do appreciate the qualifier of `indoors' but liberals were the bullies when it came to outdoor smoking bans. First we had to be X feet from building doors, then business could no longer decide if they allowed smoking indoors, and then smoking was banned outside (parks, college campuses, etc). None of this (aside from the indoor part) was based on solid science but rather a sneering condescension about what's right and not wanting to have to experience, however, briefly what's distasteful.
The common thread between then and now is that liberals seem to be willing to disregard quite a bit when they're morally certain about the righteousness of their cause.
This is fair. I am not a smoker, but I love the smell of cigarette smoke when I catch a whiff outdoors, and I agree that outdoor smoke is not a threat to anyone. The outdoor bans were needlessly punitive.
AND I wish you had spoken to me about before you finished your book. I'm sure you cover Roland Fryer Jr...
But, you could have focused on my tech solution based on his work: Hassle Tracker>
When cops do stops (hassles) for smoking or ticket or anything else, they should be FORCED to use a mobile app to write tickets basically - that ALSO documents location (automatic), race and outcome (automatic).
THEN we can just rank cops LIVE by who they ticket and don't and ALL cops will self-police- bc lighter on blacks, tougher on whites, etc to even their %s out.
This isnt complicated stuff, EVERYTHING policy wise gets more easily solved when you start with a a mobile app.
Ugh. Again, as always, thanks for this. One should be able to handle multiple thoughts and feelings at the same time. I consider myself well-left-of-center. I believe that civil disobedience is right in some cases. And I also believe that the concept of rule-of-law, carried out fairly and consistently, rocks. Just rocks. I grew up in some pretty lawless places, and a) lawlessness sucks, specially for poor people; and b) when confronted with anarchy/chaos, the majority will always opt for a strongman to bring "order." So—no, thanks. (Yes, history: many of these "leftists" look back at the hippie/rowdy late 60's with nostalgia, but conveniently forget that Nixon won twice.) So yes, please do not effing smoke on the subway.
The skyrocketing amount of antisocial behavior in public spaces makes me feel like I'm losing my mind. I do not have a car and have to take the train in Minneapolis most days and it's a mess. A woman was beaten within an inch of her life in the middle of the day on a train platform in the middle of the day on Monday.
People are completely unable to admit that they were wrong on the merits about the "no rules" thing. It's not working. Things were not like this ten years ago. We stopped enforcing the rules and conditions deteriorated, badly. It preceded the pandemic. You started letting people smoke meth on the train, you started letting kids throw chairs at teachers, you started letting people blow red lights, you started letting people carry trash bags of merchandise out of stores, and now this is what things are like. This is not complicated. It doesn't need to be unpacked by a six month series of public meetings organized by $1,000 an hour consultants that produce a 50 page PDF recommending another series of meetings. Jesus! Christ!
I can't help but notice that crime rates in the US rose from roughly 1960 to about 1992. Then they declined until about 2014.
That's two thirty year cycles. Now of course crime is rising again, dramatically. It's a small sample size but I have to wonder if we're in for another couple of decades of deteriorating social conditions before things turn around again.
Makes sense to me. Crime rises - people get scared - they support tougher policing - crime goes down - people aren't as scared - they get more concerned about over policing - they advocate for looser enforcement - crime rises - people get scared - etc.
I don't think there's a totally agreed upon reason crime fell from the mid 90s into the 2010s, but I do believe most who study it attribute at least some of that remarkable decline to heavier policing
It's the illicit market empowered by Prohibition. Except that the original Prohibition only lasted 14 years, and the Drug Prohibition Era has lasted long enough to entrench the market long enough that the children of the children of the gangsters are now grownups.
There was a huge uptick in violence associated with the street market in the 1990s, and then the drug territory thing got sorted out, coincidental to the drug fad of crack abating. And then pagers and cellphones came along, which transformed the market in both drugs and prostitution, to make the retail activity more discreet. But the underlying market situation has never been addressed. The profits from the illicit drug market were eventually tied to another market transformation- the increasing reliance on immigrant sex trafficking, both in the US and worldwide. The upshot of all of that is that Crime Pays, if you're a gangster. If you can do the time, you're able to enjoy the benefits of doing the crime. Not a great message to send to your kids, who may or may not show up every now and then at visiting hours, or talk to you on the phone. It's so predictable. And so unnecessary. Now we're in several generations deep, and it's going to take a lot more effort and expenses to turn things around than if the situation had simply been honestly addressed back in the 1970s. The recommendations were there.
Yeah, but cell phones and pagers are still around. In fact now we have pagers on steroids in the form of smart phones. The technology that allows for low profile financial transactions in both drugs and prostitution is still there and in fact is better than ever. Somehow though the violent crime rate has exploded.
The violent crime rate has gone up. It hasn't "exploded."
Like I said, the underlying situation- the conditions of the illicit markets that have made a life of crime an attractive proposition- have not been addressed. And the accumulation of high-powered firearms, decade upon decade, has allowed something of a surplus to influence the children in households where those weapons are taken for granted as part of the life of crime. Unfortunately, the situation has persisted for so long that more than drug law reform is going to be required in order to return American society to a stable baseline. The collateral damage of the criminalized social milieu of the illegal drugs trade- from drug dealer culture- is an order of magnitude greater than it was in the 1970s. That's distinct from the harms resulting from drug abuse and addiction, which have also been exacerbated by the pariah status of drug users and the social milieu of the illicit market, but which haven't played nearly as much of a role in terms of corruption and the embrace of criminality as resistance. Generally speaking, people who are children of alcoholics/addicts uncomplicated by prison records don't face challenges as severe as children who have a parent with a felony record, or a record of criminal recividism. I don't want to minimize the problems of drug abuse and addiction, but the criminalized economy creates an antisocial milieu that undermines values and encourages violent acting out in ways that no mere status of addiction can match. The negative effect isn't merely additive, it's synergistic.
The jump in the homicide rate from 2019 to 2020 was literally the largest year on year increase in modern recorded history for the United States. The per capita homicide rate now in the US is the worst it's been since 1996 or so, wiping out almost 30 years of progress in falling crime rates. And for poor blacks the per capita homicide rate is at least as bad as it's ever been in modern American history. In places like Chicago it's literally worse than in the bad old 1980's and 1990's.
I would argue that the increase in violent crime rates is historic (#1 increase ever for homicides) and for that reason qualifies as "explosive". And for increases of that magnitude I can't help but feel that something fundamental to society has been altered.
Well hell yeah. The difference between the criminal economy attendant to 14 years of alcohol prohibition and the 50 years since the illicit economy of forbidden drugs became a multibillion-dollar proposition is at least an order of magnitude. The illicit drugs economy has been over $100 billion since the early 1980s. Now it's probably five times that amount.
The Blackstone Rangers, El Rukn, and other gangs were a notable presence in Chicago even in the 1960s, but they got an infusion of illicit cash from the drug trade that's made them something like a parallel government in the city since the 1980s. That's why the homicide clearance rate is so low (despite recent efforts to artificially inflate it.)
The whole "drugs and gangs" thing in general, that was insignificant as a national phenomenon before the 1980s. Americans who were born after 1970 really have no recollection of how marginalized that societal institution was, outside of a handful of the largest cities. Now there are gangs- nationally affiliated organized crime groups- in places like Hazleton, Pennsylvania, and Omaha, Nebraska. Now our gangs aren't just African American and Chinese and Irish and Mexican, with an aggregate membership of under 100,000, the way it was in the 1960s. Now the US has hundreds of gangs, and millions of gang members. Recent immigrant populations to the US from all over the world are gang-affiliated. The seed capital to entrench them came from drugs. The number of members of prison gangs- in prison, right now- run to the hundreds of thousands. As one of my psychology professors- a woman who also worked in the California prisons- told our class in 1989: "and ALL of them have kids." An exaggeration, perhaps, but only a slight one. As a one-sentence summary, basically accurate.
A statement like that would doubtless be torn apart as "racist" by bliss ninnies on Twitter these days, but the woman who said that was a left-liberal lesbian feminist. She didn't mention race in her lecture. AC was speaking as a realist- not in some bogus "race realist" sense of spurious inferences drawn from enthrallment to some shoddy metric or another; she was just stating facts. The title of her lecture was "The Mad and the Bad"; about the cornered and neglected Crazy, who don't belong behind bars, and the Violent Predators, who do. She understood what anyone who's had much interaction with prison convicts knows: siring children is a majorly important status signifier in the probative masculinity of career criminality, no matter the ethnic group in question. Not necessarily raising them; that's held as optional. Raising children is often functionally impossible, for anyone in the revolving door of the prison system. But siring kids is as much proof of Manhood as the willingness to engage in physical violence. Part of the Crips motto: "we don't die, we multiply." The Crips just happen to explicitly state what everyone else in the gang life is thinking and doing, too. I mean, you don't think the Aryan Brotherhood think the same way?
For decades on end, that's what granting a de facto monopoly over the drugs trade to criminals has done. The retail trade runs at least $250 billion annually, and it employs as many people as the fast food industry. As David Simon points out in his book The Corner, the dope selling industry is recession-proof! As long as someone's okay with doing the time, they always have a livelihood waiting for them on the outside, doing the crime in a glamor profession. Dangerous, but that only adds to the glamor. At least until one ends up under the lawn, or in a wheelchair. But that's life as a "soldier", hmm?
"I can't help but feel that something fundamental to society has been altered."
Do tell. We didn't have all these TV programs like "America's Toughest Prisons" and "Drugs, Inc." back in the year 2000. We did already have the prisons, and the industry. The TV programs merely provide a benchmark of its success, in its bid to become a permanent feature of American Life.
The things you highlight as not happening 10 years ago were happening 10 years ago. You probably didn't notice it and/or were unaware of it because many of those things weren't viral sensations on social media. People acting like bad behavior and crime is just a sudden thing the last decade is remarkably laughable because it illustrates the impacts of social media on people's perceptions that the world has gone to hell in the bag lady's handcart.
There's a social phenomena that relates to when a crime is happening (say a public beating, etc) where people will stop and watch...waiting for someone else to take action/call the police instead of interceding themselves. My friend said this happened in NYC quite often in the early 2000s when he lived there. I saw/heard of similar situations happening in DC in the 2000s when I lived there until 2009.
Here in New Orleans we had roving bands of kids that stole strollers off of people's porches and did stick-ups on their bicycles. Then it went away...then a few years later it was car-jackings and catalytic converter thefts and the latest is serial car window break-ins looking for handguns.
Subjective bias is an issue. But at the same time violent crime rates, especially homicide, have spiked since the pandemic and have remained elevated. In terms of crime it does look like it makes sense to talk about the US before the pandemic versus the new post-pandemic normal that we reside in now.
It's true. I know in New Orleans crime is a big issue the last 4 years. It waned and was on the decline from 2010-2018ish and then started going up. But it wasn't the rate of crime so much as the violence of crime committed and that stuff gets very sensationalized down here.
When we talk about crime it's very situational as it's the immediacy of the crime rate that people consider vs the overall crime rate over a period of time. And slow change is hard to observer sometimes. I watched my neighborhood go from a colorful transitional neighborhood to a very desirable, safe and bourgeoise in the span of 10 years. But 3 blocks away, mid-day shootings were still occurring near schools.
I still consider New Orleans safe but it requires one to be self-aware about where and when to go to certain parts of town or avoid all together.
All of the '90's crackheads were dead by the 2000's and all the kids who grew up watching them knew to stay the fuck away from crack. So there was a brief period where things were genuinely better, before the current downturn.
That is actually a historical fact, and reported on at the time.
I was thinking that we had turned the corner, on the hard drug thing. And then Oxycontin raged through workplaces and high schools in the 1990s, beginning in the Appalachian region and expanding outward.
It was as if the DARE program had concentrated exclusively on the perils of marijuana and cocaine without paying even minimal attention to the hazard of prescription pills and how dangerous it was to combine many of those drugs with alcohol, while the doctors were being propagandized by corporate pharma commission salespeople that oxycodone had been magically transformed into a non-addictive opioid because time release, even though the most commonly prescribed amounts in the pills were often at least 6 times that of good old fashioned 5mg Percodan.
oh wait, that's actually what happened.
And 15 years after that, with an opioid epidemic in full rage, the government shut the door on prescription access without even considering addiction maintenance under medical supervision, and we got a heroin epidemic, followed by a fentanyl epidemic.
"It doesn't need to be unpacked by a six month series of public meetings organized by $1,000 an hour consultants that produce a 50 page PDF recommending another series of meetings. Jesus! Christ!"
But...but...where will all the consultant jobs go?!? This is a big part of the problem too. It's like we've lost the ability to simply use common sense to solve common problems. Or worse, that we're willfully choosing NOT to use common sense because it's somehow 'problematic' now. The metric shitton of bureaucratic committee nonsense that everything seems to have to filter through now is off the chart. Use your head, peoples!
DC metro was quite violent +5 years ago with beatings and stabbings and is now fine. Minneapolis should recover, too. Or you could just move to St. Paul. =)
DC saw homicides increase from around 160 in 2018 in to 226 in 2021. In Minneapolis the number of homicides literally doubled over those same years. I suspect that the increase in violent crime, which is looking like the new normal, has something to do with problems of disorderliness and crime in both transit systems and urban cores.
