5 ms·

well off persons commit very different crimes from poor people. I don't think the author is talking about white collar crimes here.

• sdoering 10y ago
  Oh believe me, how often it happens, that well off people just "accidentally" drop some little stuff in their purse. Really lots of minor crimes, like shoplifting is done by people who do not have the necessity to do so. Not to talk about (nearly) criminal behavior while driving. Might be confirmation bias, but when I do my daily commute, most of the time it is the big car that does 100 in a 60 zone. Or the mothers, driving their kids to school, doing 60 to 70 in our 30 residential zone. Directly next to a school with kids lining the pathways. For me, these are just anecdotal examples, but I do not believe, that crime happens out of necessity (sure a lot of crime does, or does because it seems to be the easier way). But just making everybody well off will not end criminal behavior. People are aholes. Imho at least 2 standard deviations (and oftentimes I count myself into this range - but working on myself).
  • anexprogrammer 10y ago
    There's a lot of sweeping generalisations there! I can't put speeding in the same category as crimes of poverty, so I won't mention it further. There's dozens of causes to crime - lack of opportunity, not caring of consequences, greed, upbringing, education, peer pressure, depression or other issues (often held up as a cause of affluent shoplifting) and many others. The simple fact remains that poverty or a recession indicates a clear rise. If you can't put food on the table for the kids, and feel you have no other choices left, you may reach the point that you steal. Crime often happens without need too. From stealing a little stationery from your well paid job, fiddling expenses (£100k a year MPs have been caught doing this, whilst legislating to send the scum to prison for years for some triviality). They can be because you're pissed at your job. So it goes on for more premeditated and higher value crimes. Giving folks a decent baseline might end crimes of poverty and necessity, but would have little effect on the rest of the causes.
    • xapata 10y ago
      Your choice to ignore speeding as a crime is interesting. Stealing has much lower risk of killing someone, so in a sense, speeding is much closer to murder.
      • anexprogrammer 10y ago
        Only in the context of the OP talking about crimes of necessity. Speeding may perhaps be a necessity if you're trying to get someone to hospital, but in normal circumstances near a school is plain reckless. Speeding and other motoring offences aren't a necessity in the same way stealing money for food might be. They're not influenced by poverty at all. Some of the other motivations are common though. Hence choosing to ignore in that context.
      • dwaltrip 10y ago
        Please, tell me, how much more likely is a there to be a fatality if one is going 5mph above the speed limit? I'm dying to know
        • arjie 10y ago
          The correlation between fatality rate and speed of impact is so well established that you should just be doing your own research here and looking it up. If you can't be bothered, the answer is that it depends on which 5 mph it is. Speeding by 5 mph in the 30 mph school zone mentioned above is substantially increasing risk of fatality of pedestrian hit. Likewise, the correlation between speed and time to stop is also rather well established.
          • dwaltrip 10y ago
            I wasn't asking for the increased risk of fatality assuming there was a crash. We are talking about the overall impact of the decision to speed, so we can't assume a specific scenario. Of course which 5 mph it is also matters, as you've stated. It also matters if it is 2 mph or 10 mph. I still think GP's assertion is ridiculous. Minor speeding, which is what most people do, is not "close to murder" by any reasonable analysis.
• esmi 10y ago
  I don't think geon was thinking of white collars crimes either. Personally, I was thinking of domestic violence.
  • dorfsmay 10y ago
    Does domestic violence affect trust in society? Is there less domestic violence in the U.S.A. then in Somalia?
  • geon 10y ago
    Fwiw, I was thinking of shoplifting. Lots of people do it recreationally.