"catch[ing] more criminals" was a quote from above. But I used it when discussing murder, not jaywalking.
I agree that being locked up once surely makes going straight harder (because employers are wary) and going crooked easier (as you now have more contacts). This is a real problem we should try to address. But I'm not convinced that looking the other way at violent crime is at all the right approach.
However, there is no way this is the main causal link between policing & crime. It's like suggesting that the birth rate is caused by hiring more schoolteachers in a neighborhood, ignoring the obvious fact that the city hires them (largely) based on observed need.
> "Certainty of being caught" apparently does [provide a deterrent effect], but as you build a police force that makes getting caught of committing a crime a certainty, you have already fallen into the same trap America (and her cities) fall into over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over and over and over and over and over and over again.
Police aren't a solution. They're a problem. That's not to say there's no UPSIDE. It's to say there are trade-offs and I think they have been proven by history to be unfavorable trade-offs in the long view.
I want them locked up, so they don't commit more crimes. Obviously the police don't catch every criminal that commits every crime. So catching them and locking them prevents them from committing more crimes.
It strongly implies that being tougher on crime --- and I'm no defunder --- isn't the solution, most especially because that's been repeatedly tried and there's a plausible argument that it made things worse.
"Hardly. Locking up families and neighbors is the exact opposite of crime prevention. It's treating the aftermath. Crime prevention should be analogous to preventative medicine: minimizing the possibility of it occurring to begin with. Police by definition are reactionary agents. They don't have the competence or the will to do anything other than handle aftermaths and create intimidation in a dubiously effective attempt to scare off bad guys."
So... in your opinion, there's no value in removing criminals from the streets because locking them up "is the exact opposite of crime prevention." There is no such thing as a repeat criminal, and the fact that a small number of criminals commit a disproportionate number of crimes is false.
In fact, black and Latino neighborhoods are enriched by the activities of violent felons. Their presence inspires children to study and ensures the safety of women young and old.
I would be very interested to visit your city and see this wonderland.
I’m not against stopping crime, but most proposed solutions to crime usually boil down to “more cops”. Even data-driven ideas like you’re suggesting seem to end up as convoluted ways of saying “send more cops here instead of there”. Crimes of poverty can’t be solved with policing, and any attempt to reduce crime without first acknowledging that is very likely to do more harm than good.
> The result is that the only way to impress upon people that crime "doesn't pay", is to make the rate of solving crimes in general much higher.
There's actually two sides to it: you can lower the upside to crime, or raise the upside to non-crime. Things like better education, job creation, better social security benefits, etc. all contribute to lowering people's need/desire to commit crimes.
Whether we need more policing is a lot more complicated than just looking at crime rates. Firstly because this can only represent reported crime, and a lot of crime is not reported. And secondly because there are absolutely detrimental effects of policing, and this would lead into a conversation more about what the goals of policing should be. Do we care about slightly and temporarily reducing crime rates if we're also drastically increasing the amount of people getting displaced from their homes for bullshit reasons and placing massive burdens on their families as a result? Does incarcerating people too much lead to higher crime rates in the future when they're released? There's a ton of negative secondary effects.
I'll step in because I really took a different (and perhaps incorrect) read of the statement "There are too many innocent people being arrested to worry about the guilty ones."
On it's own I take this to mean that we need to address the issues in policing and the justice system to have a lot less bullshit and a lot more impact. Time/money (and resulting fallout) spent harassing innocent people creates all manner of problems and is also time/money not spent on actually doing the job. In this I wholly agree.
That said, There is still room for nuance and appropriate recourse in actual crime. There are a lot of crimes, and it's pretty clear that in many cases the punishment doesn't fit the crime, or that the crime even makes sense.
Ultimately if we ever get our shit figured out I'd assume both of these would be accomplished. I just hope that we get there.
i think the obvious policy he the former attorney lists as causing more crime:
"Bond reform so no one stays in jail"
if every american suspected of shooting someone is held in jail rather than released, we have just removed the most likely population of people who cause future shootings. from the safety of the publics perspective, now the surviving victims/witnesses are more likely to be victims of more crimes because the suspected violent attackers are back on the street.
i dont really think there is room for debate on the "truthyness" of his statement, as if we kept more people in jail, less people would be out in public able to commit crime. how much is a good question tho.
This is a very good comment, and it seems pretty reasonable. I don't think police are the right agents to enforce societal change though. It seems like a lot of criminals, start off rather young charged with crimes like shoplifting etc, and that record haunts them forever, by shutting off a lot of opportunities forever.
I don't know what the solution is, how to prevent so many American youth who would perhaps have been contributing members of society and culture. I found it rather surprising that such kinds of conditions exist in a developed country like the US; its usually something you find in less developed countries.
But what a pedestrian, generic analysis that is. Based on that statement offenders are just there, and the only thing we can do is get ever bigger, more vigilant sticks since we are outside the situation and "it is what it is". Sounds like the manifesto of broken modern policing.
Instead, places that work on social programs see crime drop, because even if people are capable, they are not offenders since they have received the intellectual, emotional, psychological, economic, etc assistance they needed. Obviously some people will remain offenders and police are necessary. But by now we should know better than this, and that type of statement should not be the linchpin of any criminology.
When recidivism rates are so high (67%), I highly doubt that locking more people up is, in the long run, going to reduce crime better than methods which actually attack the root cause of crime.
I agree that being locked up once surely makes going straight harder (because employers are wary) and going crooked easier (as you now have more contacts). This is a real problem we should try to address. But I'm not convinced that looking the other way at violent crime is at all the right approach.
However, there is no way this is the main causal link between policing & crime. It's like suggesting that the birth rate is caused by hiring more schoolteachers in a neighborhood, ignoring the obvious fact that the city hires them (largely) based on observed need.
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