This Vox video is probably the type of thought piece that spurned the populist cash bail reform initiatives that California embarked on 3 years ago.

Why fixing the US bail system is tricky: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5mhwDSHKEyM

I think the challenging part is that if you just listen to the Vox which provides no rebuttal to itself, it all seems logical?

But that's because it doesn't present the alternate reality that there do exist actual bad actors in real life who can thrive in causing societal level nuisances when there is a revolving door which we are seeing playing out right now.

The true criminals are mostly the people higher up managing the backend distribution who you don't see who are systematically taking advantage bail reform and of the low level actors who may indeed need the money for food - at scale.

The nice thing is that societally there probably isn't much disagreement that these higher ups who are buying second vacation houses with these "earnings" need to be held accountable.

For instance with the San Francisco retail thefts [1]:

"agents seized and recovered approximately $8 million of stolen merchandise from retailers across the San Francisco Bay Area"

"Video from a police stakeout shows Drago unloading trunkloads full of merchandise at one of his warehouses — mouthwash, cleaning supplies, shampoo, foot spray, over-the-counter medicine, and more than $1 million dollars worth of razors. Drago allegedly directs the boosters to steal small, compact items, with long expiration dates, and high resale value."

To add another dimension of irony if there's a similar pattern to the CVS/Walgreens shoplifting distribution mechanisms - the main distribution back into the system is Amazon and E-bay, etc.

"The stolen goods eventually find their way to Ebay, Craigslist, Facebook Marketplace, and Amazon, where they are sold at a steep discount. Dugan says there’s a big societal cost to saving a few bucks."

So in that case, Amazon stuff is getting pilfered only to back into Amazon to be sold as Amazon marketplace items - no questions asked.

[1] https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2020/10/06/major-san-franc...

What is that based on?

I admit its probably my own imagination that if one has warehouses, cash counters and shell LLCs for this size of operation that one is also aware and actively figuring out how to exploit bail reform and sub-$1000 theft limits in a way akin to BigCo lawyers reading anti-trust legislation to figure out the loopholes.

"Working with the task force, investigators tracked the stolen goods to 16 different storage lockers, warehouses and homes across the Bay Area. Much of the goods were then sold online through what law enforcement says was a shell company ... they found cash, a high-speed bill counting machine, and multiple vehicles... they found stacks of hundred dollar bills. Drago’s money was laundered through real estate transactions and other businesses."

Usually the hard part of money laundering is the opposite: how to turn cash into something a bank will accept.

You don't need a quote from a Walmart executive to know that Walmart is benefiting from its employees getting Medicaid and food stamps. So similarly you don't need a quote from a criminal leader to know that the criminal organization is benefiting from lax law enforcement.

But I'm not finding good data on how lax the law enforcement actually is.

There are certainly a number of places pointing it out, such as a member of the board of supervisors of SF saying Thieves “are obviously choosing locales based on what the consequences are,” Safaí said. “If there are no consequences for their actions, then you invite the behavior. Over and over.”, Walgreens saying the thefts in their SF stores are 4x other cities, and CVS calling SF “one of the epicenters of organized retail crime”[1]. One woman stole 120 times[2]. Former assistant DAs say the DA "selectively enforces laws"[3]. The police say hundreds of repeat offenders are responsible for shoplifting in the city.[4]

On the other hand, the police's actual numbers aren't convincing:

>In 2018, there were 238 repeat offenders, 20% of them were rearrested. In 2019, there were 219 repeat offenders, 29% of them rearrested.

>While in 2020, there were 116 repeat offenders -- 33% rearrested.[4]

So the repeat offender numbers are going down. That seems to indicate no problem caused by bail reform. And why are the percent rearrested low? That seems like it's the police's fault, not directly a bail problem. Also, I'd be more interested in knowing the number of thefts committed by repeat offenders, rather than the number of repeat offenders. And especially what percent of thefts are committed by repeat offenders. Shoplifting has been declining in SF, and SF, while much higher in shoplifting rates than some cities, is also much lower than others.[5]

So I think it's obvious that lenient bail and prosecution will aid shoplifting groups, but it's unclear to me how lenient the bail and prosecution is, or how severe shoplifting is in SF.

