Philosophically I agree, this sounds nice. A bit false dichotomy-ish, but nice.

But if you think about it, an unstated yet necessary prerequisite is that the definition of "crime" must be morally aligned with what is right. If it's not, well then you're living in a dystopia. Imagine a world where slavery is still legal and being a runaway slave is a crime. How do people like Frederick Douglass escape and survive long enough to make a difference?

And that's before we get into the prerequisite that such a state must apply the laws completely evenly with no special tiers based on class, wealth, political connection, celebrity status, etc.

Move to China. You’ll love it. Not only does it have lower crime by virtue of being highly controlled, it also has the added benefit of you never hearing about crimes the government doesn’t want you to hear about, and you won’t hear about any police corruption or brutality either. Ignorance is bliss!

You also don't need to sell your company when you innovate, your well-connected oligarch has either already gotten what you're doing or can seize it without consequence.

it's "technology transfer", not "seizure" ;)

Sorry to break it to you, but oppressing people with cameras to prevent crime will only push the crime to where the cameras aren't.

This makes preventing the crime and protecting people from effects of these crimes extremely difficult.

Yes we have historically low low crime. It's unbearable.

There are a number of countries that might give you a panopticon state of you want one

This is up to debate. The FBI and DOJ numbers disagree with each other.

https://www.themarshallproject.org/2023/11/03/violent-crime-...

Yeah, historically low crime because a lot of the crime is not considered crime anymore. Why thousands of stores are closing in California?

> Why thousands of stores are closing in California?

Because everyone's buying everything online and getting it delivered to their homes.

Walgreen’s was closing stores anyway and used the pandemic shoplifting as an excuse… but it was never the actual reason.

Crime is at historical lows.

Even if shoplifting at Walgreens was the reason for closure, the downtowns of a few "liberal cities" (it's always the same 3-4 mentioned) are extremely unlikely to have that much impact on national statistics.

Well and good as a talking point, but violent crime is still illegal and way down.

The retail industry lobbying group itself noted that "shrink", the term for loss of revenue due to items walking off or being damaged, has remained unchanged since the 90s.

The people telling you that there is an immense wave of shoplifting are outright lying.

There's a few that have tried to implement this, and I want to live in none of them.

The US will fare no better if it walks down this path, and honestly will likely fare worse for it's cultural obsession with individualism over community.

Just be prepared to be never daring to complain; a zero crime society isn't without its faults.

If you're lucky, you might get your chance to live in Thiel's and Ellison's techbro utopia. Make sure to tell us how great it is to be subjected to people with no accountability, but all of the power over every aspect of your life.

You stop abuse in this country, particularly of children, and you start having zero violent crime a decade later.

So having a policeman in each street and corner, except the policeman bias is set by these four oligarchs.

Welcome to... choose among many of the technodystopies in literature.

Who will supervise the gate keepers?