Comment by bmn__
Comment by bmn__ 3 days ago
[flagged]
Comment by bmn__ 3 days ago
[flagged]
Glad to hear you love laws, you can start with wage theft: comparable in scale, basically unenforced
Not only poor people shoplift. Guessing the majority of shoplifting is done by people not living in proverty.
Gut feelings are also highly effective as tools to direct policy.
Is there evidence of that? That seems to have been the prevailing view over the last many years, and it's not clear to me that it's improved anything. There seems to be more homeless camps, more petty crime, more drugs.
According to this for example, the correlation is significant: https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1...
Also it’s absolutely not prevailing in America. Especially in a European sense.
But even when you push to a good direction, it can be misleading. Like Portugal legalised hard drug usage, but they slashed funds of organisations helping to drug addicts. Of course, you will have a problem after a while (and they have now), even when decriminalisation is a good step. But politicians can pretend that that’s the “prevailing view”, while they just make some pretexts to point their finger to the “prevailing view”.
The drive for increased penalties is very deeply rooted in the human psyche because it works extremely well in smaller societies on the order of 100 people, so we’re tempted to believe that it works in modern cities with hundreds of thousands to millions of people. In real life the evidence seems to be pretty mixed. As far as I can tell, shoplifting today breaks down into two categories: (1) dumb kids, who don’t much care about your example, and (2) professionals who are monetizing shoplifting by reselling stolen goods on platforms like Amazon. If you want to deal with the large-scale problem, you’d probably focus on (2).
Where do you live where that's the prevailing view? Where I am police funding has increased year after year for decades, and people are routinely prosecuted and jailed for petty offenses. For the most part bmn's position is the prevailing view, they have already gotten what they're asking for and it has failed to achieve those goals. At what point are we going to acknowledge the evidence and try something else.
In places that have more crime, they typically don't prosecute effectively. A significant chunk of NYC's shoplifting was just ~350 people, if I remember the NY Times article correctly from a few years back, but they just keep getting released back to do more of it, while more and more steps are taken by private businesses in response, like locked cases and limited hours, the burden for which is more keenly felt by the poor.
Then you are looking at it from a totally wrong perspective anyways, just like most people do. The homeless encampments are full of people with mental illness challenges and/or in one or another way related to drugs. It is why I cannot stand drug use apologists and drug dealer/traffickers defenders that at the same time lament poverty and homelessness.
The poverty is not the cause, it is the symptom of the system’s rot. Especially when you compare other countries and societies that are poorer, but have far fewer of those problems and less crime. Drug addiction is not cheap.
The irony is that your very perspective is the very kind of mentality that has led to the circumstances where we can’t do anything about it even if we wanted to, while the powerful and rich simply do a cost benefit analysis of it because of that and conclude it is easier to, e.g., import replacements for the humans that have been destroyed by drugs and mental illness, which then also drives down the wages/salaries, and drives up the costs of living and drives up the profits of the rich you blame. It’s a kind of “the blind men and an elephant” problem. You keep scratching at the scabs of your self-inflicted cuts, but they don’t seem to be healing.
It really always astonished me that even here, in a community of people in a domain where logic is necessary there is still this stranglehold of irrational proto-religious, emotion based belief and dogma.
People from every socioeconomic level steal, and the motivations vary far more widely than simple need. It has much more to do with personal ethics than the amount of money you can afford to spend.
> People from every socioeconomic level steal
That’s pretty meaningless. Distribution what matters. For example https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1...
It's not mutually exclusive. Just because poverty exists you shouldn't legalize theft, as that hurts both business and the community as a whole, since nobody wants to run a business and create jobs where there's a lot of crime so then the entire community spirals down into a shithole.
Yep. Eventually the businesses shut down the stores that have too much theft to be profitable; then people complain about problems like food deserts and accuse the businesses of isms; then well-meaning people elect politicians who promise to make it all better; then the politicians use tax breaks, sweetheart deals, and social pressure to get the businesses to open stores in those areas again.
The cycle continues because we can't learn a lesson that sticks for more than a generation, and the next generation thinks it'll be better this time because they care more than their parents did.