Thanks for spurring me to look into this more; it's more complicated than I thought.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/21/us/san-francisco-shoplift...

[2] https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2021/12/07/aziza-graves-sa...

[3] https://abc7news.com/chesa-boudin-recall-brooke-jenkins-san-...

[4] https://abc7news.com/sf-shoplifting-retail-theft-in-san-fran...

[5] http://www.cjcj.org/news/13165

This is exactly what the startup unicorns do - they disrupt. The scam world is computer savey, and feeds of information that hackers distribute. It could be said that we are part of the problem. Has your code been used in scam?

I don't think those are the only 2 alternatives. There's also the alternative of everyone getting good protection from crime.

"In October 2021 alone, the increase was 356% over compared to October 2020. Not only do these dramatic increases represent retail product thefts – they include increased assaults and armed robberies of UP employees performing their duties move.

These individuals are generally caught and released back onto the streets in less than twenty-four hours... Even with all the arrests made, the no-cash bail policy and extended timeframe for suspects to appear in court is causing re-victimization to UP by these same criminals."

Agree - its early data collected and correlation does not equal causation but the bail reform proponents should be investigating if more if/else/case statements need to be added to the underlying bail-reform feature codebase to prevent site outages being reported by power end users.

I'm hopeful that they are.

See the other thread for more nuanced commentary - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29990457

Meanwhile, that same letter that spent 1/3 of a sentence mentioning bail talked about plea bargains for 2 paragraphs. I agree we have problems, but bail (or lack thereof) isn't the issue.

Zero bail for 30 felonies including auto theft

https://crimewatchmn.medium.com/hennepin-county-lifts-bail-r...

Auto theft a year later increases by over 500%

https://www.mprnews.org/amp/episode/2021/12/14/why-has-a-wav...

From reading news stories it’s the same people doing it. Mostly minors. I know correlation doesn’t equal causation, but it’s interesting here in a year period from those jail changes we see over a 5x increase in those crimes.

Bail-reform is probably a good feature worthy of keeping, just don't leave a potentially bug ridden implementation in production without a plan to fix it.

Also its for sure the same people running the backend operations. The front end people doing the stealing are somewhat interchange-able.

Its the backend APIs operating at scale that are the issue.

For example, regarding catalytic converter theft:

"This is a very significant step in stopping the widespread stealing of catalytic converters which have affected hundreds and hundreds of people in our county,"... 12 suspects are considered middlemen and thieves and the three other suspects worked at recycle businesses who knowingly purchased the stolen converters to sell... Green Metal Recycle... is suspected of possessing nearly $3,000,000 of stolen converters. "One of the officers said this is like a black market Costco and it really was," Rosen said. These businesses melt down the converters to get the precious metals inside- palladium, platinum and rhodium drive up the value.

$3M - that's a big number for inventory!

Further, your article about "mostly teen" offenders explains in great detail that that statistic should not be taken at face value. Since such a small percentage (10-15%) of carjackers are caught, there is a likely skew to younger, less sophisticated criminals.

Far from proving your point, you demonstrate crime is rising in the baseline, unchanged, crimes. Therefore, you raise the amount of crime needed for the cash bailless crimes to be attributable to that factor and not larger social changes.

Repeated lowered cash bail caused this guy to die.

This is only one example from Philadelphia, there are quite a few examples in the past two to three years, coinciding with Larry Krasner. He absolves himself of responsibility in this case, but ran on a platform very explicitly reducing cash bail to reduce incarceration rates on lower level crimes.

https://theappeal.org/the-successes-and-shortcomings-of-larr...

Here is an article fairly in favor of Krasner, and he is quoted on delivering these things.

Philadelphia hit a high score of 500+ shootings last year, and over 700 carjackings. We're already over 100 carjackings this month. There is plenty of blame to go around depending on who you ask, police, Biden, Krasner, COVID, the mayor, the economy.

One thing feels more true than others: if you are in jail, you cannot commit crimes. The costs to society and other people in the city looks very high right now. Krasner was just reelected, turnout was very low, and so we have another two years to see how it goes.

The sentiment among my neighbors on my block is: be careful going to your car at any time, don't be out alone late, use rideshare not public transit if you're a late night service worker. At least a quarter of them want to move in the next two years, split evenly between renters and owners. Can't remember that feeling in the past twenty years.