"I have no idea how anything that I’m saying could be controversial, but it no doubt will be."
On the one hand, yes, amen to the general point. On the other, there's some semi-strawmanning here, in that I don't think the attitude you describe is nearly as widely embraced among most progressives/leftists as you think. I mean, look at the ratios on the screenshotted tweets at the top of the page...
I am not a defund the police guy. I think it's a huge mistake for the left to adopt the attitude that the police have no place in society. But ... I also get where it comes from.
I mean, it seems like you disagree with Chris Hayes' conclusion in his "Smoker on the Subway Platform" scenario. So does that mean you'd prefer his "A" in that scenario (cops confront and arrest the person) above the "B" (nothing happens, no consequences)? Yes, that's a binary, but the whole point is that when law enforcement gets involved, things tend to get reduced things to a very stark binary.
In the subway platform scenario, I agree with Chris Hayes. I'd take B. In many other scenarios, I'd take A. Not sure about the "smoking in a subway car with a baby" one ... probably A? I think? Even if I know there's a good chance the offender is going to suffer a lot as a result, and perhaps their family as well, and etc? I dunno.
Defund was so hegemonic in left-of-center spaces that, for example, Planned Parenthood put out a defund statement, despite the fact that it had nothing whatsoever to do with their purview.
Eh, any Defund statement made by a progressive group in 2020 should be written off as basically meaningless. It was a bizarre religious fervor that came and went as quickly as a backwoods tent revival. It's not like PP *actually* supports a no-rules approach to society, and most left-progressives don't *actually* think anything goes on the subway. (Which is maddening in a different way.)
I will give you that something in the mainstream left's orientation towards rules enforcement changed in 2020, but I think it's mostly rhetoric, not substance.
So when do we take what they say seriously? When it polls well?
They don't get a pass for it for their stupidity. They're just lucky that there was so much competition by all the other stupid things that got said and were done during Covid that it's not as memorable even if it had some of the largest impact.
This is something we need to talk about more. Planned Parenthood abandoning its purview to protect abortion and access to birth control, pulled into these ridiculous stances away from their promised and core mission by the far left.
Interesting point. Question: could transit cops act as bouncers? I don't necessarily want the offender to "suffer a lot as a result and perhaps their family as well," but they gotta stop. Mostly bouncers remove people, right? If the person got aggressive or something, fine, they should get in some trouble with the police. But it seems like a fair, positive position is to (1) stop the problem right away, every time (2) not wreck the person's life. How can we make that happen? [Also I have no serious knowledge in left theory, apologies.]
Often that's all that does happen, maybe with a fine as well to discourage the behavior in the future.
What makes this different is when there's a shortened video of a suspect being "roughed up" because he didn't want to get bounced off the train? Should the cops have apologized and left him alone?
The issue remains with the person committing anti-social behavior not those enforcing the law (provided they don't go past their mandate) nor the citizens expecting everyone to play by the same rules. Ultimately laws are backed by force and violence otherwise they are merely suggestions.
There’s also option “C” - provided it’s not something like passenger is actively assaulting another passenger (which I think we would all agree merits arrest) Cop says “Stop it” to offending person, person stops. Cop moves on. Anti-social behavior stops, no one gets arrested.
Right -- that would be the best option, and of course it often does occur this way. But part of why bystanders are skeptical of getting the police involved over minor antisocial incidents is that there's a decent potential for escalation, perhaps disastrously so.
If we could be assured that that was extremely unlikely to happen, I think fewer people would hesitate to approach the police over annoying minor infractions. But as long as the police routinely mistreat people, the cost/benefit for bystanders too often comes down in favor of saying nothing, unless the behavior in question is so egregious it's clear there's no other option.
Every law on the books ultimately comes down to enforcement by large angry men with guns.
That's the simple fact of the matter regardless of whether it's tax evasion or or murder enforcement requires force if the law is ignored. You need to decide what's worth the confrontation and not create laws otherwise.
It was one of several things that bothered me wit the Eric Garner death years ago, if you keep making laws to "fight" smoking then people will break them and have to deal with the cops. You can ask for better enforcement or training or whatever but ultimately that force will happen or you don't bother making the law.
We can't be surprised when the laws we create lead to encounters with law enforcement.
With that said I'm for laws and enforcing them, certainly far more so than we have been the last few years but I'm also for rolling back laws on the books that don't actually help anyone.
What would happen if you lit up a cigarette at work? Nothing good for you.
Why is the subway platform the wild west? You know what happened in the wild west when there was no enforcing laws? Vigilance committees. Are you so sure you want random community members policing things? I'm surprised we haven't really had a big public Bernie Goetz yet.....
Yeah, I agree rules should be enforced, but I also don't want people to get beaten up and thrown in jail if it's not necessary. What I would like is a police force and a legal system that behaves fairly and proportionally; I don't want Singapore-style canings for minor nuisances, and I don't want vigilantes and chaos, either. Doesn't seem too crazy to me.
The problem is the retroactive canonization of guys like the guy who got kneeled on by the cop and passed away. He was high on meth, he was trying to pass a kited check and he resisted arrest. None of that matters though because the world view of the infantile left is that there are only angels and devils.
If you resist arrest you are at least partly to blame for whatever befalls you. Maybe that means somebody dies because of a parking ticket but the alternative is to absolve everyone of stupid, self-destructive behavior in the interests of painting the world in black and white.
So our only options are (1) a world in which it's A-OK that sometimes people die over parking tickets and (2) a world in which all stupid, self-destructive behavior is absolved? And you don't think you see the world in black and white?
Any time a cop kills someone needlessly, that's a problem. Fine, be annoyed with Floyd's canonization, but please don't let that blind you to the fact that his death was a travesty.
Technically if you run from the cops to avoid a speeding ticket you are now guilty of evading the police. If you physically fight the cops to avoid a shoplifting charge you are now guilty of resisting arrest and possibly assault.
Yes, it's a tragedy that Floyd died. But who's to blame? Is it really so wrong to point out that he was at least partially responsible for what happened?
I think the elephant in the room is that the kind of no-rules leftist you're complaining about knows full well that more enforcement of current community standards almost assuredly will result in disparate impact on BIPOC persons, since community standards are set by the dominant culture. And said leftist has been thoroughly captured by an ideology that says the worst possible thing for a white person to do is use their power in a way that makes a BIPOC person mad.
I also think there are just a group of mostly angry young men who know they can bully women, especially worthless middle aged women with this kind of rhetoric.
Here: "Defund the police" means cutting economic perks to force them to do serious reforms.
And instantly firing cops for misconduct (like at every other job) thereby trimming millions in violent, shitty officers' pay, overtime, and lawsuit payouts that can then go to mental health care and economic opportunities. Yes, I know that one lady that one time wrote a dumb story in the NYT about how we REALLY mean get rid of ALL police, immediately.
And I know what I describe is "reform." But in our current world "reform" means "more diversity training" coupled with more money. Real reform can't happen without serious consequences—I bet cops would learn to do better real fast when they see their buddies lose their salaries and pensions. Yet, not a single actor in the system has the slightest incentive to do this.
I think defund was an unfortunate slogan. But I also think it's a mistake to take what the dumbest people on the internet say and present it as the totality of the idea.
Also for the love of god do not cast Soviet police in a positive light, they were the literal manifestation of your Planet of the Cops theory.
It should be the standard for any job where the person is legally allowed to use deadly force. We also see similar issues in the military.
I fail to understand how living in a century where we've had three separate Spiderman movie franchises, with great power comes great responsibility is not more widely accepted.
I mean, it basically can't be for any job? Instant firing for proven misconduct might be, but that just shoves it back a few steps. The very obvious problem with this demand is that without that limitation, what you've got is at will employment for cops, combined with a belief that the police force is structurally messed up...which is a recipe for firing whistleblowers or literally anyone who doesn't go along with that misbehavior.
The right answer here is to reassert non-police control over police forces, but there's very little appetite for that, because with that power comes (ala spiderman) the responsibility to actually fix things. And there's a hell of a lot more votes in complaining about things being broken than in trying to fix them.
I don't like Soviet cops. I'm just saying that "more left = fewer police" just isn't true. And, sure, what you're saying makes sense. But what percentage of the people who yell about policing issues even understand the distinction you're making? This is the whole point: we've had this collapse in basic left literacy, so that when people talk about being against the police, they don't even know what they're talking about. We can't have the conversation because there's no shared definitions, and no one wants to be the asshole who says "you need to read and develop coherent positions."
There are couple of different issues with what Tana is arguing here. First, tactically speaking, any slogan or idea that requires this level of explanation is a bad one. Consider what Martin Luther King once said about the phrase "Black Power": "I’ve said so often that I regret that the slogan Black Power came into being, because it has been so confusing. It gives the wrong connotation. It often connotes the quest for black domination rather than black equality. And it is just like telling a joke. If you tell a joke and nobody laughs at the joke and you have to spend the rest of the time trying to explain to people why they should laugh, it isn’t a good joke. And that is what I have always said
about the slogan Black Power. You have to spend too much time explaining what you are talking about. But it is a slogan that we have to deal with now."
Second, there are a lot of assumptions baked into the idea that resources from the police could be seamlessly transferred to another more useful social program and as a result, produce better overall outcomes. Police funding is largely tied up in collective bargaining agreements, so it is much easier to get rid of programs and units than it is to find efficiencies in existing ones. When moderate Democratic mayors warn that funding cuts could lead to layoffs based on seniority, which would jeopardize younger and more diverse hires, they're not entirely wrong.
So it seems a whole lot easier, tactically smarter, and even more correct on the merits to advocate for, say, more revenue to fund one's choice of social programs, than it is to put said programs into a zero-sum race for resources with police departments that typically enjoy the highest support of any part of a local budget.
I agree that defund is a bad slogan because, yes, you have to explain it. But where are you getting the info that the worst performers are departments with less money? First, rural departments get tons of federal money.
Clearance rates for rape and murder are equally low everywhere. Meanwhile, the most violent departments are big city like NYPD, LAPD, Chicago PD. The most violent individual cops even get paid the most because in the absence of any discipline you get ahead when you're more aggressive. Also, they're usually in elite plainclothes units whose only measure of success is seizure of contraband so obviously they abuse Terry stops.
At the same time, blue cities rely on real estate and tourist revenue so cops have more "quality of life" tasks they're pressured to deal with so you inherently have more low-level officer contacts with people.
And, also, stronger unions. Yes I am lefty enough. to be pro union but there's no arguing that the police unions are a positive force right now. Note the officers in the Tyre Nichols case got fired and charged two weeks after.
Anyway. But yes we can all agree the defund was a terrible slogan that drew a huge amount of backlash.
What stats show that NY, LA and Chicago are the worst cops? There are a number of terrible incidents or scandals that have plagued these departments, but Albuquerque, Baltimore, and as I highlighted, Vallejo, are actually more notorious in terms of actual rates of misconduct. Your point about lack of accountability is a deeply upsetting and frustrating one, but not one that is intrinsically tied to funding.
You did get me on reporter bias though, I mostly cover police in blue cities, because that's where I live. Yikes! But also ARE these other departments lacking in funding? Police funding is the one constant that all state legislatures never try to hack off, and then there's tons of federal funding.
Look at the ratio of cops to private citizens in the US to industrialized peers like Germany. The US has far fewer police to deal with much higher levels of crime.
There is an argument to be made that increasing the number of cops on the street to something approaching the level in Europe or Japan would result in a number of benefits like allowing for the police to spend more time per case, improving retention, improving response times, etc.
Definitively answering some of these questions about the correlation between funding and personnel per capita, and misconduct and clearance rates would require a degree of reporting and research I'm not equipped to provide right now. Maybe there are some well-funded departments that are also exceptionally bad. Suffice to say, the correlation between funding and performance is rarely exact because European nations often have higher numbers of police per capita" https://www.vox.com/2014/10/8/6939731/map-the-most-heavily-policed-countries-around-the-world
Regardless, let me again resort to a tactical argument: Given the challenge of reform with existing funding levels, what makes us think that coupling reform with austerity would have a higher chance of success?
And again, citing the power of police unions is an argument about the power of police unions -- a problem that is hard enough to solve on its own -- not funding per se.
I mean... I'm serious though when I say that there aren't any departments that are underfunded. Why do you think cops in Bumblefuck Iowa have Bearcats?
Are police unions positive? Did something change? In the past, "bad actors" would be excused of wrongdoing and then go to the union to sue to get their jobs back. I've always thought the power of police unions should be limited. Rather than defunding police, I think we should end or severely limit qualified immunity, demilitarize police, and decriminalize "victimless crimes." I think we could increase police funding if we want them to do it right--though we'd need a different model of policing, I think. I think people get to "defund" out of a mistrust of an authoritarian state, which of course, deserves to be mistrusted.
Right. But "limit qualified immunity, demilitarize police, and decriminalize "victimless crimes" — you're asking for a powerful institution to give up its power. That doesn't work without a serious incentive.
