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Broken windows policing is why I hate police. My chances of calling police under any circumstance is near zero. Having the cops kick your ass for no reason doe

Broken windows policing is why I hate police. My chances of calling police under any circumstance is near zero. Having the cops kick your ass for no reason does not help anyone in our society, it only breeds mistrust. That mistrust can last a life time. Its going to take a generation or more to get past this bullshit. Welcome to the United Police States of America.

SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
I'm not a fan either, but I think we have to acknowledge that it's an attempt to address a real problem. There really are areas where people regularly try to engage in petty crime, and the government has a duty to address that.
- MiroF 6y ago
  Why? And what sorts of petty crime? If the solution is more damaging than the problem, (and where I grew up, with jumpout vans driving around to stop and pat down random groups of teenagers, it certainly was) then the solution seems unnecessary. I feel like many commentators here are divorced from what policing on the ground in these places really looks like, there is no finesse or discretion to it.
  - SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
    I agree that the existence of the problem doesn't justify any possible policy, and patting down random groups of teenagers does seem bad. But, I mean, crimes are bad too. Ideally nobody should have to live in a neighborhood where they're afraid of being mugged or having their car broken into, and today a lot of people do.
    - MiroF 6y ago
      > being mugged Mugging is a violent crime and should be policed - but studies also show that people vastly overestimate their risk of being mugged. It definitely happens, but I am very skeptical that "broken window" policing addresses these sorts of violent crimes. A better move would be to de-densify poverty with mixed income housing, provide support resources, and build trust with police so people will report violent crimes. > having their car broken into Cars being broken in to? That's a different matter - I really don't think we have the capacity to police this in any meaningful way, it's a problem endemic to urban neighborhoods and is incredibly hard to police in a way that isn't super disproportionate. Don't leave valuables in your car, don't lock your doors - they'll just open, rifle through, and leave. I've had my car rifled through tens of times and the most they ever got was some quarters I left in there. The utilitarian in me feels like being exposed daily to random patdowns and harassments and having people jump out on you is much worse than that. Nobody should live in a neighborhood where the law enforcement doesn't treat them with dignity, just because of the color of their skin or their class background. You can't cleanly separate what crimes you choose to care about from the policies in place. When voters tell elected officials "decrease car breakins, that's what impacts my vote" that'll translate to these disproportionate policies because the communities being policed do not have the power to sway the policy and it is easy to hide the impact of the policing from the voters.
      - mikeappell 6y ago
        > Don't leave valuables in your car, don't lock your doors - they'll just open, rifle through, and leave. I've had my car rifled through tens of times and the most they ever got was some quarters I left in there. Not sure how much of an issue this still is, but thieves used to steal airbags. That's a lot more expensive and a PITA to replace.
        MiroF 6y ago
        Based on a quick google, you have about a ~0.01% chance of your airbag being stolen in a given year. How many black people should we stop and frisk to solve that problem, I'm a little rusty on the math?
        nitrogen 6y ago
        Just because the original policing tactic that spawned this thread is abhorrent doesn't mean we can't discuss other possibilities here. More on-foot friendly patrols (which should be perfectly doable given much higher density in cities), for example. Or maybe police actually trying to catch actual criminals instead of just acting like insurance agents.
        MiroF 6y ago
        Here's what happens: Voters vote for someone who says they will do this thing "more on-foot friendly patrols", "catch actual criminals". Police obviously continue what they've always been doing and stop & frisk, harass minorities, etc, because that's generally what happens when you stuff poor neighborhoods full of cops from a completely different background to the community they are policing. Everyone pretends this is not what is happening until some particularly blatant instance brings it to light. Turning up the pressure to catch stupid, small crimes while letting actual large problems (like consistent theft of wages that outnumbers money lost to robbery 3 to 1) will lead to stupid solutions.
        Dylan16807 6y ago
    - craftinator 6y ago
      I submit that any random searches by police breach our Constitutional Rights, are a form of mugging (or at least assault), and should be punished as such.