The problems with analysis like what you're doing is it just doesn't work. Like, suppose we locked up every person. Crime outside prisons would plummet! What if we made people wear GPS units at all time? Executed everyone who sped or worse!

What you have to show is that it made sense to deny him bail at the time.

Which article? On Josephus Davis? This was massive news in our city, Davis shot a dogwalker after robbing him.

The particulars on Mr. Davis:

He was released on reduced bail (300k->20k) for armed kidnapping the month before. He was also released after carjacking a rideshare driver the year before.

This is not a nice person.

>Like, suppose we locked up every person. Crime outside prisons would plummet! What if we made people wear GPS units at all time? Executed everyone who sped or worse!

Not sure why you're assuming I think this.

The purpose of showing this local story is that if there are not some kind of consequence to bad actors, things repeat themselves. Reform of cash bail appears to have side effects.

So we should continue to jail innocent people based on their income level?

Instead they need to put back on their work gloves and figure out how to deliver their promised feature (i.e. bail reform) while actively fixing the failure modes that their new feature introduced until all existing users are happy enough not to be submitting Jira tickets again.

Note that the people in the communities vote overwhelmingly for these reforms, and they are the ones living with the outcomes. A large proportion of people who have problems with it are outsiders.

Speak for yourself. Boudin and Gascon both are facing recalls, and even Portland and Oakland are reversing changes to policy funding. More likely there's a sizable portion of the said electorate that's sick of bearing the brunt of this failed sociological experiment pushed by progressive gaslighting. Not to mention the survivorship bias of the many of our friends / family who got sick of it and uprooted.

And at this point it's still just a highly correlated but not necessarily causation [1][2] - until more underlying data with more context about the crimes/criminals. But the move fast/break nature of the roll out makes the a/b test feedback cycle challenging. Perhaps it should have been tried in one or two counties first.

And don't get me wrong either - I'm more than happy if the move fast and breakers can stick around and perfect the new feature (i.e. bail reform) by adding some additional checks. It's a worthy goal/feature. Perhaps all that's needed is a check like - "if you are arrested a second/third time we are going to have cash bail".

[1] California Supreme Court Nixes Cash Bail Some Defendants - March 25, 2021

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-03-25/californ...

[2] Original Post - "In October 2021 alone, the increase was 356% over compared to October 2020. Not only do these dramatic increases represent retail product thefts – they include increased assaults and armed robberies of UP employees performing their duties move. These individuals are generally caught and released back onto the streets in less than twenty-four hours... Even with all the arrests made, the no-cash bail policy and extended timeframe for suspects to appear in court is causing re-victimization to UP by these same criminals.

There is no correlation I'm aware of. Two things happening around the same time isn't correlation. Furthermore, changes in crime rates across the country are similar regardless of the local DA policy (per the FBI's crime report), which would indicate a lack of correlation with bail policies.

> In October 2021 alone, the increase was 356% over compared to October 2020. Not only do these dramatic increases represent retail product thefts – they include increased assaults and armed robberies of UP employees performing their duties mov

Crime for one private business isn't data supporting a correlation with actions that affect the entire city.

And yes - its still early innings and the single data point is end user collected from a "bug report" by a major power end user (i.e Union Pacific).

But at the end of the day - UP is a power enterprise level user (of California as a Service) who happens to provide a useful add on service to a large chunk of the CAaS end user community.

I'd say as a proactive PM/dev responsible (i.e. Newsome, CA District Attorney, etc.) for championing the new feature (i.e. bail reform), I'd be attentively listening to all users of the community about their feedback/UX experiences and very actively thinking about tweaks to improve site uptime even before definitive data existed that pointed to my feature causing outages. Or concretely ensuring/proving its not.

If I wanted to get that promotion that is.

That part is incorrect: Correlation is defined as (A => B) AND (!A => !B). (I.e., that's a logical AND; both terms must be true.) Every morning, the rooster crows and the sun rises; that's not correlation because if the rooster doesn't crow, the sun still rises. (The actual definition of correlation is, IME, a very powerful tool for analysing through assertions.)