Any functional society will be based on people who follow the rules, go to work, and pay taxes. Whatever ideology the government adheres to, there's no possible alternative. I'm a chauvinist in that I believe that perhaps the people who do these things ought to have some say in governance.
Cops are not a different species. They are people, just like you. Honest question, if this issue is this important to you, have you considered becoming a police officer? If not, why not?
Not trying to single you out, but we've spent the last couple years as a society harping on this issue (and rightly so in some cases, others not so much, IMO). But despite the well-attended protests, I'm not aware of any effort by any of these people to actually go do these jobs. Why isn't the thousands of people who protested applying to become police officers the perfect solution? The fact that this hasn't happened at all, best I can tell, gives up the game. I suspect they know, deep down, the job is much more difficult and shades-of-gray than they make it out to be and wouldn't sign up for it under virtually any circumstances.
Yes many cops are people "just like me" in the sense that they don't go around framing and beating up teenagers. I'm saying that the cops who DO should be fired. We know who they are, there are at least three databases with officer CCRB complaints and lawsuits. I think "unless you become a police officer you have no right to criticize" is an absurd standard.
That makes sense actually. It's not gonna be me, I can't even do a pushup. But you're right that there's not like a single well-known case of a super passionate protestor joining a force.
Well, if you believe the current system is completely corrupt there's not a lot of incentive to participate in it. Even if you subscribe to the "change from the inside", you know you're going to need to participate in things you find morally objectionable for a long time, since that change will not be swift. I think this a coherent stance.
So, just march around out front and hope the completely corrupt decide to reform themselves based on the awesome slogans? That the plan?
The "police" is not some uniform, country-wide outfit. It's literally millions of independent units, with varying degrees of competence, corruption, etc. (although I don't think I would agree that any of them are "completely corrupt" but am willing to be convinced). The only way it gets better is for better people to decide to do the job. Until this movement decides policing is important enough for its members to actually do the job, I have a hard time seeing it as anything more than a pose. That doesn't mean that every member has to go apply, but when literally no one does, it's a sign.
Yes, I find it noteworthy that the same individuals who would demand that anybody who supported the Iraq War should enlist in the armed forces are suddenly averse to personal risk when it comes to reforming the police.
You act like marching around is a hopeless thing to do, but I don't think it is? It puts pressure on legislation, reform in trainings, reform of unions and punishments for officers. These things are in fact happening to different degrees all over the country. Whether or not they are going to fix much about what people don't like about police, personally I doubt it, but you hand wave away the effects of mass protest when I believe they are in fact very real.
Whenever I voice this opinion online i'm shouted down as racist for giving the police the power to arrest delivery workers or something...but delivery workers are only a small slice of the problem. Walking to work involves 4-5 jump scares each time and I was hit last year. NYC is classically a pedestrian city, but having to dodge bikes, scooters and sometimes motorcycles ON THE SIDEWALK makes me want to move.
The long term solution is to make more/safer bike paths—but is that happening? Are the cyclists using them? Is the police enforcing this?
Yeah it's a perfect example - early in the deBlasio administration there was an effort to rein it in, then people said it was racist, and it was dropped. Now every New Yorker experiences almost getting run down on the sidewalk every time.
I feel like what's missing from your essay is an expansion on what you say here in your second line. Once anyone or anything is labeled "racist", no matter how silly that accusation, many leftists cower in fear and run away. The situation you describe in your essay is driven by exactly this phenomenon. Policing, simply as an idea, has been labeled racist, and *this* is the reason your average media-addled leftist refuses to support the enforcement of rules and laws.
You can expand beyond the accusation of racism, and look at the myriad of words (mostly on the left, rarely on the right*) that have been operationalized as the beginning and end of a conversation when they're deployed--creep, cultural appropriation, colonizer**. Racism as a societal ill has historically had teeth, and is still kicking in many contexts, so it's not surprising that it has a long runout. But there's a good number of others--cultural appropriation is a great example--that just don't kick like they used to. I find it reassuring that, though people can be caught by surprise on the scale of a couple of years, the experiences of the general public have a long term centering effect on rhetoric.
Exhibit A: Here we are, talking about enforcing smoking bans on the subway in response to a progressive housing activists tweet asking for the same.
*Likely because they tend to get hotboxed in academia.
I visited Israel last year with my family (wife's father is originally Israeli) and I found it very interesting that in Tel Aviv (and maybe other Israeli cities) the lane for scooters and bikes was on the inside of the sidewalk, not the outside of the road. It seemed very unsafe to me, and I'd be interested to hear why that took that approach. I suppose it protects the bikers/scooter riders from cars, but I think the tradeoff is more pleasant for your average citizen the other way around.
This pops up in a few American cities, mostly on busier avenues, though with a sidewalk on each side of the bike path (not sure how it would work without one).
I've never had a problem with them as a pedestrian (they have their own walk signals, and dodging bikes when you're jaywalking is easy), and mile per mile imagine separating bikes and cars is safer, but I have an intense paranoia when making a right turn across them in a car; you're crossing another ersatz road when you do, and the approach speed, visibility, and lackadaisical attitude of cyclists towards traffic signals seems like a t-bone waiting to happen.
In Australian cities we are trying to deal with the popularity of e-scooters and e-bikes, and the fact that a percentage of their users ride them carelessly in pedestrian spaces, ride without helmets, ride doubled up, "park" them in the middle of footpaths and bicycle paths, etc. Different approaches are being pursued in different cities.
I lived in a small town in CO with the same problem. The offenders were almost always entitled middle-aged white men. Huge amounts of money were spent on bike trails and bike lines to cater to their hobby, with the result that grandmothers walking their little dogs on a pedestrian trail had to risk being yelled at to get out of the way. Driving risked being stuck behind packs of slow-moving cyclists. I now live in a large city, and the cyclists are far more polite. There's a cultural tipping point with bicyclists that should not be crossed.
All e-scooters should be immediately banned and people found driving them on sidewalks should be arrested. There is absolutely zero benefit provided from these devices but with massive degradation of the urban environment. It's inexcusable that they exist and I applaud the people of the City of Paris for being the first one to try and take a stand.
My vision of "defunding the police" is to figure out what problems are inefficiently addressed by simply dumping more cops onto the issue, and then put the money into addressing them more efficiently.
For example, in my city of Toronto, there is currently a TON of homeless people sheltering from shitty winter weather on public transit, and there were also many homeless encampments in parks over the summer. The conventional solution to this has been more (expensive) policing, which just plays whack-a-mole with homeless people, because there simply are not enough shelter spaces (much less supportive or affordable housing) to accommodate everyone.
Another example is road safety. It's much more effective to prevent collisions by designing streets that force you to drive slower and more carefully (as well as providing reasonable alternatives to driving) than it is to spend tons of money on cops with a speed gun.
Mental health is another good one. Plenty of examples of cities introducing mental health emergency response teams as alternatives to policing and the cops themselves saying "these guys are better at this than we are, and it means we're not tied up for hours on calls where we become social workers."
I work in public transit and one of the most common complaints of riders, after missed trips and insufficient service, are safety and anti-social behavior. I lived in Atlanta for 10 years and one of the features of their transit system is an app where you could report anonymously to the transit police (a lot of agencies have this). I forgot why, but I was in a reddit discussion talking about how well it seemed to work and told the story of two teenagers playing loud music on a packed train and refused twice to turn it off. About two stations later, transit police walked on and escorted the teens off the train and hopefully they just got a lecture about why they shouldn't do that. After recounting this story. I was immediately branded as a racist (even though I never mentioned race and I'm mixed race myself) and endangering the lives of the teens and other platitudes like "don't start shit, there won't be shit", which I found to be extremely anti-social and corrosive to society. I then explained that I just witnessed it, I didn't report it, that everyone from the teens, to the women who asked them to turn it down, to the cops, were all the same race, at which point they said I was making that up. To relate it back to this story, there seems to be this growing sentiment on a part of the left that you're a "Karen" or busybody if you see anti-social behavior and want it to stop. It's as if working class people wanting to ride home in peace after a long day at work is a bourgeoise or WASPy luxury.
"It's as if working class people wanting to ride home in peace after a long day at work is a bourgeoise or WASPy luxury."
The thing is, it sort of is. Many societies worldwide don't have these things. Granted, in many of them, actual anti-social behavior on mass transit is less usual than the problem of discomfort and overcrowding. But to have both a relatively comfortable vehicle and a ridership that is respectful, non-violent, and quiet... these *are* luxuries, globally speaking. There are places where your option is a shared minivan filled to over 200% of its recommended capacity, but everyone is respectful and polite, and then there are places where the bus is half-empty but could get shot up at any time. Societies that have neither of these are pretty few and far between. (Urban Thailand is one that I can think of, off the top of my head, and much of western Europe as well.)
Off the top of my head I can think of Japan, S. Korea, the developed parts of China--and most of the United States outside of hotspots like poor inner city neighborhoods. Most of the people living in suburbia don't worry about catching a bullet regardless of what they're doing.
That's fair. Add most of Europe and North America to that and you've got a decent coverage of the globe, but still a minority of the population and one that coalesces strongly among countries with a strong middle class.
And urban cores in the United States are notorious for driving out said middle class. If you want safe public transportation and you live in El Salvador you have to figure out how to get to the US somehow or another first world country peer. If you live in NYC and you want safe public transportation get a job upstate (or in flyover country) and move. The barriers are much lower and as a consequence the country is seeing migration out of big cities and both coasts.
One could add that It's bourgeoise and WASPy to think that only bourgeoise and WASPy people would like a public transit trip that is drama free. Having had to use public transit most of my life in the places I've lived to commute and worked crummy jobs, I see plenty of regular working class folks that just want a quiet ride home because they're so exhausted.
I rarely saw the bourgeoise falling asleep from sheer exhaustion on the bus unless they were taking the last train home from a night of revelry and were passing out from too much drinking.
I'm not using bourgeoise and WASPy as negative terms, to start with, so you can call it what you like. My contention wasn't that workers didn't *want* these things, but rather that in much of the world they don't *get* these things. The kind of cultures that have shown the capability to offer reliable mass transit that is both comfortable and non-dangerous are almost universally cultures that have a strong middle class. Places with dangerous mass transit, such as much of Central America, don't have a middle class to speak of. Places with crowded and uncomfortable transit, such as parts of southern Africa, have a small middle class but mostly an insulated upper class that would never dream of sharing transit with anyone, and a huge working class (and underclass) that has no other option.
In other words a lot of people think they can have the niceties of a society with a strong middle class without having something so gauche and retrograde as the actual, troublesome middle class itself. Maybe they can, but there's scant evidence of it so far. Countries with a small upper class and a massive proletariat generally have pretty poor mass transit that delivers the bare minimum (move people from A to B) with nothing more than that, and in places like South Africa it has the spicy addition of gang wars between rival taxi operators (taxi being the local word for a shared minivan, as opposed to cab) in which passengers all too often get caught in the crossfire.
I think your position is true where there isn't a working/middle class cohort that demands things like clean mass transit. I know when I used the trains in Spain and Germany, people were orderly and stations pretty clean. The only people really making noise were the teenagers. But having not used transit in Asia, I can't speak to that. I know my friend spent 6 months in Japan and he was floored by how orderly the chaos was handled.
I know using public transit very much is a class thing. It's much like walking and riding a bike to commute to work. When it's out of necessity...it's frowned upon by anyone who can afford a car but also seen as a luxury choice for those who can live close enough to walk / ride to work because they can afford to.
Exactly, and that class needs to be sufficiently empowered to do so. I'm sure most working class South Africans would much rather have a nice bus with aircon instead of a crowded combi with springs sticking out of the seats, but when the country has trouble keeping the lights on that's probably not something too easy to mobilize towards.
On the "plus" side if someone started smoking they'd have their cigarette taken off them; if someone started masturbating they would receive - and the absolute minimum - the beating of a lifetime. So at least some standards will be upheld. Somehow.
You're confusing quiet and orderly with safe and respectful. Not everyone can have the former, but the latter is much more important. Yes, a spacious, air-conditioned bus is better than a crowded one, but the difference is smaller than between a crowded minibus where you're in no danger and a crowded minibus full of violent, unruly young men. There are plenty of countries where public transit is safe but not comfortable.
'Ride home in peace' means exactly that. I could get into a dabaab in Sanaa and while I'd be cramped (and occasionally have to rearrange to make sure the seating arrangement respected local gender roles) I never felt unsafe or harrassed. In other cities, you feel a papable tension in shared taxis. It's a world of difference between the two, and people mostly want the 'safety' and 'respect' parts. That isn't, and shouldn't, be a luxury, and you shouldn't impose your definition of comfort on places that might not share it. In some societies, sharing a vehicle and not speaking to anyone in it is eerie and uncomfortable to many.
Cope. 99 people out of 100 would prefer not to be cramped and regard being cramped as a discomfort. Show your fellow passengers an air-conditioned Benz with reclining seats and they'll make a beeline for it. It'll be less exotic for the visitor but locals will prefer it virtually every time.