  - rwmj 6y ago
    In tourist areas I'd quite like the police to be proactively stopping pickpockets and scam artists.
    - MiroF 6y ago
      Again - you're discounting the negative secondary effects of the policy when the police start harassing people who "look" like pickpockets. Reminder - more total money is stolen from workers in the form of wage theft than is robbed by a factor of ~3 [0], why don't we focus on policing that? [0]: https://www.epi.org/publication/wage-theft-bigger-problem-forms-theft-workers/ https://www.epi.org/publication/wage-theft-bigger-problem-fo...
      - rwmj 6y ago
        You target pickpockets by having the police pretend to be a tourist, then arresting anyone who tries to pickpocket them. There's no confusion or profiling going on. And the rest of your comment is pure whataboutery - yes, we should do both.
        MiroF 6y ago
        It's not whataboutery in the context of limited policing resources and public attention. Accusations of tu quoque get thrown around way too quickly on the internet.
        skinnymuch 6y ago
        There’s limited resources. How is it whataboutism?
        rwmj 6y ago
        Arresting pickpockets may be an overall gain if tourists feel safe to go out and therefore spend. And rampant wage fraud also ought to be tackled, again possibly a net overall gain if that increases tax revenue. If your country cannot fund a police force that could do both these things then you have much bigger problems.
- TuringNYC 6y ago
  There are lots of petty crimes on Wall Street too. Check out downtown Manhattan on a Friday night and you'll find plenty of people with illegal drugs...yet...the broken windows theory seems to focus only on select [poor] neighborhoods.
  - SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
    And that's a bad thing, but I'm sure you'd agree the right solution isn't for the police to permit lots of crime in poor neighborhoods.
    - LeifCarrotson 6y ago
      Permitting petty crime would be a better solution than many alternatives. One such worse solution would be, for example, proactive, racially and economically discriminatory policing, ruining fragile, impoverished, limited-opportunity lives and breeding distrust, while simultaneously ignoring white-collar crime in rich neighborhoods.
    - JackRabbitSlim 6y ago
      So inversely, it is the right solution for police to permit lots of crime in well-off areas. “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.”
      - SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
        Poor people are certainly exposed to bad policing more often, but I don't think they see the entire concept of law enforcement as unequal. Most people across all income groups don't commit or approve of crimes.
    - bikezen 6y ago
      "Permitting crime" and not hassling everyone who looks a certain way or is in a certain area are two VERY different things. People are harassed and delayed for no reason just because of the way they look or where they are coming/going from, even if its their neighborhood. They're also ticketed for minor offenses due to those same "reasons" meanwhile people elsewhere are not having those same offenses punished. You will find plenty of stories from people who lives in neighborhoods where this was applied where you literally have to allow extra time to come and go from your own home because its likely you will be stopped and questioned just going about your daily lives. That would not fly in more affluent communities. "Proactive Policing" allows implicit and other biases of the police force to be acted on directly because there needs to be no crime to stop someone, its entirely on the polices judgement on who to stop and why.
- wavefunction 6y ago
  Community policing is the solution to the problems that broken window policing attempts to and fails at solving. It involves building rapport with the local community so that the community and police can work together to solve the problems in the community.
- stephen_g 6y ago
  What you're basically saying is, "sure, this and various experiences show that this kind of policing might make things worse, but hey, at least they have good intentions". Well, plenty of terrible things have been done with good intentions. This is one of the things I really dislike about a lot of politics, I see it all too often. There's a problem, so we need to do something in the name of fixing it - doesn't matter if it helps or not, we just have to be able to say we're doing something. But maybe we should step back and look at whether there are better ways to deal with the problems.
  - SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
    We should step back and look! What concerns me about policing is that a lot of proposals seem to reduce to ignoring the problem; there's a particular famous city a bit north of me where it's just become accepted that the streets should be covered in poop and shattered window glass. So I'm skeptical of alternatives which can't clearly explain how they will stop people from doing crimes.