As you say, correlation does not mean causation, even using the proper definition. For example, two people completely unknown to each other may, over the course of an hour, laugh, cheer, and cry at the same time, in a highly correlated manner. But there is no causation between them; they are merely watching the same live TV show.

this requires more inspiration to solve than just pointing at having vs not having cash bail

for now, they ended cash bail without implementing any additional system, and that has undermined a merely familiar balance in our society. there is nothing saying that balance could be restored while also not having a cash bail system, but people are pretending like these two concepts are intrinsically tied.

Saying “jailing innocent people” is just playing with words.

But you’re not put in jail before trial because you’re guilty, it’s to keep the public safe and/or make sure you don’t flee.

Most people don't want to steal, but many more do because they feel they have to.

You can't deter someone from putting food on their family's table, putting a roof over their head, or getting sound sleep.

People sometimes think just because they would only steal as a last resort just before death that other people treat theft with the same moral compass. No, they don't. Some people are plain opportunists.

I don’t think we need more mandatory sentences or stricter laws, but simply turning the other way and not punishing this kind of behavior is also going to backfire. There has to be a balance.

I suspect it’s all designed to artificially reduce the crime stats (“if we don’t process or book them no crime was committed”) while at the same time getting extra points for social justice. Two birds with one stone.

Because one idea is that they have to feed their children. It’s an urgent, desperate need. They are not doing it for fun, they don’t want to be criminals.

Well, it is easy to explain stealing a bag of beans to a judge, and most of all, to the starving children at home, than justifying waiting for a train, cutting the lock, getting the luxury Louis Vuitton sunglasses, bringing them home, putting them up for sale on Craigslist and waiting for offers, so then, they can finally go to the store and buy the bag of beans.

The story of feeding hungry kids doesn’t work as well in the later case.

I see people mentioning children the same way people say children when talking about surveillance. It’s usually a tool for sympathy rather than real motive.

I also have my personal experience noticing how a good number of people I knew thoroughly enjoyed the rush and the excitement of it. I couldn’t think of many who ever said they had no choice, had children to feed, but rather they would go on about how they hid from the cops, sold the stuff, such and such was stupid to get caught, etc.

I would like to believe everyone is kind and nice and doesn’t want to do those things, the reality I have been through doesn’t support it at all, sadly.

What's odd is you have people who are very ideological and dogmatic and refuse to believe this is the case. They don't see themselves becoming thieves just because, so therefore no one else would do such a thing.

But look, do people have to be in the mob? Is it risky to be in the mob? Do they not have any other options? Yet, people get in to the mob. It's not lucrative. They could get regular jobs, but no, they like the atmosphere --well, that was years ago before the feds pretty much put a lid on it.

Pragmatically - You have to steal fewer items with less security, so less risk of getting caught. It's lighter to move. You can use that money for clothing or rent. You can use that money to buy a lot more food.

Meanwhile, it seems as trivial to justify to a judge. You needed food, so you stole something to get food. Certainly, I consider it to be at least as moral as stealing the food directly, so I don't understand why it would be harder to justify. Unless your contending that stealing beans is obviously for feeding kids, but stealing a bag isn't? That is, you're asking for leniency and not debating morals. In which case I would ask you if motive matters to a judge or if that means your kids are more likely to get taken away or can you not get the same effect by just keeping better records? Receipts of how your spent the bag money.

Where do we have data that that is happening?

It’s in the letter being discussed.

Some are, but your childhood friends aren't the people who are causing this letter to be sent.

The people committing this level of crime do need the income this theft generates to survive.

Later on I knew people who stole electronics --not as juveniles any more. It was just easy money for a night's work. They didn't have to put in 40. Didn't have a foreman. They'd brag about how easy it was...

So, I don't believe they have not alternative but this. It may be an "easier" option compared to other options, but it's not their last option. No. People in the Eastern block had less purchasing power than a poor person in the US. They did not have a culture of thievery. One, they were not a consumerist society and two, they would give no quarter to thieves.

That's a great way to ignore the problems of people not like you.

I'm sure you'll change your story to further illustrate how evil you think these people are, but the reality is they're not evil, and they don't really have other options, regardless of what went down in your world when you were younger.

No matter how many times you say otherwise, people would rather not steal. Fix their circumstances, fix their behavior. If you actually cared about solving the problem, you’d care about helping these people.

