Actually, it's quite normal in highly unequal societies, and has been documented time and time again throughout history, as has the cycle of wealth redistribution. Nobody has managed to stop the inevitable march to redistribution, although they have managed to mitigate the late-stage violent period in some cases, and even avoid violent revolution.

there are many much more unequal societies than the US where this just isn't a problem. russia or china, for example. their rates of violent crimes like this are far below that of the US.

it's a pretty idiotic trend in recent years to reduce every societal problem to a income, wealth or other types of inequalities. there are societal problems that are completely and utterly caused by different issues, and this is one of them.

China has a huge wealth gap like in the US, yes, but _everyone_, even peasant farmers, can afford health care and real food that isn’t McDonalds. The lowest class materially knows their life is improving, year over year, so they don’t have cause to act out.

Saying “look at their rates of violent crime” overlooks how the Chinese government _very heavily_ cracks down on dissent or violent offenders in the general case, usually by shooting everyone indiscriminately or making a public example out of them.

Anecdotally, I’ve been at a Chinese bar when a fight broke out. People tried resolving it quickly, before the police found out. If a situation escalates enough, a whole truck of police show up and beat everyone there, including bystanders, for not “keeping the peace”.

> russia or china, for example. their rates of violent crimes like this are far below that of the US.

Hm. I am myself not from Russia exactly but from 90s Baltics and I personally remember repeated occasions I had to do end up in fights with local “trash”.

Once that ended with a guy punching one of the girls from our crowd in the face because she was being too outspoken about him trying to incite a fight with one of us. To be fair we should have expected that but none of us had any time to react.

To be clear that is actually quite a normal thing. Well, at least at the time it was and the area I lived in was not one of those incredibly poor areas. Russia has way worse places.

So yeah, we never reported that because truth to be told it was very usual and the whole general philosophy is to endure or to fight back yourself and not go to the police. So I would not think this stuff ends up in statistics.

What ends up in the stats is all of the really bad stuff like rape and killings at the same time. I would not even expect any medium-hard definition of “rape” would be reported on a regular basis let alone someone getting punched in their face.

china has been working continuously to get people out of poverty and that work continues. from the perspective of the people they mostly feel that they are better off than they were a decade or more ago.

this is the difference to the US. poor people in the US do not see that things are getting better for them.

also in china, everyone, even the poorest have access to affordable healthcare.

most poor people in china do not live in cities but outside where they have land to sustain themselves, so while their life may be poor for our standards, it is nothing like the experience of poor people in the US.

china values social stability first and foremost and works to keep it that way while in the US poor people are blamed for their own condition, like they should just work harder to get out of poverty, little is done to actually enable them to do so.

so no, china is absolutely not more unequal. much less so. there are poor areas and richer areas, but within each area everyone is pretty much equal.

So your preferred solution is to segregate poor people? Wild.

Tell that to the police, who target the working class with crimes like loitering, jaywalking, or "driving on a suspended license" (inability to keep up with court fine on top of court fine)

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/04/coronavirus-ne...

From what I have seen in Minneapolis/St. Paul, those are things (low-level, livability crimes) which have stopped being enforced over the past 5-10 years. We are starting to see the effects of this inverse-broken-windows social experiment, and it's not looking good, at least where I live.

e.g. Aggressive panhandling, tent cities, traffic infractions, public transit fare evasion, shoplifting (<$1k), etc.

And that will continue getting steadily worse until public outcry causes the city to reverse course and get "tough on crime" again. After that, the "us vs them" mentality crystallises into fractured communities that eventually start to be run by gangs, similar to what you get in Brazil.

cool, the typically slippery slope. wonder if there could be other reasons for latin american countries being destabilized... hmm

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

b/c there could be no other reasons for this to be the case, and the only solution is to arrest, jail, or fine people potentially exacerbating their poverty?

this sounds like pearl clutching and not wanting to think more about an issue with tons of variables.

If you maltreat 10 poverty stricken people to the point of desperation, one or two probably will act out this way.

More will probably kill themselves, though.

I think we have to talk in broad swaths here, we can't zoom in on individuals.

Unprovoked? Neither “class” has realistic access to social services or health care in the US, so the mental health and addiction issues that often lead a person down this road go unaddressed.

Further, the US legal system (and US society) heavily stigmatizes “offenders”. Once a person is down its extremely hard to get back up, and people need money survive.

Not saying that violence is ok, but in many cases people just need help instead of punishment.

Agreed, we need to treat addiction much much more aggressively.

Here in CA/SF the current policy is to simply ignore low-level crime (which funds their drug addiction aka "to survive")... instead let's take people off the street (and take them off drugs).