People take the easier option. You choose "lock your trains well" despite knowing the answer will be "crack those locks well" because it was the easy answer. The view is simple. Eventually the train will be a rolling mountain of steel protected by an army. Your fishing lure will cost an arm and a leg because protection costs are up. And the thieves will just be relegated to do slave work (the work that shouldn't exist in those conditions but society was too busy locking the train well to bother protecting its most vulnerable members) or starve because those are the only options on the table.
For house burglary the way to deter opportunistic criminals is to harden down the house just a little bit. Lock doors, close windows.
Often drugs is the driving factor. I notice that out of 207 comments in this thread, only 4 including this one mention drugs.
(I used to work in a criminology research office)
That assumes thieves are rational actors capable of assessing risks at least somewhat accurately. Often times (the vast majority of times, even) they are not.
It's also worth bringing up that certain American subcultures glorify criminals. The criminal lifestyle is seen as glamorous by a large number of people, while honest labor is just dull, whether it pays enough or not.
It probably is not the main driver, but it is hard to discount it as a factor. Another interesting archetype is one man going solo against a corrupt system ( usually guns are involved ). You could reasonably argue that US populace is conditioned for it and then people are all surprised when people actually act out on those early imprints.
"They are poor, not stupid"
He was commenting on the risk decisions of farmers throughout history. It would be sensible for people to put all their effort into growing surplus of one crop for sale, but then they would be at greater risk of starving under crop failure.
People's choices are affected by their (percevied) risk calculus.
https://acoup.blog/2020/07/24/collections-bread-how-did-they...
Except when these thefts are de-facto decriminalized in Califronia, and police is either defunded or directed not to fight these crimes, the "risk of getting caught" is effectively zero.
That means that unless you start handing out iPhones for free in local malls, the thefts will continue.
Let's stop pretending these thieves are "starving". Starving people don't pull up to a Gucci or Louis Vuitton in a Porsche and casually steal a luxury handbag for their girlfriend.
If all work is slavery to you, how about the people who produced all these iPhones and LV bags?
We're dealing here with people who are happy to steal the products of other people's work, instead of doing any work themselves.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_California_Proposition_47
That means criminals engaging in such thefts cannot be legally arrested or prosecuted.
And we haven't even started discussing LA's new DA Gascon's aggressive move to decriminalize a very large set of offenses:
https://abc7.com/george-gascon-los-angeles-district-attorney...
If there's no directive, why is property crime not pursued?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_California_Proposition_47
No matter how diligent cops are, they cannot do anything about these crimes within the law. Passing such Propositions then blaming cops for rising crime is sinister.
> It recategorized some nonviolent offenses as misdemeanors, rather than felonies, as they had previously been categorized.
It’s still a crime. Police’s job is to respond to crime. Can you imagine if you were tasked with a job and then just stopped doing it because your thought your boss needed to take it more seriously? Any place I worked you’d get fired.
Especially if you started lying to everyone that your boss made it a rule that the problem can’t be dealt with when in reality you just think the consequences aren’t high enough
> No matter how diligent cops are, they cannot do anything about these crimes within the law
They could patrol the streets and respond to the crime. The court system and prosecutors office decides if it needs to escalate from there. This is the LAPD however so they’re probably too busy forming gangs and engaging in crime themselves
to the extent that police are an effective anti-crime tool, it primarily stems from their physical presence (racially profiled harassment) as a deterrent. outside of homicides & some PR-useful drug enforcement, police departments spend most of their time discouraging people from filing police reports after actual crimes, harassing poor people, and meeting traffic citation quotas
It’s not. The long term trend in property crime in the US is down.
Furthermore we seem to have such an easy money culture right now - if you get caught in a crypto or NFT or memestock or whatever bubble on FB or Twitter, 'everyone' is rich with no effort (and they can teach you how for 99$ a month!) - why shouldn't you be rich without working?!
No they don't. See all the studies that disprove the "broken windows theory" that tried to prove that crime rates go down when you enforce policing.
https://carder.uk/threads/does-broken-windows-theory-work.11...
The first book to disprove the broken window theory was Bernard Harcourt 's Illusion of Order, published in 2001. The author points out that over the 30 years of the existence of this theory, it has never been empirically confirmed, on the contrary, the available research contradicts it. The theory also relies on arbitrarily defined categories of "order" and "disorder", "law-abiding citizens" and "violators."
The first book to disprove the broken window theory was Bernard Harcourt 's Illusion of Order, published in 2001. The author points out that over the 30 years of the existence of this theory, it has never been empirically confirmed, on the contrary, the available research contradicts it. The theory also relies on arbitrarily defined categories of "order" and "disorder", "law-abiding citizens" and "violators."
First of all, the drop in crime in New York occurred simultaneously with the corresponding process in the entire United States. In another study, Harcourt notes that the drop in crime rates in New York coincided with the end of the crack drug epidemic. Christina Sterbenz adds that this trend has been fueled by declining unemployment (during the 1990s, its rate fell by 40%).