But no. For you, this is about petty vindictive retribution. Your inability to empathize with someone not like you creates a cycle of hate that’s self perpetuating, further exacerbating the problem rather than being effective in finding a lasting solution.

You need to get out of your bubble man.

I've got a number of other comments here at this point that cite sources which explain things better than I'll ever be able to, if you're actually curious, I recommend you read those sources (and others, "are people good?" is a fairly well trod area of psychology, and indeed philosophy).

If you were in their situation, you'd do exactly as they would, you just had a better situation in your life. We owe it to them to give them that shot.

I know it's easier to blame these people for their choices, but in a lot of cases, there never really was any other choice for them. "Just don't do crime" isn't really a choice you can make when nobody explains to you what else there is to do that gives you any real shot in this world.

I'll repeat, because it's important: you'd do exactly the same thing these people have done, if you had their set of experiences.

We need to stop trying to be devoid of personal responsibility as a society.

Why is it important to you to focus on the bad people, when there are many, many more people who aren't bad?

You’re telling me the vast majority of people wouldn’t take advantage of others if they ended up with serious power.

History and personal experience tell me otherwise. People are not basically good.

This isn't opinion, and these are just easily accessible sources. There are a lot more, and a lot more rigorous sources, if you're actually interested.

The alignment of incentives and the perception (or lack thereof) of choice does a lot more work than you apparently are aware of.

At this point, it seems like I'm trying to reason you out of an opinion you didn't reason yourself into, which is both sad and futile, so I'm going to stop.

[0] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/scientists-probe-...

[1] https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/how_science_he...

[2] https://www.zmescience.com/science/humans-are-good-in-nature...

[3] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/social-animals/20191...

[4] https://www.vox.com/conversations/2017/5/23/15516752/science...

[5] https://www.nbcnews.com/better/health/good-company-why-we-ne...

[6] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/oct/14/selfis...

[7] https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20130114-are-we-naturally...

Nonsense! It's possible you learned everything you know about people by reading it from a book.

This is a report from the real world: everyone (at least in the US) these days get a "shot" and while some are lucky enough to be born with a silver spoon, most people who are below middle class get lots of extra attention and resources paid for by everyone else (who work for a living). Opportunity is there and is often just left on the table in favor of anti-social (more entertaining) behaviors. Sorry, but it's true. If you want to "owe" other people something, go ahead, I'm tired of paying the bills for other people's sentimentalism.

It may surprise you to learn how many people in my life have not gotten a "shot", how many have, and how many have gotten vastly more than their fair of a "shot" in life. Those are the circumstances, and when you find yourself in similar circumstances, with a similar set of life experiences as someone else, you tend to make similar choices as they would. Humans, generally, act similarly, all else being equal.

To quote MLK, "It’s all right to tell a man to lift himself by his own bootstraps, but it is cruel jest to say to a bootless man that he ought to lift himself by his own bootstraps." [0]

The people who are stealing from these trains are, by and large, men without boots.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xsbt3a7K-8

Most of those people are working and paying taxes, as many benefits programs are stipulated on first having a job. Those benefits are also laughably terrible to non-existent, as well, and vary heavily from state to state.

Also, many people who are "below middle class" are not eligible for the programs, anyway. The federal poverty level is something like $12k a year for an individual, and benefits are cut off if you earn more than that.

No, the people that work for a living are the people below middle class, hence why the class below the (petit bourgeois) niddle class in capitalism is known as the “working class”.

You don't know my situation or my past. I can say that you clearly don't understand criminals, criminality or even destitution.

Most people will not embezzle from their company —but some will despite not needing to and being aware of the risks. They just have the opportunity to. The same behavior happens in other spheres.

Most theft is not due to impending dire straights. It’s opportunity for quick cash of loot without needing to go through the tribulations of getting a paying gig.

Anyway, the question under discussion is whether maybe we should change their experiences, so they don’t do this sort of thing anymore.

I know it’s popular to say that we only need positive reinforcement, that we can accomplish everything good just by saying “yes.”

That is false.

As for the claim that you'd behave as they would, were you in their situation, that's basic Situational Action Theory [0], a well studied theory in criminology that attempts to explain crimes as moral actions.

