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You said the crime increased. It has in most places in the last few years, not just where there is Wal-Marts. It also fluctuates everywhere constantly. There wa
by lenticular 8y ago
You said the crime increased. It has in most places in the last few years, not just where there is Wal-Marts. It also fluctuates everywhere constantly. There was understandably an uptick of shoplifting at the Wal-Mart due to its existence, but how does it follow that that :
(1) The Wal-Mart caused an increase in total crime. Any place where people congregate will have more crime. The existence of the Wal-Mart may have displaced crime and shoplifting from elsewhere. The existence of the Wal-Mart means that crimes occur there, but that doesn't tell you anything one way or the other.
(2) If the crime was due to the Wal-Mart, it was mostly due to people coming in from out of the area. How many of the people caught were not from the area? How does this proportion differ from when the Wal-Mart wasn't there?
The claims you are making would be very hard to show for a hyper-local area from the rates of crime and the demographics of the perpetrators. It requires actual evidence, including a very large effect to offset the noisy small sample.
- mastazi 8y ago> Any place where people congregate will have more crime. The existence of the Wal-Mart may have displaced crime and shoplifting from elsewhere. The existence of the Wal-Mart means that crimes occur there, OK > but that doesn't tell you anything one way or the other. This directly contradicts your previous sentence.
- lenticular 8y agoNo, it does not. The claim is that crime increased due to out-of-area people coming to a Wal-Mart. People congregate in a Wal-Marts. The proportion of in- vs out- of-area people may differ, but there are a lot of people there. This means crime, especially because it is a store that can be shoplifted from. Much of this crime was displaced from elsewhere, because those same people weren't elsewhere. In other words, it does not follow this crime was due to out-of-area people, since the crime would have increased regardless.
- mastazi 8y agoThe rest of this thread (including the parent comment you were replying to) seemed to be about city vs suburbia, so that’s how I interpreted that Wal-Mart story. I’m not very familiar with the suburbanisation process in North America - I’ve never lived there - but wasn’t it driven by the desire of avoiding higher crime rates by moving to less densely populated areas? If so, local suburbanites must have hated that new Wal-Mart precisely because it was a point of congregation. Your reasoning is centered around “in vs out-of-area people” but the way I read it is just “not many people around vs lots of people around”.
- SamReidHughes 8y agoThe Walmart's existence as a crime nexus was because it attracted trashy people from other neighborhoods, not because it was a congregation point. The same problem didn't occur at previous superstores, or high school football games, or the community college.
- mastazi 8y agoIs this because Walmart is a low-price store? I'm not American so I have no idea
- SamReidHughes 8y agoPartly that, partly it's a great store.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]