Criminologist Ralph Taylor is sure that socio-economic is a significant factor that affects the crime rate. Returning to the experiment with two cars - in the Bronx initially there was a low level of welfare, and in wealthy Palo Alto, a researcher must intervene in the experiment to provoke vandalism.
The theory of broken windows has also failed to pass the test of a massive social experiment. In 1994, the US government introduced the Moving to Opportunity program, which relocated 4,800 impoverished families to prime locations. The program was implemented in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston and Baltimore. Three quarters of the resettled households were on the brink of poverty, and two thirds of the participants were African American.
According to the theory, in the new environment the level of their involvement in offenses should have, but this did not happen, since the move did not improve their financial situation, but emphasized the social gap with their neighbors.1. https://www.ppic.org/publication/the-impact-of-proposition-4...
But in general I'd expect crime to be a "least worst option" choice and I seem to remember research to that effect. Although I wouldn't be able to find that now again, so take it with an appropriate amount of salt.
> https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn07...
"Two commonly used measures are: people in relative low income – living in households with income below 60% of the median in that year; people in absolute low income – living in households with income below 60% of (inflation-adjusted) median income in some base year, usually 2010/11."
This is however a bureaucratic definition of poverty that I don't accept as capturing the everyday meaning, but I thought it might be of interest to mention. I remember being under the poverty line and thinking "this doesn't count. I don't accept that I'm living in poverty." Knowing these technical uses made me regard official-sounding news and reports about 'poverty' quite differently.
(The bottom of the article talks about a group giving a more lay-compatible definition "The Social Metrics Commission (SMC) proposed a new based on the extent to which someone’s resources meet their needs. This accounts for differences among households such as costs of childcare and disability, savings and access to assets." which seems more meaningful if you're interested about absolute standards of living).
The question here is really what specific policies and cultural forces are shaping the economic realities that these people are living in. If nothing else, we should ask why someone isn't having great success hiring a few thick-knuckled train robbers away from their life of crime and running a very profitable security business.
Yes and currently society has many many ways for the privileged to get even more than others than they already have, in ways that are legally accepted even if they’re morally reprehensible. And as long as we don’t change that and make the playing field more even, I don’t think judging petty theft so harshly makes any sense at all.
It is the cruelest and vilest thing to do to those poor people who actually don't steal.
Yup. I wish we would start doing that.
https://inthesetimes.com/article/walmart-corporations-wage-t...
A scathing new report finds that hundreds of major corporations in the United States are repeat wage-theft offenders — committing the violations and then paying the subsequent fines as part of the cost of doing business.Working is always superior to stealing. Your words might try and cast them as morally equivalent, but they arent.
Until we as a society can honestly look at what reasonable amount of well being in information societies looks like, it's tricky to tell those with less what is reasonable to expect of quality of life.
Yes, mimetic desire is a real power too. Is that really what's at play here?
Who has the right to draw the line between basic well being and an utopia?
This Android vs. iOS thing is not about technical capabilities, it's about elitism - and elitism always breeds jealousy, and thus thievery. Lao Tse knew this in 500 BC: "By not prizing goods hard to get, you will cause the people to cease from robbing and stealing."
Used iphones are verifiable to be reliable, so there is a good aftermarket for them, as opposed to Android phones. At that point the elitism argument falls conpletely apart.
The point I want to make is that it can and will happen related to phones regardless of the brand. Some people are proud of actual propertiea of the product, others will focus more on the image or ideological aspects.
There's nothing wrong with this as such: humans are good at attaching their identities/personalities to all kinds of external things. This tendency also drives healthy psychological growth and learning when it's in check.
Police budgets are, by and large, still increasing in the US.
In billions of dollars:
2014-2015: $1.338
2015-2016: $1.438
2016-2017: $1.485
2017-2018: $1.578
2018-2019: $1.609
2019-2020: $1.733
2020-2021: $1.721
2021-2022: $1.760
The city also took on $47 million in overtime debt in the year that the budget was cut [2]
[1] https://lacontroller.org/budgets/ [2] https://www.lawenforcementtoday.com/la-cut-the-police-budget...
This is based on the (imho) wrong assumption that people prefer stealing over working when it's easier. But this is not true, people prefer to work but they need to live and their children need to live. You should remove the necessity to steal by building a social infrastructure that helps struggling people.
The case for this is nicely details in "Human Kind" by Rutger Bregman [0].
Why crime us going up? Because of higher desired standard (every body needs an iPhone, brand name shoes and hats), more difficulty with earning a wage (largely, difficulty getting a job at all) and decreased difficulty in crime (defunding police, more aesily available opportunities to steal, etc).
For well-off people it is easier to earn their standard by earning money by work than by stealing. Or they have more comfortable ways of stealing than haulig a paltry 10k in av equipment...
I wish i could be an idealist and to believe in a world where every one is happy with what they've got. But that's a utopia. Humans will always crave to have more than each other ad will steal, loot, defraud, do anything to get there.
Lock your trains well.