The irrational focus on the relatively small number of "because I wanted to" type crimes is very popular in conservative circles, but isn't an accurate or helpful view of why crime is committed, and it's not shared by the plurality of experts who study this topic academically.

[0] https://www.cac.crim.cam.ac.uk/resou/sat

That’s sort of the problem here. Different fundamental models of human motivation and behavior. I don’t really have an answer one way or another but I would disagree that most people who steal do it reluctantly and don’t enjoy it. Or, they do it to put food on the table. I have lived in places with pervasive crime. Some of my acquaintances growing up were in and out of jail over various things including including burglaries, assault, and all kinds of horrible things I would rather not mention. A good proportion of them enjoyed the rush and the excitement.

I looked up a few videos of looting it’s almost never produce, food or clothing. But big screen TVs, electronics etc.

There has to be balance between lock everyone up for small amounts of drug use and not referring even a single one of the 100+ arrested looters for prosecution and just saying they are so poor so they have to put food on the table, and train companies can afford it anyway.

> given strong deterrence

This is a theory that doesn't fit the facts. The US has some of the highest prison sentences of any first world country. Where I live, there are some of the shortest and gentlest, and yet, crime is very low. There is no correlation between harsh 'deterrence' and low crime.

Even if the punishment is not that severe, a high probability of being caught is a much greater deterrent.

You're not going to get far with the current US police. If you compare the money put in to the crime stats, the picture is one of an extreme inefficiency. They've failed in their mission to such an extent that a large minority of people simply don't trust them enough for them to do their duty to those people. They've preside over a third-world crime rate with first world tax revenues.

At this point, it would be reasonable to start talking about a wholesale reboot of the whole operation.

However, if that's too radical, or too expensive, it would seem pragmatic to try and target crime through some other mechanism - e.g. welfare.

If that ever stops being the case maybe solve that problem first and understand how to go back to when deterrence wasn’t even necessary.

If you did lose your livelihood I suspect you would fare better due to the same impulse control and ability to delay gratification that led you to be temporarily wealthy in the first place.

Just plainly asking: what's the situation with social welfare where you live?

It's a blue city in one of the bluest states in the country, if that's what you're asking. The social services are about as good as you're gonna find in the US. The city shares a border with a slightly smaller urban area in one of the lower service red states (they haven't even legalized weed yet, not that that's a service). That side of the river is not noticeably higher or lower in crime.

This rampant petty property crime problem seems to follow specific public policy, not any other variable.

Much of this is due to the design of the region: the greater Los Angeles area is a sea of concrete in a desert, that extends for 100 miles in every direction. It's impossible to run as a region efficiently and requires a massive amount of effort to provide services for.

The weather's nice though :)

>unless you leave your $1k road bike unlocked within view of the street for a long time it's probably not gonna grow legs

In other words, you live and work in the wealthy parts of the city.

What is that based on? I can see wealthy property owners thinking that - that the police are there to serve their personal interests, including by enforcing the laws they control to a large degree - but I don't know any basis for it nor do I think other segments of the population would agree.

In fact, it's arguable that law enforcement has been to a great extent about power: The powerful suppressing the weak, such as minorities.

> The purpose is deterrence

If you mean, the primary means of law enforcement is deterrence, it seems plausible but there is a lot of research out there. Again, where does this theory come from?

Also, how is locking up innocent people a form of deterrence? That seems to be a form of oppression.

> Without deterrence, you get a negative spiral as we're beginning to see in cases like this where the purpose of justice system is being subverted

Crime rates are generally very low. Homicides and shootings have increased, but relatively equally across the country, in large and small communities. (source: recent FBI crime report) Where is the evidence that particular policies are causing an increase in crime?

I've lived in places like this, as well. Except it didn't come down to the existence of the police, but the fact that it was a middle to upper middle class neighborhood where nobody had a reason to commit petty theft. Deterrence wasn't a factor at all with the people that lived there when it came to buying and selling drugs like cocaine, for example.

Truthfully, I think most property crime would be stopped in its tracks if people didn't have economic reasons to commit petty theft.

> I think increasingly that people in western societies are misunderstanding (and electing people to positions of power who misunderstand) the big picture purpose that law enforcement and justice system has played throughout civilized history.