So your solution is to put people who are desperate enough to steal say $500 of goods from a pharmacy into jail at a cost of $50K+? As others have said, that money is better spend helping these people out of poverty or helping them with their addictions rather than trying to "teach them a lesson".
That would require spending more tax dollars on law enforcement and courts, and almost nobody wants to do that.
> Put the criminals in prison. Do it often enough, and shoplifting ceases to be a problem of plague-like proportions. Big fan of accountability and immediate personal consequences and enforcing the law.
This just doesn't work. A high-trust society cannot be built by force.
> I am fatigued of the suicidal and deleterious empathy of those in charge who refuse to take second-order effects into account.
The irony here is palpable. An increasingly desperate poverty class with no hope of social mobility has many second-order effects, and none of them can be policed out of existence.
> A high-trust society cannot be built by force.
Imo we're kinda in the worse quadrant of whats possible.
You can either have high visibility/force of prevention efforts or low. And you can have high actual rates of crime or low.
Imo we currently have low actual rates of crime (you see people saying oh its rampant in California or whatever but im not there and can't make an accurate assessment of it over the internet) and highly visible (damn near pervasive) efforts at preventing crime in almost every corner of our lives. "please don't abuse our staff" "cctv in operation", facial recognition, constant assumptions that you are a threat. If I didn't know better its almost like they "want" people to be criminals -- it seems like according to some other threads there are at least some people whose jobs it would make easier
It is amazing to me that we have have failed so completely to report on the miraculous drop in crime rates over the past 30 years. People consistently report that crime is up, even when presented with contradictory evidence.
A major part of the problem, in my estimation, is that a lot of people don't actually perceive crime as crime but instead perceive divergence from their expected social hierarchies as crime. This is how you get people saying that crime in DC is high because they saw a person that looked homeless sitting on the metro. Although sitting on the metro is legal, a poor person doesn't "belong" there so this is seen as evidence of crime.
and thats kinda what my point is. Even outside of the news cycle, there is so much anti thievery signs etc where their main function, in my estimation, is causing people to feel that crime is all around them, regardless of their effects on actual crime.
High trust societies can only exist when there are consequences for things like theft.
All examples of high trust societies show that those consequences must be social, because _by definition_, in a high-trust society, you must trust other people to do the right thing.
A punitive dictatorship or police state is not a high-trust society, even though laws may be strictly enforced. Likewise, in a high-trust society, behaviour is expected to be good and moral, even where not mandated by law.
Trust has to be earned. High-trust societies are awesome, but you can't just expect people to trust that they're not going to be robbed in the street if people keep getting robbed in the street, or that the few criminals that do exist will suffer consequences for their behavior if they're not actually suffering those consequences. That sort of culture takes time to build.
> That sort of culture takes time to build.
It does. Generations. We should get started.
Just to be clear, I don't think policing is futile or unethical or anything. But it is symptom control and cannot improve your society. Leaning into policing as a panacea inevitably results in worse outcomes for everybody, police included.
And there-in lies the problem of modern society. There are no social consequences. The decline of religion and family with no suitable replacement has left most people without a peer group to exert these social consequences.
A high-trust society cannot be built any way other than force!
Once you've removed the dredges of society (by force), all of the good, law-abiding citizens have better lives.
> This just doesn't work. A high-trust society cannot be built by force.
To badly quote Mead, "It's the only thing that ever has". If the incentives are such that defecting becomes less attractive, defection will decrease.
I don’t think that’s what a high trust society is. In fact, I’m pretty sure the whole point of the thing is that people in a high trust society don’t defect even when they don’t think they’ll get caught, because they understand that not-defecting is part of the bargain everybody is engaging in to keep the good thing going.
You're just plain wrong. You can enforce compliance - a police state - but it inevitably worsens outcomes for both people who commit crimes and their victims.
But that isn't a high-trust society. In fact a high trust society requires minimal formal policing by definition (and a _lot_ of informal policing by parents, families, friends, and communities).
High-trust societies aren't without their problems, too, as trust is regularly abused.
A society where trust is regularly abused isn’t—or will not long remain—a “high-trust” society.
