Mugging is a violent crime and should be policed - but studies also show that people vastly overestimate their risk of being mugged. It definitely happens, but I am very skeptical that "broken window" policing addresses these sorts of violent crimes.
A better move would be to de-densify poverty with mixed income housing, provide support resources, and build trust with police so people will report violent crimes.
> having their car broken into
Cars being broken in to? That's a different matter - I really don't think we have the capacity to police this in any meaningful way, it's a problem endemic to urban neighborhoods and is incredibly hard to police in a way that isn't super disproportionate.
Don't leave valuables in your car, don't lock your doors - they'll just open, rifle through, and leave. I've had my car rifled through tens of times and the most they ever got was some quarters I left in there.
The utilitarian in me feels like being exposed daily to random patdowns and harassments and having people jump out on you is much worse than that. Nobody should live in a neighborhood where the law enforcement doesn't treat them with dignity, just because of the color of their skin or their class background.
You can't cleanly separate what crimes you choose to care about from the policies in place. When voters tell elected officials "decrease car breakins, that's what impacts my vote" that'll translate to these disproportionate policies because the communities being policed do not have the power to sway the policy and it is easy to hide the impact of the policing from the voters.
Now I just leave nothing of value inside the vehicle - even removed my glovebox (another thief ruined the locking mechanism trying to get it out).
I live in a very nice area of DC, cars would get rifled through every ~2 months or so, very late at night and they would move very quickly. Many people have decided that it is worth their while to live there despite this minor inconvenience. If you don't want to live there, that's fine - but please don't vote for people who are going to institute stop & frisk and heavy policing of poor neighborhoods. Those policies don't even work to stop it - the cause is large wealth disparity in a small geographic region.
You may have the choice to live in a certain area, many do not have the choice to live in areas where they are subject to demeaning patdowns and stops.
Pretty much every city is moving to less aggressive policing of petty crime largely because of its pretty blatant failure and the substantial negative impacts it has. Generally sounds like you'll probably want to stay in suburbia.
> Generally sounds like you'll probably want to stay in suburbia.
It rather sounds like you have a strange perspective on urban living. I can't speak for the US, but it isn't normal in any city in Europe for your car to be rifled through every 2 months in a nice area of a city. It isn't even normal for bad areas of cities. If it happens once in a person's life it would be bad luck.
I don't know how you have knowledge of the normal number of car break ins in every neighborhood of every city in Europe, but yes car breakins are not infrequent in the urban US. Ours was probably particularly frequent because it was being targeted by some sort of organized setup, but it is not uncommon.
It's a function of the amount of inequity - Europe is generally has somewhat less wealth inequity in the United States and less generational poverty.
> Generally sounds like you'll probably want to stay in suburbia.
So the poster you replied to was correct to say that they can just move to cities where it isn't accepted that cars are frequently broken into. They don't have to stay safe in suburbia after all.
In sum, car breaks in happen, policing it generally doesn't work very well, stop & frisk is bad, don't vote for people who do it, thank you for coming to my ted talk.
As a Brazilian, wow, that's a high crime area. People here voted a crazy wannabe dictator into the presidency because he promised to fix places that were less bad than this.
Anyway, yes, random stop & frisk probably makes things worse, not better.
Brazil's homicide rate is like 7x the United States, I find it hard to believe that the occasional opening of a door and looking through your car would be high crime by Brazilian standards where people will literally get stopped by armed gangs and kidnapped out of their car.
There were no murders where I lived, no muggings, no particularly violent crime of any kind - just some people would drive up to the rich neighborhoods at like 2:30 am and go through some cars.
The going logic is that the gang violence was isolated to their turf, and the property crime happened in the rich neighborhood on the other side of the housing projects. So there's sweet spots out there.
How would you know if your car got broken into if your doors were unlocked? What city was this (one of Baltimore, DC, Oakland, Chicago, NYC?)?
YMMV but it's not like car break-ins are rare.
Will this affect your insurance if the car is stolen?
Do car thefts of this form even really happen anymore? How would they even prove the doors were unlocked?
I am not sure whether a negative answer would have affected my claim.
Not sure how much of an issue this still is, but thieves used to steal airbags. That's a lot more expensive and a PITA to replace.
More on-foot friendly patrols (which should be perfectly doable given much higher density in cities), for example. Or maybe police actually trying to catch actual criminals instead of just acting like insurance agents.
Turning up the pressure to catch stupid, small crimes while letting actual large problems (like consistent theft of wages that outnumbers money lost to robbery 3 to 1) will lead to stupid solutions.
Absolutely and I think there are models of policing that reduce petty crime and obviously people would rather have less petty crime than more. We are all in agreement here.
I just want people to be aware that the policing of their imagination is not always the policing of reality and oftentimes what your gut instinct tells you might work will have pretty large and distorted negative impacts.
I really do think we're all on the same side here. Nobody likes crime and nobody likes police excess. The problem is just that sometimes where we grew up and what experiences we've had can lead us to underestimate one impact and overestimate another.
Reminder - more total money is stolen from workers in the form of wage theft than is robbed by a factor of ~3 [0], why don't we focus on policing that?
[0]: https://www.epi.org/publication/wage-theft-bigger-problem-fo...
And the rest of your comment is pure whataboutery - yes, we should do both.
> If your country cannot fund a police force that could do both these things then you have much bigger problems.
Underfunded local institutions are the reality in most of the world, not the exception. I'd rather have bodies investigating people who are witholding wages and illegally paying below the minimum wage then spending their day pretending to be a tourist in the hope that someone pickpockets them.
It's odd - it seems among this class of HN commentator-cum-policymaker, evidence driven policy is an unknown concept.
When you're living in poverty, withheld wages is a much larger problem than your apparently daily encounters with aggressive pickpockets, are you kidding me?
What an incredibly tone deaf comment.
Wage theft: didn't get paid for doing something before clocking in or got their hours messed with or whatever, which is also very bad of course, but more spread out and not as directly disastrous as the other scenario even if the total numbers might be higher.
So no, it's not tone deaf if you look past your knee-jerk reaction, it's just a well-reasoned justification why someone might be more mad about thieves than wage theft. It's not unreasonable to have the view that one murder is worse than a trillion people stubbing their toes once a week for a year even if the second scenario might add up to a higher score if you added it up by some quantifiable ethical metric.
Or like you're paid $6/hr to do migrant farm work when the minimum wage is $12. That adds up much more quickly and leads people to turn to things like theft.
That's already half your net worth right there.
> Robbery, pickpocketing, car stolen
The average person, even the average person in poverty, is not going to lose the majority of their net worth from pickpocketing, that's just absurd.
Now you're adding in two other crimes, which you didn't mention in your original comment, (you just said pickpocketing is worse than wage theft). Most people in poverty don't own cars in the first place.
My reaction wasn't knee-jerk - the suggestion that pickpocketing is some sort of epidemic across America affecting the nation's poor is just absurd on face.
Theft is the unlawful taking of property. Robbery is a subset of theft where violence or the threat of violence is used to accomplish the taking.
Pickpockets are thieves, not robbers.
I was making the assumption that total $ robbed was an upper bound on total $ pickpocket, which seems reasonable given what I've observed in the United States - but I am having trouble finding reasonable statistics about incidence in the United States.
If the solution is more damaging than the problem, (and where I grew up, with jumpout vans driving around to stop and pat down random groups of teenagers, it certainly was) then the solution seems unnecessary.
I feel like many commentators here are divorced from what policing on the ground in these places really looks like, there is no finesse or discretion to it.