Haha cope? Should I seethe as well? Have I been owned? God what a sad comment. Regardless, given that I concede that point directly in my comment, we don't actually disagree on anything. Genuinely disappointed that the quality of discourse here is also 'sad teenager on Twitter' level.
You said I was "confusing" two different things, quiet and orderly on the one hand and safe and respectful on the other. I did no such thing; my very first post on the subject made it clear that just because something is crowded and uncomfortable does not make it unsafe or a place lacking respect.
You then said that by conflating these I also ran the risk of dismissing peoples' definition of comfort. And here we definitely do disagree. In every single place in the world where shared taxis/combis/whatever were once dominant, but are now not dominant, *every single one* of these places has shown no desire to return to how things were. When they can replace combis with Benzes they do so, and they don't look back. Again, less romantic for the visitor, but hardly some kind of imposition.
The cope is because you've halfway convinced yourself that crowded, shared minicabs are some kind of expression of shared culture that's valued in and of itself. They're not. They may incidentally show how people act in crowded spaces - respectfully, usually - but it's just that: incidental. The microsecond they can spread out across two seats and enjoy the AC, they do so, 100% of the time. Again, were this not true, you'd be able to point to a society where they've replaced crowded transit with non-crowded transit, only for everyone to eschew it (for non-economic reasons) and sit in the back row with six old ladies and a goat. It literally never, ever happens, and nor will it ever happen. The single, only time this ever happens is if it's economic necessity. It never, ever happens for cultural reasons, regardless of how exciting it makes your travel stories.
>The cope is because you've halfway convinced yourself that crowded, shared minicabs are some kind of expression of shared culture that's valued in and of itself.
This wasn't my read on their comment at all. Cut the "cope" shit.
Yes, people would prefer to be more comfortable. But people withstand all manner of discomfort all the time, either on crowded buses and subway cars, or walking home in the rain, or walking past piles of black trash bags on the street in NY. Would people rather those things not be like that? Of course. Are they a different kind of experience from someone smoking in the car or being physically aggressive? Also yes.
That you compared "200% over capacity" with "risk getting shot up" shows you don't really understand that distinction. (Cue "actually I rode the bus for 57 years, with three people to each seat, and I was shot every day on my way to and from work").
This happens all the time in the main West Philly Facebook group. Best example was somebody burying their dead dog in a sidewalk planter. Some people were saying "different cultures grieve in different ways, we should be sensitive" (these people were white). Then a Black neighbor commented "what the hell is wrong with you all, this is not okay no matter their race." To deny that there's diversity of opinion on these matters is itself racist.
Well, it depends on the neighborhood. I lived in WP for years, and the places I lived in were pretty good. Of course, I haven’t been there much in recent years, so maybe they’ve deteriorated some.
I'm no fan of Daniel Lavery (I'm supicious of agony uncles and aunts etc. full stop) but that strikes me as a judicious, balanced response. A dead baby is not equivalent to a dead dog and a privately owned cot is not equivalent to a public sidewalk planter.
I think a lot of this has to do with not wanting to be a "Karen." No one wants to be a buzzkill and I think it's easy to adopt some vaguely progressive-sounding justifications to cover the fact that you (general you) are just conflict-avoidant. I say all this as someone who keeps putting off asking her neighbors to stop smoking pot in the stairwell every day. Cowardice feels bad. You may as well make up some reasons for it.
It's one thing to respond this way if asked what you would do in that situation directly, but to go onto social media and pronounce how *you* think this is racist/dangerous/wrong/etc. is a different story.
This is a great post and I think pairs well with this one- that if you want to give special dispensations to groups in need then you must ensure that those dispensations aren’t abused: https://dilanesper.substack.com/p/the-left-has-a-problem-with-cheaters
That's an excellent post. There was a recent scandal in the UK about vulnerable people having their gas supplies cut off, and it left me nonplussed because decades ago I worked in that business and for every vulnerable person there were five people just not bothering paying their bills. Do we just give them free heating for life? Or do we have to enforce, and police, and require the vulnerable to jump through hoops?
I've said this about the conduct of the local homeless population. It's male aggression and male entitlement. Economic deprivation does not absolve anyone of responsibility, nor does it nullify anyone else's expectations that other people follow rules. Mental illness is different, but that's not the topic.
Middle-class people have a right to expect that the rules they follow will be enforced. Their expectations are valid, and constantly telling them to follow rules when there are so many exceptions undermines the whole social contract. It's a power game, and it's obvious.
There's an implicit accusation that middle class people are somehow responsible for homelessness, and dealing with the discomfort is their penance. This is nonsense.
That's a shell game. Homelessness is a separate issue from beating off on the subway. No one is entitled to indulge their antisocial behaviors just because they're unhoused.
If they opposed building an asylum in town I would agree with you.
No one is homeless in downtown Houston because the residents of Friendswood, Tx declined to build an apartment building. It’s slightly more complicated than that.
"Excuse me, I support zoning reform -- could you please take your masturbation to the other end of the car?"
Sorry, I think I agree with you in principle! It sounded funny is all.
Depends what you mean by expect, doesn't it?
There are moral expectations and then there are predictions of the future. And while homelessness doesn't make unpleasant behaviour okay, it does make it inevitable.
Homelessness, like extreme wealth, makes it very difficult to impose consequences on a person. So naturally it leads to increased rates of bad behaviour. Especially in small and petty ways, ways too small to reasonably get the police involved.
You can argue that the homeless should behave better anyway, and on some level you'll be right, but "should" doesn't count for much. If you leave a pile of money outside with a note saying "please do not steal", you're going to lose it all.
Opportunity makes the thief. Or the vandal, or the public harasser. Every population contains people who would be behaving terribly if not for their fear of consequences; remove the consequences from the population, and you'll get a good look at those people.
I don't understand the logic here. If someone is found breaking, let's say, the laws of public decency, how does their status as a homeowner impede the consequences of breaking said laws?
To be clear I support enforcing the law regardless of one's housing status, race, gender, age, etc. With that said they're commenting that for a homeless person 3 hots and a cot isn't a real threat vs for you or I getting arrested would cause all sorts of issues.
That part, I understand. It's the unwillingness to enforce laws I don't. In this scenario, the basic living conditions of food and shelter sound more like an enticement, and not a threat, imprisonment notwithstanding. You're right that a personal arrest would cause me a few issues. But, as to the question of basic expectations: I don't expect behaviors as much as I expect that laws attempting to shape them should be enforced.
Who said anything about being unwilling to enforce laws?
Homeless people get arrested all the time. It just doesn't accomplish much. And it's never going to accomplish much, either.
You can arrest someone for pooping on the street. But that action won't actually reduce the amount of poop on the street in the future unless it scares the arrestee, the bystanders, or both.
And bear in mind, there's a lot of stuff we'd like to discourage that doesn't rise to the level of real crime. Stuff that's normally "punished" by other people thinking ill of you. The chronically homeless generally don't have to worry about offending friends, family, or colleagues, so the normal social pressures aren't in place for them.
Right, I understand what you’re saying about social consequences. You said it was difficult to impose consequences. But I don’t understand how it’s difficult to enforce legal consequences on the basis of home ownership.
I don’t expect anyone to legislate against shamelessness as it relates to things which are not criminal, but enforcing the law acts to realize the law itself as real, and legitimate, and actionable. I wish more people lived above the scope of most societal pressure, frankly.
So if I move to NYC, not only are there mice and rats galore, I can at least wash my ass in the conference room without someone complaining to Feline Resources that i am making her uncomfortable?!?
Tell me more!
I'm admittedly spitballing here, but it doesn't seem that long ago that the left believed their ideas could not only withstand debate but would triumph. The plan seemed to be to win people over with the power of their ideas. For whatever reason, that strategy seems to have been abandoned in favor of bumper sticker propaganda. It's as though someone decided winning on the merits is just not worth pursuing anymore. Not sure how we got here.
Because the left subsequently got the whip hand.
The thing with power is that it attracts sociopaths the way catnip attracts cats.
I don't think sociopathy is limited to one team, and as I pointed out, power is hella attractive to the sociopath.
I've studied Rao, too. It is important to remember he makes heavy use of metaphor.
Once you start identifying as the party of the college educated the next step is to realize that college graduates are a minority of the population. Somehow the gap was supposed to be made up by working class minorities (because working class whites were the apotheosis of the opposition). Of course, that's not really working out.
This is, no doubt, true. But I just find it extremely odd that academics, of all people, now seem to be the most dedicated to sticking their fingers in their ears and refusing to listen, debate, learn, etc. It's almost as though a significant subset of higher ed has decided that learning itself is a fool's errand.
"For one thing, there is something about getting too involved in theoretical work that makes you absolutely unable to deal with physical reality or even things outside your area of expertise."
Absolutely! Most of the academics I know are extremely smart and interesting people but I'm often surprised by how hard of a time they have with the type of practical but necessary bullshit I spend most of my time dealing with at my office job. Academics are like one of those weird animal species that's uniquely suited to some extreme environment that most species would not survive, but those same adaptations make them uniquely unsuited to the rest of the world that's more hospitable to everyone else.
The numbers just aren't there. And a good part of how the left identifies itself these days is as a self conscious elite. The very definition of the term "elite" implies that the numbers just aren't there. In a democracy that means perpetual banishment to the fringes of power.
That's the first half. What about widening the base by persuasion, perhaps dialogue with those working class white voters and their allies? That unfortunately is where the term "deplorables" comes into play.
Of course people who have spent their entire professional lives defending and developing particular ideas will be very reluctant to admit that those ideas, when implemented, produced bad results. What about that would be unintuitive? Their credibility and their careers aren't about some abstract *learning*; they're about having access to correct information, which can be imparted to others. If they don't have correct information, why should they have their privileged positions and status?
The more I think about it the more strange it seems that the people in our society who have the highest level of theoretical knowledge of any given subject are the least likely to have any practical knowledge of it since they've spent their entire lives in school and have never actually worked in any industry or actively participated in the running of society. That doesn't really matter for something like biochemistry or physics or literature where the subject itself is mostly confined to academic research but it seems like it would matter a hell of a lot for anything involving public policy.
Never underestimate the conformism of academics. In our particular meritocracy, one’s merit is fundamentally defined by the opinions of one’s colleagues. Stepping out of line and even implying that one is a member of the out group can be a death sentence to an academic career.
Historically the socialist and labour movements in advanced capitalist societies were a coalition of two social types - the humanistic intellectual and the politicised industrial worker. The most successful such movements were those that managed to get the balance right between, and positively managed the tensions between, these two groups.
Any such coalition based on dividing the economic spoils is not possible in the US in the present day because a core goal of the professional managerial class is economic self interest. Look at the rise of credentialism for example as a defense mechanism designed to raise barriers against class promotion and keep the money where it is.
Credentialism isn't a barrier against class promotion; it's an ass-covering move by risk-averse HR types ("Don't fire me, there was no way of knowing that Jones was so incompetent - he went to Brown!") and in some cases a bad substitute for the competency and/or IQ tests which used to be administered to job candidates, but have increasingly run afoul of hyper-aggressive "civil rights" lawyers.
Both sides largely gave up on winning over undecideds, based on political theory saying it was more effective to rile up the base, and by rhetoric that branded the other side as racist misogynistic theocratic fascists/atheistic queer baby-murdering groomers. Its far easier to stir up hate than to have a nuanced conversation, and now we have *strategies* telling us it works better. (It may, in the short run, but it's killing democracy over time).
It doesn't even make sense because there is every indication that raising one party's turnout just drives turnout in the opposing party. When the country is evenly divided between left and right the only path to victory is persuading the middle.
Yes! Thank you! I am old enough that I remember a time when smoking was ubiquitous. My mom had eye surgery in the late 70s, and her roommate in the hospital was a chain smoker. People on the left worked hard to get smoking banned in indoor spaces so that people would be protected from smelly, toxic fumes on the job.
And now we seem to have backslid, to the point where some people on the left think it’s wrong to object to nasty behavior in public. But it is not a left position to allow some people to hurt other people; quite the contrary, we on the left should be speaking out against bullies, and praising those who, like this woman, spoke up for regular people who would like to get to work unmolested, by smoke, by harassment, or by anything else.
Making a post on twitter does not constitute "speaking up" in any sense. This fundamental misunderstanding is a huge part of why left "activists" have become such a joke.
Of course it does. This is exactly the kind of thing that gets a bucket of hot gooey shit dumped on someone's desk at SEPTA. What relevant alternative for "speaking up" would you suggest? Should she buy a soapbox and stand on it in the market square? Write a strongly worded letter to the editor?
I'm sure there are ways to contact SEPTA directly. Only morons use twitter, and over time it just makes them even dumber. Never worth it.
"Privately contact government agency in the hope they'll solve systemic problem."
You sure you're not the moron here?
twitter has only ever made systemic problems worse. Pretending otherwise is not helpful.
It's also nuts that someone says "I would like people to not engage in behaviour that is actively harmful to the people around them" and everyone jumps to "so you're saying we need cops???" as if there is *no* other way to enforce or influence standards of behaviour than gun-toting agents of the state.