If we look at the history of policing in the US, we didn't have municipal police forces for quite some time. In the North in port cities, merchant owners would hire security at their ports, and decided that it would be cheaper to instead make it a government service that everyone pays for instead of just the merchants[1]:

> In cities, increasing urbanization rendered the night-watch system completely useless as communities got too big. The first publicly funded, organized police force with officers on duty full-time was created in Boston in 1838. Boston was a large shipping commercial center, and businesses had been hiring people to protect their property and safeguard the transport of goods from the port of Boston to other places, says Potter. These merchants came up with a way to save money by transferring to the cost of maintaining a police force to citizens by arguing that it was for the “collective good.”

In the South, policing rose out of gangs of slave patrols[1]:

> In the South, however, the economics that drove the creation of police forces were centered not on the protection of shipping interests but on the preservation of the slavery system. Some of the primary policing institutions there were the slave patrols tasked with chasing down runaways and preventing slave revolts, Potter says; the first formal slave patrol had been created in the Carolina colonies in 1704. During the Civil War, the military became the primary form of law enforcement in the South, but during Reconstruction, many local sheriffs functioned in a way analogous to the earlier slave patrols, enforcing segregation and the disenfranchisement of freed slaves.

Ultimately, the origins of policing in the US from wealthy owners wishing to secure their expensive assets from theft, destruction, or in the case of slaves, escape, and also not wanting to pay for that security themselves. Later those police forces served those same owners by serving as strikebreakers[1]:

> For example, businessmen in the late 19th century had both connections to politicians and an image of the kinds of people most likely to go on strike and disrupt their workforce. So it’s no coincidence that by the late 1880s, all major U.S. cities had police forces. Fears of labor-union organizers and of large waves of Catholic, Irish, Italian, German, and Eastern European immigrants, who looked and acted differently from the people who had dominated cities before, drove the call for the preservation of law and order, or at least the version of it promoted by dominant interests. For example, people who drank at taverns rather than at home were seen as “dangerous” people by others, but they might have pointed out other factors such as how living in a smaller home makes drinking in a tavern more appealing. (The irony of this logic, Potter points out, is that the businessmen who maintained this belief were often the ones who profited off of the commercial sale of alcohol in public places.)

[1] https://time.com/4779112/police-history-origins/

As someone who grew up poor this type of racist/classist argument is insulting. The poor have morales, values and pride too. The people robbing these trains are criminals and do not represent the community they live in. Frankly your hurting poor kids by allowing these criminals to be present and act like role models.

I grew up very poor, as well, around plenty people who sold weed when it was illegal to pay rent because the other option was living on the street. The truth is that if someone is hungry, they aren't going to just curl up, starve and die. Even more so if their kids are hungry. I don't think that makes them bad people at all, and some their choices may even be the most moral actions to take.

I'm not making a moral argument or judgment at all with that statement, I'm just stating the simple fact that theft will happen if people are deprived of the property they need to live. It seems that society has chosen to hire people to beat and imprison others as the solution to theft, instead of choosing to alleviate the deprivation of resources that causes most of it. Truthfully, I think the former option is what's racist and classist.

I would bet dollars to donuts that the proceeds made from these thefts went into drugs, alcohol, and entertainment than proving for any basic needs.

Please don't strawman my posts, especially when I've posted this[1] not more than a day ago.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29961052

Theft, like all of human behavior has many causes. You can look at what differentiates thieves from the working poor with similar lack of resources to determine some of the causes. Alternatively, you can look at what is in common between rich and poor thieves.

I have known far too many honest and hard-working poor people to believe that a lack of resources constitutes either a necessary or sufficient cause of theft.

If your primary point was that a hungry person will steal to feed themselves, I agree but don't think it is relevant to the social problem at hand.

If you were to ask me, I would say that people steal when they have little to lose, including integrity and empathy for their victims.

Of course the people stealing from the railroad aren’t necessarily pilfering items to meet an immediate human need. But according to reporting this weekend from the LA Times, some of the thieves do indeed live in camps near the railroad. And who knows why they’re stealing — maybe one needs cash for insulin and another is fueling a drug addiction.

In either case (and this is a hot take) I’d still argue these acts aren’t necessarily immoral. Addiction is a powerful force, perhaps more so than urges of hunger and thirst. And of course no one wants to die of uncontrolled diabetes!