    - craftinator 6y ago
      > Poop and shattered window glass These are symptoms of wealth inequality. Do you see wealthy people going around defecating on the ground or breaking glass? No. Do you see middle class people doing these actions? No. These are actions taken by homeless people (and teenagers), who have nothing worth while to do with their time, no money for idle entertainment, and awful living conditions.
      - SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
        This just strikes me as an intensely disrespectful hypothesis. Poor people and teenagers are people just like you and I; the vast majority of them are good citizens who feel no impulse to do crimes or poop on the street.
    - pinkfoot 6y ago
      Singapore has some ideas.
- rmrfstar 6y ago
  The US has the highest per-capita incarceration rate in the world [1]. US: 655/100k UK: 135/100K China: 121/100K Germany: 77/100K Iceland: 37/100K It feels like we are consuming just a little too much of the "security" product. Maybe we should try consuming the "justice" product. I hear it's pretty good. [1] https://www.prisonstudies.org/highest-to-lowest/prison_population_rate?field_region_taxonomy_tid=All https://www.prisonstudies.org/highest-to-lowest/prison_popul...
  - Zecar 6y ago
    Every one of those countries has a high level of social cohesion that is not present in the USA. Don't you think that would be a huge factor?
  - SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
    I agree, but the question is how to get from here to there. Releasing all the nonviolent drug addicts - which we certainly should do! - still doesn't get us close to those other countries.
    - MiroF 6y ago
      The problem with the drug war is imprisoning dealers, not addicts - and if we released them it would get us much closer to those other countries.
    - danenania 6y ago
      By the numbers, our best bet is probably revamping the prison system to focus on rehabilitation instead of punishment, and then drastically reducing the length of sentences. Our goal should be to get someone as close as possible to 0 chance of recidivism in as short a time as possible.
      - close04 6y ago
        Education is usually another good place to start. Educated people tend to make more informed choices, and informed choices tend to shape better futures.
- SN76477 6y ago
  I believe that petty crime is the cost of a free society. Strong arm tactics used by police do not stop it. It is simply going to happen. Spending resources to make sure everyone has what they need will drop petty crime rates. this is all my opinion.
- xphilter 6y ago
  Those areas are everywhere; they’re only selectively enforced in neighborhoods of color. White people don’t smoke weed, for instance? The huge rush of white folks into “legal” weed business suggests that’s not the case. But how many teenage boys in the suburbs are harassed and arrested and need to be bailed out? Imagine if all white people were stopped when they’re out in their neighborhood and actually had all those “petty” crimes enforced. (1) the policy would change overnight and (2) the arrest rate and mistrust of police would skyrocket.
kspacewalk2 6y ago
You seem to suggest "broken window policing" has to come with abuse of power. But it is in fact the abuse of power that breeds mistrust. The broken window theory itself seems quite sound to me - if you let small crimes slide without appropriate, lawful and proportionate response and punishment, it does indeed breed contempt for the law and does indeed lead to increases in more serious crimes. I think the same is true with upholding traffic laws, for example. My home province of Ontario loves to create rules that sound great (and sometimes overly strict) on paper, and then proceed to not enforce them, ever. Municipal police services have essentially given up on speeding unless it's truly outrageous, like 50kmh over. But what they fail to realize is the causal link between small offences and large ones. Hypocrisy about "small" offences breeds general contempt for rules of all kind.
- mc32 6y ago
  Indeed. Anyone who lived under Edward I. Koch’s mayorship would agree that the broken window theory has merit. As you say it also requires proportional response with the intention of steering behavior towards a better society rather than looking at it as purely “punishment”.
  - vmception 6y ago
    > Anyone who lived under Edward I. Koch’s mayorship would agree that the broken window theory has merit. There are subsequent studies that suggest it didn't have as much merit as people imagined it did.
    - mc32 6y ago
      “Not as much” doesn’t mean no merit. Even empty storefronts with no broken windows, if they dominate, take out the spirit of a location. Cities could, if they have resources, lease and use them for community centered services to entice some form of vibrance.