In Toronto, we used to have these models of streetcars wherein if you stood on the steps, the doors could not close. When it was really busy & full during rush hour, you'd sometimes have people jam themselves up onto the steps anyway because they didn't want to wait for the next streetcar, and obviously the streetcar cannot proceed if the door is just hanging open.
Very quickly, you would have half the people on the streetcar all yelling and shaming this person to "get the FUCK off the steps so we can all get to work" which had a 90% success rate. The other 10% were taken care of by the streetcar driver joining in on yelling at the person over the intercom. Never saw a cop called.
This of course does not apply to every situation and every person, but I think there is a normal distribution of people who respond to different structures, incentives, social norms, etc and calling for more "middle" tactics to influence behaviour isn't necessarily calling for more policing.
If I was to tweet "I would like to be able to ride my bicycle down the street without fearing being hit by a car," I (personally) wouldn't be calling for more police, but rather for better cycling infrastructure, better-designed roads, more transit to get people out of cars, education campaigns, etc.
I worked at Starbucks for a couple years that was located beside a strip club, homeless shelter, subway station, weed store, and worst of all, 24/7 McDonalds.
We had a really nice homeless guy that came in every morning for a tea, until my manager (a 5"2 wisp of a woman) had to ban him from the store because another customer saw him jack off under the table into a Christmas cup, and then....he never came back.
I had to kick a guy out who was harassing a table of teenage girls and he got up in my face to yell racist, sexist slurs at me. I gave him a dead-eye stare and didn't really react, and then...he left and didn't come back.
I told off the bouncer who worked next door at the strip club who kept asking my co-worker out to have a threesome with him & his wife, and...he stopped.
I set boundaries with the creepy regular who always wanted to "help us close" who turned out to be a legit murderer/rapist who'd been in jail for 15 years. For that one, he stopped coming because he got arrested again for child porn and trying to lure a 14 y/o girl over the internet, which is a use case of the police that I support.
The only times I ever needed to call the cops was when I was required to by store policy, i.e. to file an incident report because a customer was sitting on the patio and got punched by some random walking by who ran away. Otherwise, our liberal arts major barista team of girls and gays did a decent job at managing people's shitty behaviour on our own.
The other day, I was waiting at a bus shelter (the little ones that are on the street and have three sides) and a guy joined, smoking, and I said, "sorry, can you not smoke in here?" and he apologized and stepped onto the sidewalk.
But yes, thankfully I am not American and don't have to worry about everyone around me being armed to the teeth. I do get threats from drivers for telling them off when they park in the bike lane, though.
With regards to prevention, IDK about cigarettes, but I've seen people do drugs on the subway or in parks, and (to an extent) safe consumption sites can help prevent that. For people jerking off in public, (some) percentage of that can likely be cut down by access to housing or mental health/addiction supports.
I never really understood the legality of safe consumption sites. They seem to be places in which laws surrounding illicit drug use don't apply.
A few years back I was hanging out with friends at the downtown pedestrian mall. Some homeless guy catcalled a girl walking by, my friend told him off, they went chest to chest and neither wanted to back down and then we brawled up and down the mall. And when I say up and down the mall I mean it because one of those homeless guys ran off to get some buddies, resulting in two separate fights over the course of two or three blocks. Another friend got hit in the head with a bike lock a couple of times, I pinned some guy to the ground with a knee in his chest and punched him in the head a bunch of times and one of the homeless guys almost died because my friend stabbed him in the throat with a pocket knife. Good times, good times.
This is a significant point. Anti-social behaviour in public spaces is often a result of a psychiatric impairment and/or some form of intoxication. People in such a condition will generally be beyond the reach of peer group pressure, and it could be dangerous for ordinary members of the public to intervene with them. Such people will require some form of management by a cadre of professional people with the specialised skills required for that task - if not the police, then some other duly constituted and immediately recognisable compliance agency.
I agree, civilians confronting people who aren't in their right minds isn't a great idea. That's where the various non-police mental health crisis intervention teams come in, of trained, unarmed professionals who are there respond to people in crisis. Toronto started a pilot last year and it's shown really good results so far.
Even the cops have admitted that their presence alone will often escalate situations and makes them worse (https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/toronto-community-crisis-service-mental-health-1.6548427). I had a conversation with an acquaintance that's married to a cop back in 2020, and we didn't agree on much, but she did say that an absurd amount of her husband's time was devoted to responding to mental health calls that he wasn't really trained or equipped to deal with.
Prison is also a contributing factor. I get that it's important as a deterrent, but you can't just throw the offenders together and then throw them away. In understaffed, under-equipped facilities, the worst of the inmates end up running things. Bad prisons- which is most of them-are criminogenic. https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/06/cca-private-prisons-corrections-corporation-inmates-investigation-bauer/
Most of the incarcerated end up on the streets again. Some more damaged than before. Many of them having been taught all the wrong lessons of the power of threat, intimidation, and violence.
I've met some shining lights, too, individuals who didn't let it break them, and members of groups in prison who refused to degrade themselves and kept both inward and outward sense of discipline while imprisoned. (Fwiw, the people I met like that were African Americans; I only have a small number of anecdotes of any sort about convicts relating their experiences to me, and my sample was not random.) And the outside society often has nothing to reward them for that, on their return to the free world.
It's a broken system. But we're stuck with it, until we find the fortitude to stop the criminogenic Prohibition regime and improve conditions for the people who are living inside the walls (and this includes the COs.) If the only alternative is to allow impunity to perpetrators of serious and violent offenses, prison is still a vast improvement over nothing. Even given its potential to make matters worse in some ways.
Perhaps an AI-powered water cannon mounted on the carriage could extinguish lit cigarettes.
`People on the left worked hard to get smoking banned...indoor[s]' and `we on the left should be speaking out against bullies'
I do appreciate the qualifier of `indoors' but liberals were the bullies when it came to outdoor smoking bans. First we had to be X feet from building doors, then business could no longer decide if they allowed smoking indoors, and then smoking was banned outside (parks, college campuses, etc). None of this (aside from the indoor part) was based on solid science but rather a sneering condescension about what's right and not wanting to have to experience, however, briefly what's distasteful.
The common thread between then and now is that liberals seem to be willing to disregard quite a bit when they're morally certain about the righteousness of their cause.
This is fair. I am not a smoker, but I love the smell of cigarette smoke when I catch a whiff outdoors, and I agree that outdoor smoke is not a threat to anyone. The outdoor bans were needlessly punitive.
Good god Freddie, you have no excuse.... we have been here before, your thinking lost for the same reason then!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I7d6VCFeGHI
Honestly Freddie watch the whole movie, it's hilarious and free- AND BTW thats the kind of socialism (digital) you have HAVE!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcUv4dAiCkA
I know you think you desperately need "digital property" to be treated like it's atomic- but you are wrong
https://www.morganwarstler.com/post/35224055375/digital-socialism-atomic-capitalism
AND I wish you had spoken to me about before you finished your book. I'm sure you cover Roland Fryer Jr...
But, you could have focused on my tech solution based on his work: Hassle Tracker>
When cops do stops (hassles) for smoking or ticket or anything else, they should be FORCED to use a mobile app to write tickets basically - that ALSO documents location (automatic), race and outcome (automatic).
THEN we can just rank cops LIVE by who they ticket and don't and ALL cops will self-police- bc lighter on blacks, tougher on whites, etc to even their %s out.
This isnt complicated stuff, EVERYTHING policy wise gets more easily solved when you start with a a mobile app.
Smoke em if you got em. Obviously. Ok. Next issue.
Great podcast! Subscribe!
https://smokeempodcast.substack.com/
Ugh. Again, as always, thanks for this. One should be able to handle multiple thoughts and feelings at the same time. I consider myself well-left-of-center. I believe that civil disobedience is right in some cases. And I also believe that the concept of rule-of-law, carried out fairly and consistently, rocks. Just rocks. I grew up in some pretty lawless places, and a) lawlessness sucks, specially for poor people; and b) when confronted with anarchy/chaos, the majority will always opt for a strongman to bring "order." So—no, thanks. (Yes, history: many of these "leftists" look back at the hippie/rowdy late 60's with nostalgia, but conveniently forget that Nixon won twice.) So yes, please do not effing smoke on the subway.
The skyrocketing amount of antisocial behavior in public spaces makes me feel like I'm losing my mind. I do not have a car and have to take the train in Minneapolis most days and it's a mess. A woman was beaten within an inch of her life in the middle of the day on a train platform in the middle of the day on Monday.
People are completely unable to admit that they were wrong on the merits about the "no rules" thing. It's not working. Things were not like this ten years ago. We stopped enforcing the rules and conditions deteriorated, badly. It preceded the pandemic. You started letting people smoke meth on the train, you started letting kids throw chairs at teachers, you started letting people blow red lights, you started letting people carry trash bags of merchandise out of stores, and now this is what things are like. This is not complicated. It doesn't need to be unpacked by a six month series of public meetings organized by $1,000 an hour consultants that produce a 50 page PDF recommending another series of meetings. Jesus! Christ!
The shame of it is that it needs to get a lot worse before it will get better.
I got out of the city and do what I can to protect my family. I'll leave the Defund the Police crowd to figure it out for themselves.
With that said good luck to you and do what you need to do in the mean time.
I can't help but notice that crime rates in the US rose from roughly 1960 to about 1992. Then they declined until about 2014.
That's two thirty year cycles. Now of course crime is rising again, dramatically. It's a small sample size but I have to wonder if we're in for another couple of decades of deteriorating social conditions before things turn around again.
Makes sense to me. Crime rises - people get scared - they support tougher policing - crime goes down - people aren't as scared - they get more concerned about over policing - they advocate for looser enforcement - crime rises - people get scared - etc.
Classic cycle.
Tougher policing often seems to make the problem worse, especially when there are criminals among the police.
I don't think there's a totally agreed upon reason crime fell from the mid 90s into the 2010s, but I do believe most who study it attribute at least some of that remarkable decline to heavier policing
It's the illicit market empowered by Prohibition. Except that the original Prohibition only lasted 14 years, and the Drug Prohibition Era has lasted long enough to entrench the market long enough that the children of the children of the gangsters are now grownups.
There was a huge uptick in violence associated with the street market in the 1990s, and then the drug territory thing got sorted out, coincidental to the drug fad of crack abating. And then pagers and cellphones came along, which transformed the market in both drugs and prostitution, to make the retail activity more discreet. But the underlying market situation has never been addressed. The profits from the illicit drug market were eventually tied to another market transformation- the increasing reliance on immigrant sex trafficking, both in the US and worldwide. The upshot of all of that is that Crime Pays, if you're a gangster. If you can do the time, you're able to enjoy the benefits of doing the crime. Not a great message to send to your kids, who may or may not show up every now and then at visiting hours, or talk to you on the phone. It's so predictable. And so unnecessary. Now we're in several generations deep, and it's going to take a lot more effort and expenses to turn things around than if the situation had simply been honestly addressed back in the 1970s. The recommendations were there.
Yeah, but cell phones and pagers are still around. In fact now we have pagers on steroids in the form of smart phones. The technology that allows for low profile financial transactions in both drugs and prostitution is still there and in fact is better than ever. Somehow though the violent crime rate has exploded.
The violent crime rate has gone up. It hasn't "exploded."
Like I said, the underlying situation- the conditions of the illicit markets that have made a life of crime an attractive proposition- have not been addressed. And the accumulation of high-powered firearms, decade upon decade, has allowed something of a surplus to influence the children in households where those weapons are taken for granted as part of the life of crime. Unfortunately, the situation has persisted for so long that more than drug law reform is going to be required in order to return American society to a stable baseline. The collateral damage of the criminalized social milieu of the illegal drugs trade- from drug dealer culture- is an order of magnitude greater than it was in the 1970s. That's distinct from the harms resulting from drug abuse and addiction, which have also been exacerbated by the pariah status of drug users and the social milieu of the illicit market, but which haven't played nearly as much of a role in terms of corruption and the embrace of criminality as resistance. Generally speaking, people who are children of alcoholics/addicts uncomplicated by prison records don't face challenges as severe as children who have a parent with a felony record, or a record of criminal recividism. I don't want to minimize the problems of drug abuse and addiction, but the criminalized economy creates an antisocial milieu that undermines values and encourages violent acting out in ways that no mere status of addiction can match. The negative effect isn't merely additive, it's synergistic.
The jump in the homicide rate from 2019 to 2020 was literally the largest year on year increase in modern recorded history for the United States. The per capita homicide rate now in the US is the worst it's been since 1996 or so, wiping out almost 30 years of progress in falling crime rates. And for poor blacks the per capita homicide rate is at least as bad as it's ever been in modern American history. In places like Chicago it's literally worse than in the bad old 1980's and 1990's.
I would argue that the increase in violent crime rates is historic (#1 increase ever for homicides) and for that reason qualifies as "explosive". And for increases of that magnitude I can't help but feel that something fundamental to society has been altered.
