> alternative that happens in a some communities is vigilante justice

And NYC is now famous for prosecuting you for engaging in self defense as well.

https://nypost.com/2022/07/10/nyc-bodega-owners-urge-da-brag...

https://nypost.com/2023/04/01/nyc-garage-worker-charged-with...

In the first story, the charges were dropped.

In the second story, who knows what in the hell is even going on. It happened too recently for there to be any clarity on what actually happened there. That could easily have been an over-zealous person causing problems (like George Zimmerman) rather than self-defense. Time and the trial will tell.

Outside of NYC, the guy in the first story would never have been arrested, and the charges were dropped due to immense public pressure on the DA's office. The police stated that they intended to charge him with murder.

The police don’t bring charges. They can intend whatever they want.

Charges were dropped. But why do they keep getting raised against people defending themselves, and never raised against chronic nuisances?

The point is to inculcate a state of learned helplessness into productive citizens.

You're right, we don't have the details yet, but from what we do have, I think you'd be hard pressed to find a jury willing to convict someone that shot an assailant with the assailants gun after being shot twice. Once you've been shot, you are on a clock for getting medical assistance. I could see how retaliatory shooting is valid self defense as it ensures that the person who just threatened your life is unable to continue threatening your life, even if you have possession of the gun(because you've just been shot) and it ensures that you have a scene where paramedics can actually attend to you. If you want to ensure your best odds of survival, making sure your assailant is dead also ensures that you aren't competing for medical resources...but I'm not sure taking it that far would qualify as self defense. Using deadly force though, seems entirely justified.

> You're right, we don't have the details yet, but from what we do have, I think you'd be hard pressed to find a jury willing to convict someone that shot an assailant with the assailants gun after being shot twice.

All of this is alleged, and based only on testimony of the person who did the shooting. We simply don't actually know what happened here yet (if we ever will). You're making assumptions based on the New York Post's reporting, which is a tabloid at best. It's entirely possible that the person who did the shooting was the one who had the gun all along.

The second story is pretty clear the attendant witnessed a person looking in random cars confronted the person. The lowlife took out his gun and shot the attendant who wrestled away the gun and shot the criminal in turn.

Nobody looks into random cars in a lot without intent to steal and he was the only one to introduce a gun into the affair.

None of those facts are known in the second story. It's all based solely on the testimony of the person who did the shooting. That's why I emphasized it's way too soon after to actually know what happened. Also, you're putting way too much faith into the New York Post, which is a tabloid that lives by the motto 'if it bleeds, it leads'.

> In the first story, the charges were dropped.

They never should have been filed. The victim was cuffed to his hospital bed recovering from two gunshot wounds.

That’s ridiculous and horrific.

If you’ve ever been falsely arrested, you’d realize that the process alone is punishment, and should never be applied without significant care.

It’s Bolshevism, plain and simple. Criminals are “socially close” and therefore blameless except in the most blatant circumstances, whereas gainfully employed, law-abiding citizens are bourgeoisie or kulaks, and must be punished. This is not a new playbook.

"NYC in particular suffers from rampant under-reporting on crime stats. "

How do you know this? Why aren't other cities affected by this under reporting?

Metrics-driven policing often gets the blame here: shifts in policing policy that hold individual precincts, officers, etc., directly responsible for crime statistics under their watch were initially successful in more efficiently allocating police resources, but have now created a set of perverse incentives that encourage officers to either not file reports or to down-classify reports into less-grave categories (reporting armed robbery as theft, etc.). These kinds of programs originated in NYC, as the "CompStat" program under Jack Maple and Bill Bratton, largely during the administration of Rudy Giuliani as mayor, but similar programs have since been adopted by (particularly urban) police departments across the country, to arguably similar both positive and negative effects. This kind of stats manipulation ("juking the stats") featured heavily in the TV show The Wire, for example, which is set in Baltimore.

So, to more directly answer your second question: other cities absolutely also suffer here, but New York has been at it the longest, and so is perhaps best known for this issue.

For more background, Reply All did a two-parter a few years ago exploring the history here, which is quite good. This is the first part: https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/o2hx34

I wasn't doubting that criminal stats can be manipulated or are unreliable.

I was asking for evidence that was the case for nyc and that it was such an extent as to change the danger of the city compared to others

No urban police department is going to care about your small time theft.

The primary difference I notice is that in SF, people seem to expect that the police will care about this? I am not sure why the expectations seem so different - perhaps it is the large number of people coming from more suburban parts of the country where the police do investigate these crimes?

They should.

And maybe, probably because they should be investigating these crimes.