Re:How to Safely and Ethically Film Police Misconduct
by bsanr2 on Tuesday June 02, 2020 @09:57PM
(#23398869)
A dead reply to this post expressed incredulity at the disparate treatment of Bernie Madoff and countless black convicts when comparing the scale of the damage they respectively caused. They illustrated this with the erroneous "factoid" that Madoff stole more than the value of all robberies and burglaries by black people in the country's history. This is probably untrue, due in no small part to the nature of his scheme. That said, the trillions in value lost during the Great Recession, which was the result of completely unpunished malfeasance by executives and regulators across the financial industry, and which stripped black families of roughly half their wealth, almost surely eclipses whatever figure one could come up with for the proposed above. I agree with the spirit of his comment.
However, it's clear that the vast majority of resources are devoted to black areas and poor areas, and to responding to directly "violent" crime. A mugging is more sensational than white collar crime, but from a purely utilitarian standpoint, I'm not sure it's rational to devote more resources to catching the mugger when, for example, there is widespread wage theft depressing incomes in the mugger's city. Which causes more damage in the long run?