Well hell yeah. The difference between the criminal economy attendant to 14 years of alcohol prohibition and the 50 years since the illicit economy of forbidden drugs became a multibillion-dollar proposition is at least an order of magnitude. The illicit drugs economy has been over $100 billion since the early 1980s. Now it's probably five times that amount.
The Blackstone Rangers, El Rukn, and other gangs were a notable presence in Chicago even in the 1960s, but they got an infusion of illicit cash from the drug trade that's made them something like a parallel government in the city since the 1980s. That's why the homicide clearance rate is so low (despite recent efforts to artificially inflate it.)
The whole "drugs and gangs" thing in general, that was insignificant as a national phenomenon before the 1980s. Americans who were born after 1970 really have no recollection of how marginalized that societal institution was, outside of a handful of the largest cities. Now there are gangs- nationally affiliated organized crime groups- in places like Hazleton, Pennsylvania, and Omaha, Nebraska. Now our gangs aren't just African American and Chinese and Irish and Mexican, with an aggregate membership of under 100,000, the way it was in the 1960s. Now the US has hundreds of gangs, and millions of gang members. Recent immigrant populations to the US from all over the world are gang-affiliated. The seed capital to entrench them came from drugs. The number of members of prison gangs- in prison, right now- run to the hundreds of thousands. As one of my psychology professors- a woman who also worked in the California prisons- told our class in 1989: "and ALL of them have kids." An exaggeration, perhaps, but only a slight one. As a one-sentence summary, basically accurate.
A statement like that would doubtless be torn apart as "racist" by bliss ninnies on Twitter these days, but the woman who said that was a left-liberal lesbian feminist. She didn't mention race in her lecture. AC was speaking as a realist- not in some bogus "race realist" sense of spurious inferences drawn from enthrallment to some shoddy metric or another; she was just stating facts. The title of her lecture was "The Mad and the Bad"; about the cornered and neglected Crazy, who don't belong behind bars, and the Violent Predators, who do. She understood what anyone who's had much interaction with prison convicts knows: siring children is a majorly important status signifier in the probative masculinity of career criminality, no matter the ethnic group in question. Not necessarily raising them; that's held as optional. Raising children is often functionally impossible, for anyone in the revolving door of the prison system. But siring kids is as much proof of Manhood as the willingness to engage in physical violence. Part of the Crips motto: "we don't die, we multiply." The Crips just happen to explicitly state what everyone else in the gang life is thinking and doing, too. I mean, you don't think the Aryan Brotherhood think the same way?
For decades on end, that's what granting a de facto monopoly over the drugs trade to criminals has done. The retail trade runs at least $250 billion annually, and it employs as many people as the fast food industry. As David Simon points out in his book The Corner, the dope selling industry is recession-proof! As long as someone's okay with doing the time, they always have a livelihood waiting for them on the outside, doing the crime in a glamor profession. Dangerous, but that only adds to the glamor. At least until one ends up under the lawn, or in a wheelchair. But that's life as a "soldier", hmm?
"I can't help but feel that something fundamental to society has been altered."
Do tell. We didn't have all these TV programs like "America's Toughest Prisons" and "Drugs, Inc." back in the year 2000. We did already have the prisons, and the industry. The TV programs merely provide a benchmark of its success, in its bid to become a permanent feature of American Life.
>accumulation of high-powered firearms
We should note that most murders are committed with relatively low-powered firearms.
for crying out loud...ALL firearms are high powered, compared to what was available when the Second Amendment was ratified.
The things you highlight as not happening 10 years ago were happening 10 years ago. You probably didn't notice it and/or were unaware of it because many of those things weren't viral sensations on social media. People acting like bad behavior and crime is just a sudden thing the last decade is remarkably laughable because it illustrates the impacts of social media on people's perceptions that the world has gone to hell in the bag lady's handcart.
There's a social phenomena that relates to when a crime is happening (say a public beating, etc) where people will stop and watch...waiting for someone else to take action/call the police instead of interceding themselves. My friend said this happened in NYC quite often in the early 2000s when he lived there. I saw/heard of similar situations happening in DC in the 2000s when I lived there until 2009.
Here in New Orleans we had roving bands of kids that stole strollers off of people's porches and did stick-ups on their bicycles. Then it went away...then a few years later it was car-jackings and catalytic converter thefts and the latest is serial car window break-ins looking for handguns.
Subjective bias is an issue. But at the same time violent crime rates, especially homicide, have spiked since the pandemic and have remained elevated. In terms of crime it does look like it makes sense to talk about the US before the pandemic versus the new post-pandemic normal that we reside in now.
It's true. I know in New Orleans crime is a big issue the last 4 years. It waned and was on the decline from 2010-2018ish and then started going up. But it wasn't the rate of crime so much as the violence of crime committed and that stuff gets very sensationalized down here.
When we talk about crime it's very situational as it's the immediacy of the crime rate that people consider vs the overall crime rate over a period of time. And slow change is hard to observer sometimes. I watched my neighborhood go from a colorful transitional neighborhood to a very desirable, safe and bourgeoise in the span of 10 years. But 3 blocks away, mid-day shootings were still occurring near schools.
I still consider New Orleans safe but it requires one to be self-aware about where and when to go to certain parts of town or avoid all together.
I took the train ten years ago. People were not regularly smoking meth on the train ten years ago. Again: Jesus! Christ!
Haha....it was crack back then baby
All of the '90's crackheads were dead by the 2000's and all the kids who grew up watching them knew to stay the fuck away from crack. So there was a brief period where things were genuinely better, before the current downturn.
That is actually a historical fact, and reported on at the time.
I was thinking that we had turned the corner, on the hard drug thing. And then Oxycontin raged through workplaces and high schools in the 1990s, beginning in the Appalachian region and expanding outward.
It was as if the DARE program had concentrated exclusively on the perils of marijuana and cocaine without paying even minimal attention to the hazard of prescription pills and how dangerous it was to combine many of those drugs with alcohol, while the doctors were being propagandized by corporate pharma commission salespeople that oxycodone had been magically transformed into a non-addictive opioid because time release, even though the most commonly prescribed amounts in the pills were often at least 6 times that of good old fashioned 5mg Percodan.
oh wait, that's actually what happened.
And 15 years after that, with an opioid epidemic in full rage, the government shut the door on prescription access without even considering addiction maintenance under medical supervision, and we got a heroin epidemic, followed by a fentanyl epidemic.
"It doesn't need to be unpacked by a six month series of public meetings organized by $1,000 an hour consultants that produce a 50 page PDF recommending another series of meetings. Jesus! Christ!"
But...but...where will all the consultant jobs go?!? This is a big part of the problem too. It's like we've lost the ability to simply use common sense to solve common problems. Or worse, that we're willfully choosing NOT to use common sense because it's somehow 'problematic' now. The metric shitton of bureaucratic committee nonsense that everything seems to have to filter through now is off the chart. Use your head, peoples!
#toomanywhitecollarjobs
Master’s degree and easily manipulated and played by heroin addicts and 14 year olds? Many such cases!
Does seem to be a lack of common sense in the Twin Cities given the police killings of Philando Castile and Justine Damond.
DC metro was quite violent +5 years ago with beatings and stabbings and is now fine. Minneapolis should recover, too. Or you could just move to St. Paul. =)
DC saw homicides increase from around 160 in 2018 in to 226 in 2021. In Minneapolis the number of homicides literally doubled over those same years. I suspect that the increase in violent crime, which is looking like the new normal, has something to do with problems of disorderliness and crime in both transit systems and urban cores.
"I have no idea how anything that I’m saying could be controversial, but it no doubt will be."
On the one hand, yes, amen to the general point. On the other, there's some semi-strawmanning here, in that I don't think the attitude you describe is nearly as widely embraced among most progressives/leftists as you think. I mean, look at the ratios on the screenshotted tweets at the top of the page...
I am not a defund the police guy. I think it's a huge mistake for the left to adopt the attitude that the police have no place in society. But ... I also get where it comes from.
I mean, it seems like you disagree with Chris Hayes' conclusion in his "Smoker on the Subway Platform" scenario. So does that mean you'd prefer his "A" in that scenario (cops confront and arrest the person) above the "B" (nothing happens, no consequences)? Yes, that's a binary, but the whole point is that when law enforcement gets involved, things tend to get reduced things to a very stark binary.
In the subway platform scenario, I agree with Chris Hayes. I'd take B. In many other scenarios, I'd take A. Not sure about the "smoking in a subway car with a baby" one ... probably A? I think? Even if I know there's a good chance the offender is going to suffer a lot as a result, and perhaps their family as well, and etc? I dunno.
Defund was so hegemonic in left-of-center spaces that, for example, Planned Parenthood put out a defund statement, despite the fact that it had nothing whatsoever to do with their purview.
Eh, any Defund statement made by a progressive group in 2020 should be written off as basically meaningless. It was a bizarre religious fervor that came and went as quickly as a backwoods tent revival. It's not like PP *actually* supports a no-rules approach to society, and most left-progressives don't *actually* think anything goes on the subway. (Which is maddening in a different way.)
I will give you that something in the mainstream left's orientation towards rules enforcement changed in 2020, but I think it's mostly rhetoric, not substance.
So when do we take what they say seriously? When it polls well?
They don't get a pass for it for their stupidity. They're just lucky that there was so much competition by all the other stupid things that got said and were done during Covid that it's not as memorable even if it had some of the largest impact.
This is something we need to talk about more. Planned Parenthood abandoning its purview to protect abortion and access to birth control, pulled into these ridiculous stances away from their promised and core mission by the far left.
Interesting point. Question: could transit cops act as bouncers? I don't necessarily want the offender to "suffer a lot as a result and perhaps their family as well," but they gotta stop. Mostly bouncers remove people, right? If the person got aggressive or something, fine, they should get in some trouble with the police. But it seems like a fair, positive position is to (1) stop the problem right away, every time (2) not wreck the person's life. How can we make that happen? [Also I have no serious knowledge in left theory, apologies.]
Often that's all that does happen, maybe with a fine as well to discourage the behavior in the future.
What makes this different is when there's a shortened video of a suspect being "roughed up" because he didn't want to get bounced off the train? Should the cops have apologized and left him alone?
The issue remains with the person committing anti-social behavior not those enforcing the law (provided they don't go past their mandate) nor the citizens expecting everyone to play by the same rules. Ultimately laws are backed by force and violence otherwise they are merely suggestions.
There’s also option “C” - provided it’s not something like passenger is actively assaulting another passenger (which I think we would all agree merits arrest) Cop says “Stop it” to offending person, person stops. Cop moves on. Anti-social behavior stops, no one gets arrested.
Right -- that would be the best option, and of course it often does occur this way. But part of why bystanders are skeptical of getting the police involved over minor antisocial incidents is that there's a decent potential for escalation, perhaps disastrously so.
If we could be assured that that was extremely unlikely to happen, I think fewer people would hesitate to approach the police over annoying minor infractions. But as long as the police routinely mistreat people, the cost/benefit for bystanders too often comes down in favor of saying nothing, unless the behavior in question is so egregious it's clear there's no other option.
Every law on the books ultimately comes down to enforcement by large angry men with guns.
That's the simple fact of the matter regardless of whether it's tax evasion or or murder enforcement requires force if the law is ignored. You need to decide what's worth the confrontation and not create laws otherwise.
It was one of several things that bothered me wit the Eric Garner death years ago, if you keep making laws to "fight" smoking then people will break them and have to deal with the cops. You can ask for better enforcement or training or whatever but ultimately that force will happen or you don't bother making the law.
We can't be surprised when the laws we create lead to encounters with law enforcement.
With that said I'm for laws and enforcing them, certainly far more so than we have been the last few years but I'm also for rolling back laws on the books that don't actually help anyone.
What would happen if you lit up a cigarette at work? Nothing good for you.
Why is the subway platform the wild west? You know what happened in the wild west when there was no enforcing laws? Vigilance committees. Are you so sure you want random community members policing things? I'm surprised we haven't really had a big public Bernie Goetz yet.....
Yeah, I agree rules should be enforced, but I also don't want people to get beaten up and thrown in jail if it's not necessary. What I would like is a police force and a legal system that behaves fairly and proportionally; I don't want Singapore-style canings for minor nuisances, and I don't want vigilantes and chaos, either. Doesn't seem too crazy to me.
The problem is the retroactive canonization of guys like the guy who got kneeled on by the cop and passed away. He was high on meth, he was trying to pass a kited check and he resisted arrest. None of that matters though because the world view of the infantile left is that there are only angels and devils.
If you resist arrest you are at least partly to blame for whatever befalls you. Maybe that means somebody dies because of a parking ticket but the alternative is to absolve everyone of stupid, self-destructive behavior in the interests of painting the world in black and white.
So our only options are (1) a world in which it's A-OK that sometimes people die over parking tickets and (2) a world in which all stupid, self-destructive behavior is absolved? And you don't think you see the world in black and white?
Any time a cop kills someone needlessly, that's a problem. Fine, be annoyed with Floyd's canonization, but please don't let that blind you to the fact that his death was a travesty.