Also, it’s not clear me if you really meant that enforcing property laws inevitably worsens outcomes for those who would otherwise have been victims, or if you mean that the now-much-smaller pool of victims have a worse time with effective enforcement. I’d argue that both are false, but the latter at least seems arguable.
> A society where trust is regularly abused isn’t—or will not long remain—a “high-trust” society.
Yes, well, I think you'll find this is how every high-trust society to date has ended up. Trust is abused, usually by the in-group rather than strangers. Abuse of power by politicians, the clergy, authorities like police, etc has largely lead to the collapse of trust across the West.
It's part of the inevitable cyclical nature of social change.
> Also, it’s not clear me if you really meant that enforcing property laws inevitably worsens outcomes for those who would otherwise have been victims, or if you mean that the now-much-smaller pool of victims have a worse time with effective enforcement.
Yes, increasing enforcement without structurally addressing the underlying issues - starting with poverty and wealth inequality - only ever leads to a criminal underclass, more poverty, more crime, and a worse society for everybody, criminals and victims alike.
It doesn't create fewer victims, it creates more (and I'm not being mealy-mouthed and counting the criminals as victims).
There is no way to police yourself into a better society.
What do you mean "this just doesn't work"?
You do understand that an overwhelming majority of crime and overall anti social behavior is done by a tiny percentage of people. Remove those people and you spare the rest of us.
For instance, the number of prisoners that have had 15 or more prior arrests is over 26%.
You can just have a 15 strikes and you're out policy and make a huge impact. Once these bad actors are out of society, high trust can be built. Stop letting a tiny percentage of people terrorize the rest of us.
It's not about poverty and ironically the biggest victims of this criminal behavior are poor people. Poor innocent people deal w theft, getting hassled and other consequences of criminal behavior at a much higher rate. It's not compassionate to let them suffer.
https://mleverything.substack.com/p/acceptance-of-crime-is-a...
> What do you mean "this just doesn't work"?
What I mean is that it doesn't work. Your proposal only increases crime, only deepens poverty, only worsens society.
> You do understand that an overwhelming majority of crime and overall anti social behavior is done by a tiny percentage of people. Remove those people and you spare the rest of us.
And yet, this policy has never worked. Three-stikes laws never work. Increased policing and more comprehensive criminal legislation never works. As long as the circumstances that caused the criminality persist, the problems returns ever more entrenched.
> It's not about poverty and ironically the biggest victims of this criminal behavior are poor people. Poor innocent people deal w theft, getting hassled and other consequences of criminal behavior at a much higher rate. It's not compassionate to let them suffer.
You are correct that the poorest suffer the most. As a society, we should aim to eradicate the poverty. Anything short of that is symptom control.
Eschew flamebait.
Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
Neither side of any political spectrum thinks that a law enforcement policy "works" if it reduces the incidence of criminal events against innocent people. Obviously if that was the goal, the easiest path is to remove laws and disband police. Instant crime rate drop.
But in fact both sides want to improve their societal outcomes and the policing/criminal policies that they support are by-and-large attempts to do that - improve society.
I'm neither left- nor right-wing in the US sense, but it is clear from examples around the world that high-trust societies emerge from the ground up and require strong family units, strong local communities, and strong engagement in larger politics.
While you do need police, you can't build communities by policing them. It's never worked anywhere.
I think another framework is blank slatism.
For instance, you can look at two countries and if one country has a higher prison population, that country over polices because every country and its people should have the same criminality level because all cultures and people are identical.
I remember feeling great shame that the US had such a high imprisonment rate. This led to a big decrease in state prison population and things like cashless bail and letting people go to basically like the stats. We need to get back to basics and remove people that are destructive and stop overanalyzing things
Please don’t worry about the emdashes, worry about the broad and inaccurate generalizations being churned out by your flawed world model. I urge you to go to some actual criminal reformers in person.
Eschew flamebait.
Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
Yes. I presume you’re not capable of empathy, given your comment. Punishments don’t stop people being hungry, and they sure don’t stop people from stealing when they are hungry.
The fact that you’re unable to at least sympathize is pretty pathetic.
> Put the criminals in prison. Do it often enough, and shoplifting ceases to be a problem of plague-like proportions.
The Brits very conclusively disproved this concept.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloody_Code