If there are many good options and the person performs the one with maximal negative effects on society, I'm perfectly happy to hit him with punishment. I'm more amenable to necessity, but that's not what you're talking about here.

They qualify for CaliFresh, it’s not like they’ll starve unless they can figure out how to trade food for drugs.

> maybe one needs cash for insulin and another is fueling a drug addiction.

One you can get with Medicaid (well, Medi-cal), the other you can’t. Diabetics would definitely qualify if they meet the residency requirement.

> The people robbing these trains are criminals and do not represent the community they live in. Frankly your hurting poor kids by allowing these criminals to be present and act like role models.

No one said anything about criminals being representative, or about them being role models except you.

> The poor have morales, values and pride too.

Lots of rich people don't, they just commit different crimes.

A sort of poetic statement that has some kernels of truth but is incredibly reductive to the point of being untrue save for a handful of municipalities where former slave patrollers actually headed municipal police. The overwhelming majority of police forces have little, if any, connection to slave patrols.

https://www.aei.org/op-eds/the-problem-with-claiming-that-po...

> First, every decent country has police, including the non-white ones. Second, the South lost the Civil War. Under Reconstruction, the Radical Republicans imposed the North’s will on the South. The slave patrols were disbanded. Some patrollers did indeed become police. But so did African-Americans. Meanwhile, the evil energies of the patrols were primarily expressed elsewhere—in the form of vigilante groups like the KKK. When Reconstruction ended, the South imposed tyrannical Jim Crow laws.

The only known case of a former slave patrol organization becoming a municipal police force is in Charleston South Carolina. Slave patrols were a mostly irregular force, tasked with policing a mostly rural agricultural enslaved population. And when the civil war was lost, these patrols were disbanded. Only in a few instances did slave patrols actually become police, like in Charleston.

Yes, policing in Southern slave states has some roots in slave patrols.

Roman tradition still forms the basis for many police institutions across much of Europe. Most of Europe and the Americas didn't abolish slavery until a few decades before the US did. Some actually didn't abolish it until decades after US emancipation. One could make a claim that their police forces are rooted in enforcement of slavery, in the same vein as the South. And even stronger ones for much of the Middle East and North Africa, some of which didn't actually make slaver a crime until the 2000s (I kid you not [1]). If you believe what is going on in Western China, you could argue that slavery is still practiced, under the watchful eye of law enforcement. My point is that pointing to the history of policing in the US as uniquely tied to slavery is pretty disingenuous if you're taking a good faith reading of the history of policing. It's acting like there isn't a country and a half between the police forces of 1860 and 2020.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_slavery_in_the_Musl...

That's essentially summarizing the article: slave patrols existed in much of the south, but claiming continuity with today's police is a very big stretch, to the point where it's only poetically true.

You realize that cost of theft would otherwise be passed on to consumers? It's not exactly a free lunch to get merchants to pay for their own security. Also, I'm sure you can invoke the "it would be cheaper to instead make it a government service that everyone pays for" excuse for any other government service. eg. roads, military, education, etc. Should we look at those services with the same type of cynicism?

Reality isn't so nice and theoretically pure. People want power and they develop various systems to gain and secure their power.

Source please. There’s actual studies promoting things like bail reform that use actual data and such. Do you have anything like that, or are you just preaching from your privileged bubble with no idea what it’s like to be on the other side of the justice system?

Anyone who thinks criminals are “good people in bad circumstances” and “having to be a criminal is punishment enough for their crimes” is just wilfully ignorant.

One can’t help but wonder if people pushing these policies are victims of “no-consequences positive parenting” 30 years later. Those policies can work fine in a loving home - not so much in the adversarial and violent world of society at large.

This is no experiment. This is a single case in a single city that may have been avoidable with other policy decisions.

> Anyone who thinks criminals are “good people in bad circumstances” and “having to be a criminal is punishment enough for their crimes” is just wilfully ignorant.

Ah, the real bias comes out now.

> One can’t help but wonder if people pushing these policies are victims of “no-consequences positive parenting” 30 years later. Those policies can work fine in a loving home - not so much in the adversarial and violent world of society at large.

More pseudo psychology please!

Citation needed...