Technically if you run from the cops to avoid a speeding ticket you are now guilty of evading the police. If you physically fight the cops to avoid a shoplifting charge you are now guilty of resisting arrest and possibly assault.
Yes, it's a tragedy that Floyd died. But who's to blame? Is it really so wrong to point out that he was at least partially responsible for what happened?
What about the whole "It's not cancel culture, it's accountability culture" line? Aren't there consequences for smoking in the non-smoking section?
I think the elephant in the room is that the kind of no-rules leftist you're complaining about knows full well that more enforcement of current community standards almost assuredly will result in disparate impact on BIPOC persons, since community standards are set by the dominant culture. And said leftist has been thoroughly captured by an ideology that says the worst possible thing for a white person to do is use their power in a way that makes a BIPOC person mad.
I also think there are just a group of mostly angry young men who know they can bully women, especially worthless middle aged women with this kind of rhetoric.
Here: "Defund the police" means cutting economic perks to force them to do serious reforms.
And instantly firing cops for misconduct (like at every other job) thereby trimming millions in violent, shitty officers' pay, overtime, and lawsuit payouts that can then go to mental health care and economic opportunities. Yes, I know that one lady that one time wrote a dumb story in the NYT about how we REALLY mean get rid of ALL police, immediately.
And I know what I describe is "reform." But in our current world "reform" means "more diversity training" coupled with more money. Real reform can't happen without serious consequences—I bet cops would learn to do better real fast when they see their buddies lose their salaries and pensions. Yet, not a single actor in the system has the slightest incentive to do this.
I think defund was an unfortunate slogan. But I also think it's a mistake to take what the dumbest people on the internet say and present it as the totality of the idea.
Also for the love of god do not cast Soviet police in a positive light, they were the literal manifestation of your Planet of the Cops theory.
Instant firing for misconduct should be the standard, but I'd argue that *isn't* the case for every other job, either.
It should be the standard for any job where the person is legally allowed to use deadly force. We also see similar issues in the military.
I fail to understand how living in a century where we've had three separate Spiderman movie franchises, with great power comes great responsibility is not more widely accepted.
I mean, it basically can't be for any job? Instant firing for proven misconduct might be, but that just shoves it back a few steps. The very obvious problem with this demand is that without that limitation, what you've got is at will employment for cops, combined with a belief that the police force is structurally messed up...which is a recipe for firing whistleblowers or literally anyone who doesn't go along with that misbehavior.
The right answer here is to reassert non-police control over police forces, but there's very little appetite for that, because with that power comes (ala spiderman) the responsibility to actually fix things. And there's a hell of a lot more votes in complaining about things being broken than in trying to fix them.
I don't like Soviet cops. I'm just saying that "more left = fewer police" just isn't true. And, sure, what you're saying makes sense. But what percentage of the people who yell about policing issues even understand the distinction you're making? This is the whole point: we've had this collapse in basic left literacy, so that when people talk about being against the police, they don't even know what they're talking about. We can't have the conversation because there's no shared definitions, and no one wants to be the asshole who says "you need to read and develop coherent positions."
Hillary Clinton said just such a thing and was panned for it.
Fair! Internet brain I guess.
There are couple of different issues with what Tana is arguing here. First, tactically speaking, any slogan or idea that requires this level of explanation is a bad one. Consider what Martin Luther King once said about the phrase "Black Power": "I’ve said so often that I regret that the slogan Black Power came into being, because it has been so confusing. It gives the wrong connotation. It often connotes the quest for black domination rather than black equality. And it is just like telling a joke. If you tell a joke and nobody laughs at the joke and you have to spend the rest of the time trying to explain to people why they should laugh, it isn’t a good joke. And that is what I have always said
about the slogan Black Power. You have to spend too much time explaining what you are talking about. But it is a slogan that we have to deal with now."
Second, there are a lot of assumptions baked into the idea that resources from the police could be seamlessly transferred to another more useful social program and as a result, produce better overall outcomes. Police funding is largely tied up in collective bargaining agreements, so it is much easier to get rid of programs and units than it is to find efficiencies in existing ones. When moderate Democratic mayors warn that funding cuts could lead to layoffs based on seniority, which would jeopardize younger and more diverse hires, they're not entirely wrong.
But then there's another matter to consider: What evidence do we have that cities or states that spend less on policing per capita get better outcomes in terms of police misconduct or clearance rates on major crimes or anything else? If anything, some of the cities with the worst policing issues appear to have underpaid and overworked cops, who leave at the nearest chance to work in the suburbs where pay is higher and the work less stressful and dangerous. The case of Vallejo, California, comes to mind: https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/this-california-city-defunded-its-police-force-killings-by-officers-soared/2020/06/22/253eeddc-b198-11ea-856d-5054296735e5_story.html
So it seems a whole lot easier, tactically smarter, and even more correct on the merits to advocate for, say, more revenue to fund one's choice of social programs, than it is to put said programs into a zero-sum race for resources with police departments that typically enjoy the highest support of any part of a local budget.
I agree that defund is a bad slogan because, yes, you have to explain it. But where are you getting the info that the worst performers are departments with less money? First, rural departments get tons of federal money.
Clearance rates for rape and murder are equally low everywhere. Meanwhile, the most violent departments are big city like NYPD, LAPD, Chicago PD. The most violent individual cops even get paid the most because in the absence of any discipline you get ahead when you're more aggressive. Also, they're usually in elite plainclothes units whose only measure of success is seizure of contraband so obviously they abuse Terry stops.
At the same time, blue cities rely on real estate and tourist revenue so cops have more "quality of life" tasks they're pressured to deal with so you inherently have more low-level officer contacts with people.
And, also, stronger unions. Yes I am lefty enough. to be pro union but there's no arguing that the police unions are a positive force right now. Note the officers in the Tyre Nichols case got fired and charged two weeks after.
Anyway. But yes we can all agree the defund was a terrible slogan that drew a huge amount of backlash.
What stats show that NY, LA and Chicago are the worst cops? There are a number of terrible incidents or scandals that have plagued these departments, but Albuquerque, Baltimore, and as I highlighted, Vallejo, are actually more notorious in terms of actual rates of misconduct. Your point about lack of accountability is a deeply upsetting and frustrating one, but not one that is intrinsically tied to funding.
Are departments in Albuquerque, Baltimore,Vallejo underfunded?
You did get me on reporter bias though, I mostly cover police in blue cities, because that's where I live. Yikes! But also ARE these other departments lacking in funding? Police funding is the one constant that all state legislatures never try to hack off, and then there's tons of federal funding.
Look at the ratio of cops to private citizens in the US to industrialized peers like Germany. The US has far fewer police to deal with much higher levels of crime.
There is an argument to be made that increasing the number of cops on the street to something approaching the level in Europe or Japan would result in a number of benefits like allowing for the police to spend more time per case, improving retention, improving response times, etc.
Definitively answering some of these questions about the correlation between funding and personnel per capita, and misconduct and clearance rates would require a degree of reporting and research I'm not equipped to provide right now. Maybe there are some well-funded departments that are also exceptionally bad. Suffice to say, the correlation between funding and performance is rarely exact because European nations often have higher numbers of police per capita" https://www.vox.com/2014/10/8/6939731/map-the-most-heavily-policed-countries-around-the-world
Regardless, let me again resort to a tactical argument: Given the challenge of reform with existing funding levels, what makes us think that coupling reform with austerity would have a higher chance of success?
And again, citing the power of police unions is an argument about the power of police unions -- a problem that is hard enough to solve on its own -- not funding per se.
I mean... I'm serious though when I say that there aren't any departments that are underfunded. Why do you think cops in Bumblefuck Iowa have Bearcats?
Are police unions positive? Did something change? In the past, "bad actors" would be excused of wrongdoing and then go to the union to sue to get their jobs back. I've always thought the power of police unions should be limited. Rather than defunding police, I think we should end or severely limit qualified immunity, demilitarize police, and decriminalize "victimless crimes." I think we could increase police funding if we want them to do it right--though we'd need a different model of policing, I think. I think people get to "defund" out of a mistrust of an authoritarian state, which of course, deserves to be mistrusted.
Right. But "limit qualified immunity, demilitarize police, and decriminalize "victimless crimes" — you're asking for a powerful institution to give up its power. That doesn't work without a serious incentive.
Very true.
Any functional society will be based on people who follow the rules, go to work, and pay taxes. Whatever ideology the government adheres to, there's no possible alternative. I'm a chauvinist in that I believe that perhaps the people who do these things ought to have some say in governance.
Cops are not a different species. They are people, just like you. Honest question, if this issue is this important to you, have you considered becoming a police officer? If not, why not?
Not trying to single you out, but we've spent the last couple years as a society harping on this issue (and rightly so in some cases, others not so much, IMO). But despite the well-attended protests, I'm not aware of any effort by any of these people to actually go do these jobs. Why isn't the thousands of people who protested applying to become police officers the perfect solution? The fact that this hasn't happened at all, best I can tell, gives up the game. I suspect they know, deep down, the job is much more difficult and shades-of-gray than they make it out to be and wouldn't sign up for it under virtually any circumstances.
Yes many cops are people "just like me" in the sense that they don't go around framing and beating up teenagers. I'm saying that the cops who DO should be fired. We know who they are, there are at least three databases with officer CCRB complaints and lawsuits. I think "unless you become a police officer you have no right to criticize" is an absurd standard.
I didn't say that and maybe I misread your comment.
Do you not find it odd that a movement doesn't seem to generate a single person that actually wants to do the work they claim is so important?
That makes sense actually. It's not gonna be me, I can't even do a pushup. But you're right that there's not like a single well-known case of a super passionate protestor joining a force.
I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not. Has there been someone and I'm just unaware of it?
not sarcastic. I don't know of anyone.
They could at least consider doing ride-alongs.
Well, if you believe the current system is completely corrupt there's not a lot of incentive to participate in it. Even if you subscribe to the "change from the inside", you know you're going to need to participate in things you find morally objectionable for a long time, since that change will not be swift. I think this a coherent stance.
So, just march around out front and hope the completely corrupt decide to reform themselves based on the awesome slogans? That the plan?
The "police" is not some uniform, country-wide outfit. It's literally millions of independent units, with varying degrees of competence, corruption, etc. (although I don't think I would agree that any of them are "completely corrupt" but am willing to be convinced). The only way it gets better is for better people to decide to do the job. Until this movement decides policing is important enough for its members to actually do the job, I have a hard time seeing it as anything more than a pose. That doesn't mean that every member has to go apply, but when literally no one does, it's a sign.
Yes, I find it noteworthy that the same individuals who would demand that anybody who supported the Iraq War should enlist in the armed forces are suddenly averse to personal risk when it comes to reforming the police.
You act like marching around is a hopeless thing to do, but I don't think it is? It puts pressure on legislation, reform in trainings, reform of unions and punishments for officers. These things are in fact happening to different degrees all over the country. Whether or not they are going to fix much about what people don't like about police, personally I doubt it, but you hand wave away the effects of mass protest when I believe they are in fact very real.
I am a one issue voter: bikes off the sidewalk.
Whenever I voice this opinion online i'm shouted down as racist for giving the police the power to arrest delivery workers or something...but delivery workers are only a small slice of the problem. Walking to work involves 4-5 jump scares each time and I was hit last year. NYC is classically a pedestrian city, but having to dodge bikes, scooters and sometimes motorcycles ON THE SIDEWALK makes me want to move.
The long term solution is to make more/safer bike paths—but is that happening? Are the cyclists using them? Is the police enforcing this?
Yeah it's a perfect example - early in the deBlasio administration there was an effort to rein it in, then people said it was racist, and it was dropped. Now every New Yorker experiences almost getting run down on the sidewalk every time.
I feel like what's missing from your essay is an expansion on what you say here in your second line. Once anyone or anything is labeled "racist", no matter how silly that accusation, many leftists cower in fear and run away. The situation you describe in your essay is driven by exactly this phenomenon. Policing, simply as an idea, has been labeled racist, and *this* is the reason your average media-addled leftist refuses to support the enforcement of rules and laws.
You can expand beyond the accusation of racism, and look at the myriad of words (mostly on the left, rarely on the right*) that have been operationalized as the beginning and end of a conversation when they're deployed--creep, cultural appropriation, colonizer**. Racism as a societal ill has historically had teeth, and is still kicking in many contexts, so it's not surprising that it has a long runout. But there's a good number of others--cultural appropriation is a great example--that just don't kick like they used to. I find it reassuring that, though people can be caught by surprise on the scale of a couple of years, the experiences of the general public have a long term centering effect on rhetoric.
Exhibit A: Here we are, talking about enforcing smoking bans on the subway in response to a progressive housing activists tweet asking for the same.
*Likely because they tend to get hotboxed in academia.
**And those are just in the c's.
I visited Israel last year with my family (wife's father is originally Israeli) and I found it very interesting that in Tel Aviv (and maybe other Israeli cities) the lane for scooters and bikes was on the inside of the sidewalk, not the outside of the road. It seemed very unsafe to me, and I'd be interested to hear why that took that approach. I suppose it protects the bikers/scooter riders from cars, but I think the tradeoff is more pleasant for your average citizen the other way around.
