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.
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?
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/