This pops up in a few American cities, mostly on busier avenues, though with a sidewalk on each side of the bike path (not sure how it would work without one).
I've never had a problem with them as a pedestrian (they have their own walk signals, and dodging bikes when you're jaywalking is easy), and mile per mile imagine separating bikes and cars is safer, but I have an intense paranoia when making a right turn across them in a car; you're crossing another ersatz road when you do, and the approach speed, visibility, and lackadaisical attitude of cyclists towards traffic signals seems like a t-bone waiting to happen.
In Australian cities we are trying to deal with the popularity of e-scooters and e-bikes, and the fact that a percentage of their users ride them carelessly in pedestrian spaces, ride without helmets, ride doubled up, "park" them in the middle of footpaths and bicycle paths, etc. Different approaches are being pursued in different cities.
Here is Queensland's State Transport Minister on this topic.
https://fb.watch/i-yEz2vIo_/
I lived in a small town in CO with the same problem. The offenders were almost always entitled middle-aged white men. Huge amounts of money were spent on bike trails and bike lines to cater to their hobby, with the result that grandmothers walking their little dogs on a pedestrian trail had to risk being yelled at to get out of the way. Driving risked being stuck behind packs of slow-moving cyclists. I now live in a large city, and the cyclists are far more polite. There's a cultural tipping point with bicyclists that should not be crossed.
All e-scooters should be immediately banned and people found driving them on sidewalks should be arrested. There is absolutely zero benefit provided from these devices but with massive degradation of the urban environment. It's inexcusable that they exist and I applaud the people of the City of Paris for being the first one to try and take a stand.
My vision of "defunding the police" is to figure out what problems are inefficiently addressed by simply dumping more cops onto the issue, and then put the money into addressing them more efficiently.
For example, in my city of Toronto, there is currently a TON of homeless people sheltering from shitty winter weather on public transit, and there were also many homeless encampments in parks over the summer. The conventional solution to this has been more (expensive) policing, which just plays whack-a-mole with homeless people, because there simply are not enough shelter spaces (much less supportive or affordable housing) to accommodate everyone.
Another example is road safety. It's much more effective to prevent collisions by designing streets that force you to drive slower and more carefully (as well as providing reasonable alternatives to driving) than it is to spend tons of money on cops with a speed gun.
Mental health is another good one. Plenty of examples of cities introducing mental health emergency response teams as alternatives to policing and the cops themselves saying "these guys are better at this than we are, and it means we're not tied up for hours on calls where we become social workers."
I work in public transit and one of the most common complaints of riders, after missed trips and insufficient service, are safety and anti-social behavior. I lived in Atlanta for 10 years and one of the features of their transit system is an app where you could report anonymously to the transit police (a lot of agencies have this). I forgot why, but I was in a reddit discussion talking about how well it seemed to work and told the story of two teenagers playing loud music on a packed train and refused twice to turn it off. About two stations later, transit police walked on and escorted the teens off the train and hopefully they just got a lecture about why they shouldn't do that. After recounting this story. I was immediately branded as a racist (even though I never mentioned race and I'm mixed race myself) and endangering the lives of the teens and other platitudes like "don't start shit, there won't be shit", which I found to be extremely anti-social and corrosive to society. I then explained that I just witnessed it, I didn't report it, that everyone from the teens, to the women who asked them to turn it down, to the cops, were all the same race, at which point they said I was making that up. To relate it back to this story, there seems to be this growing sentiment on a part of the left that you're a "Karen" or busybody if you see anti-social behavior and want it to stop. It's as if working class people wanting to ride home in peace after a long day at work is a bourgeoise or WASPy luxury.
"It's as if working class people wanting to ride home in peace after a long day at work is a bourgeoise or WASPy luxury."
The thing is, it sort of is. Many societies worldwide don't have these things. Granted, in many of them, actual anti-social behavior on mass transit is less usual than the problem of discomfort and overcrowding. But to have both a relatively comfortable vehicle and a ridership that is respectful, non-violent, and quiet... these *are* luxuries, globally speaking. There are places where your option is a shared minivan filled to over 200% of its recommended capacity, but everyone is respectful and polite, and then there are places where the bus is half-empty but could get shot up at any time. Societies that have neither of these are pretty few and far between. (Urban Thailand is one that I can think of, off the top of my head, and much of western Europe as well.)
Off the top of my head I can think of Japan, S. Korea, the developed parts of China--and most of the United States outside of hotspots like poor inner city neighborhoods. Most of the people living in suburbia don't worry about catching a bullet regardless of what they're doing.
That's fair. Add most of Europe and North America to that and you've got a decent coverage of the globe, but still a minority of the population and one that coalesces strongly among countries with a strong middle class.
And urban cores in the United States are notorious for driving out said middle class. If you want safe public transportation and you live in El Salvador you have to figure out how to get to the US somehow or another first world country peer. If you live in NYC and you want safe public transportation get a job upstate (or in flyover country) and move. The barriers are much lower and as a consequence the country is seeing migration out of big cities and both coasts.
One could add that It's bourgeoise and WASPy to think that only bourgeoise and WASPy people would like a public transit trip that is drama free. Having had to use public transit most of my life in the places I've lived to commute and worked crummy jobs, I see plenty of regular working class folks that just want a quiet ride home because they're so exhausted.
I rarely saw the bourgeoise falling asleep from sheer exhaustion on the bus unless they were taking the last train home from a night of revelry and were passing out from too much drinking.
I'm not using bourgeoise and WASPy as negative terms, to start with, so you can call it what you like. My contention wasn't that workers didn't *want* these things, but rather that in much of the world they don't *get* these things. The kind of cultures that have shown the capability to offer reliable mass transit that is both comfortable and non-dangerous are almost universally cultures that have a strong middle class. Places with dangerous mass transit, such as much of Central America, don't have a middle class to speak of. Places with crowded and uncomfortable transit, such as parts of southern Africa, have a small middle class but mostly an insulated upper class that would never dream of sharing transit with anyone, and a huge working class (and underclass) that has no other option.
In other words a lot of people think they can have the niceties of a society with a strong middle class without having something so gauche and retrograde as the actual, troublesome middle class itself. Maybe they can, but there's scant evidence of it so far. Countries with a small upper class and a massive proletariat generally have pretty poor mass transit that delivers the bare minimum (move people from A to B) with nothing more than that, and in places like South Africa it has the spicy addition of gang wars between rival taxi operators (taxi being the local word for a shared minivan, as opposed to cab) in which passengers all too often get caught in the crossfire.
I think your position is true where there isn't a working/middle class cohort that demands things like clean mass transit. I know when I used the trains in Spain and Germany, people were orderly and stations pretty clean. The only people really making noise were the teenagers. But having not used transit in Asia, I can't speak to that. I know my friend spent 6 months in Japan and he was floored by how orderly the chaos was handled.
I know using public transit very much is a class thing. It's much like walking and riding a bike to commute to work. When it's out of necessity...it's frowned upon by anyone who can afford a car but also seen as a luxury choice for those who can live close enough to walk / ride to work because they can afford to.
Exactly, and that class needs to be sufficiently empowered to do so. I'm sure most working class South Africans would much rather have a nice bus with aircon instead of a crowded combi with springs sticking out of the seats, but when the country has trouble keeping the lights on that's probably not something too easy to mobilize towards.
On the "plus" side if someone started smoking they'd have their cigarette taken off them; if someone started masturbating they would receive - and the absolute minimum - the beating of a lifetime. So at least some standards will be upheld. Somehow.
Bourgeoise or WASPs are allowed to have preferences, and they are legitimate. Why is antisocial behavior more legitimate?
Exactly.
You're confusing quiet and orderly with safe and respectful. Not everyone can have the former, but the latter is much more important. Yes, a spacious, air-conditioned bus is better than a crowded one, but the difference is smaller than between a crowded minibus where you're in no danger and a crowded minibus full of violent, unruly young men. There are plenty of countries where public transit is safe but not comfortable.
'Ride home in peace' means exactly that. I could get into a dabaab in Sanaa and while I'd be cramped (and occasionally have to rearrange to make sure the seating arrangement respected local gender roles) I never felt unsafe or harrassed. In other cities, you feel a papable tension in shared taxis. It's a world of difference between the two, and people mostly want the 'safety' and 'respect' parts. That isn't, and shouldn't, be a luxury, and you shouldn't impose your definition of comfort on places that might not share it. In some societies, sharing a vehicle and not speaking to anyone in it is eerie and uncomfortable to many.
Cope. 99 people out of 100 would prefer not to be cramped and regard being cramped as a discomfort. Show your fellow passengers an air-conditioned Benz with reclining seats and they'll make a beeline for it. It'll be less exotic for the visitor but locals will prefer it virtually every time.
Haha cope? Should I seethe as well? Have I been owned? God what a sad comment. Regardless, given that I concede that point directly in my comment, we don't actually disagree on anything. Genuinely disappointed that the quality of discourse here is also 'sad teenager on Twitter' level.
You said I was "confusing" two different things, quiet and orderly on the one hand and safe and respectful on the other. I did no such thing; my very first post on the subject made it clear that just because something is crowded and uncomfortable does not make it unsafe or a place lacking respect.
You then said that by conflating these I also ran the risk of dismissing peoples' definition of comfort. And here we definitely do disagree. In every single place in the world where shared taxis/combis/whatever were once dominant, but are now not dominant, *every single one* of these places has shown no desire to return to how things were. When they can replace combis with Benzes they do so, and they don't look back. Again, less romantic for the visitor, but hardly some kind of imposition.
The cope is because you've halfway convinced yourself that crowded, shared minicabs are some kind of expression of shared culture that's valued in and of itself. They're not. They may incidentally show how people act in crowded spaces - respectfully, usually - but it's just that: incidental. The microsecond they can spread out across two seats and enjoy the AC, they do so, 100% of the time. Again, were this not true, you'd be able to point to a society where they've replaced crowded transit with non-crowded transit, only for everyone to eschew it (for non-economic reasons) and sit in the back row with six old ladies and a goat. It literally never, ever happens, and nor will it ever happen. The single, only time this ever happens is if it's economic necessity. It never, ever happens for cultural reasons, regardless of how exciting it makes your travel stories.
>The cope is because you've halfway convinced yourself that crowded, shared minicabs are some kind of expression of shared culture that's valued in and of itself.
This wasn't my read on their comment at all. Cut the "cope" shit.
Yes, people would prefer to be more comfortable. But people withstand all manner of discomfort all the time, either on crowded buses and subway cars, or walking home in the rain, or walking past piles of black trash bags on the street in NY. Would people rather those things not be like that? Of course. Are they a different kind of experience from someone smoking in the car or being physically aggressive? Also yes.
That you compared "200% over capacity" with "risk getting shot up" shows you don't really understand that distinction. (Cue "actually I rode the bus for 57 years, with three people to each seat, and I was shot every day on my way to and from work").
Many societies are unjust (including our own) therefor to seek justice is a WASP ethic....
We should always work for a fairer, more just society for everyone. We don't seek to sink to the lowest common denominator.
Well, there are more than a few of us who can't afford the extra 20(?) baht for the AC bus and were packed in a bit!
Thankfully Thai people, even in Bangkok, are gracious and don't remonstrate too much beyond a sigh about westerners sweating all over the place.
(Bangkok public transportation is quite good).
This happens all the time in the main West Philly Facebook group. Best example was somebody burying their dead dog in a sidewalk planter. Some people were saying "different cultures grieve in different ways, we should be sensitive" (these people were white). Then a Black neighbor commented "what the hell is wrong with you all, this is not okay no matter their race." To deny that there's diversity of opinion on these matters is itself racist.
Honestly, I've lived in a half a dozen shitty neighborhoods around Philadelphia and always stayed away from West Philly for just this reason.
Well, it depends on the neighborhood. I lived in WP for years, and the places I lived in were pretty good. Of course, I haven’t been there much in recent years, so maybe they’ve deteriorated some.
I was talking about the attitudes of the residents, not the dog burial itself.
Thankfully, that attitude was limited to small sections of Facebook - it was a lovely place to live!
That reminds me of one of the worst Daniel Lavery Dear Prudence letters ever. https://slate.com/human-interest/2016/12/dear-prudence-my-friends-baby-died-and-she-wants-to-burn-my-cot.html
I'm no fan of Daniel Lavery (I'm supicious of agony uncles and aunts etc. full stop) but that strikes me as a judicious, balanced response. A dead baby is not equivalent to a dead dog and a privately owned cot is not equivalent to a public sidewalk planter.
I think a lot of this has to do with not wanting to be a "Karen." No one wants to be a buzzkill and I think it's easy to adopt some vaguely progressive-sounding justifications to cover the fact that you (general you) are just conflict-avoidant. I say all this as someone who keeps putting off asking her neighbors to stop smoking pot in the stairwell every day. Cowardice feels bad. You may as well make up some reasons for it.
It's one thing to respond this way if asked what you would do in that situation directly, but to go onto social media and pronounce how *you* think this is racist/dangerous/wrong/etc. is a different story.