      - vmception 6y ago
        Which is why I wrote not as much instead of no merit. Words.
apotecaryman 6y ago
What is your definition of broken windows policing? When I google it, it says: "The broken windows theory is a criminological theory that states that visible signs of crime, anti-social behavior, and civil disorder create an urban environment that encourages further crime and disorder, including serious crimes." Now when you look at a riot such as the one in Minneapolis and in in prior cases such as California 92, how do you not see a further increase in crime and disorder once a subset of the population realizes that something seems to have gone unpunished? Even in smaller cases such as graffiti, an area tends to have a higher rate of graffiti the more graffiti there is in the area. The reason is simple, others came before and managed to do, opportunistic individuals with broken morals will abuse it.
- kaitai 6y ago
  As someone from the Twin Cities, the opportunists here include white supremacists and outside agitators as well as local folks who took advantage of this loss of control. We had hockey riots too, & burned cars, in 2003 and 2014; no one made your argument there. We have a strong civic community here, and there are many more protestors taking care of each other, taking care of small businesses, and trying to keep the peace here. Yes, sh*& is going down here. We need change. The arrest of Omar Jimenez of CNN on camera accurately represents the situation for black men in Minneapolis. This is not about broken windows or graffiti. This is about George Floyd, Philando Castile, Jamar Clark, the fact that Devin Chauvin who killed George Floyd has been involved in multiple shootings and has never been prosecuted -- even after killing other people. That's your broken window, hah.
- zaksoup 6y ago
  If you had scrolled down a bit on the Wikipedia article you might have found a rather well cited section that shows the causal link you imply here is extremely weak in follow-up studies. Sure you can say intuitively "if people see crimes go unpunished they may be inclined to commit further crimes" but the problem is that policing is an aggregate function of society, not an individual one. Communities rightfully question the efficacy policing petty property crimes with the total value of white collar crime vastly dwarfs the value of property crime. Often these white collar criminals are connected to or directly the cause of economic devastation in these communities, yet the communities themselves are the ones who bear the brunt of over-policing and the violence that causes.
hedora 6y ago
I’ve had no luck calling the police. Certified crazy friend wanted to shoot people at a synagogue. Family, friends, employer and psychiatrist agree he needs to be taken in? Nothing. Witnessed a person hit my car, give them the license plate? Nothing. Multiple burglaries in a remote area, with video footage and time stamps? Do they run a Google location tracking query after I point out they can and should? Of course not. Hand them the address of a repeated trespasser that’s threatened to damage my property, with video footage? They’ll enforce the law ($500 fine next offense, misdemeanor after that) if I spend $10k’s on a civil case, and the court orders them to do so. If I do nothing, they’ll encumber the deed to my property with a prescriptive easement for the jackass. Nightly drug deals in my back yard keep waking me up? They’ll have a patrol car drive by in 5 hours. That time the DMV received, recorded but failed to process my smog check? >$1000 in fines, and two days missed work. Once a black lady ran a light in a car I‘d sold. That was the crime of the century! They tracked me down and threatened to take legal action against me if I didn’t say who she was. I had no idea; it went to an auction house. It took multiple phone calls and two letters to prove I hadn’t had a sex change and somehow switched races. They “resolved” it by saying they’d either drop charges, or they’d assume I waived my right to trial and issue an arrest warrant. They said there was no way for me to tell me which of those things they did. It’s been a few years, and no one’s arrested me. I guess I’m good? Each incident happened in a different city in the SF bay area.
- 8ytecoder 6y ago
  Here I was thinking police not enforcing pedestrian safety rules and not even moving a finger to find my lost bike was a big deal. I feel you. I have dealt with police in two countries and it’s the same story. There are very few service minded individuals in the department.
- annoyingnoob 6y ago
  The DMV is a whole different kind of crazy.
Abishek_Muthian 6y ago
For those who would like to learn about the origins of Broken Windows, which the parent mentions - Hidden Brain (NPR) has a great episode on Broken Windows[1]. [1]https://www.npr.org/2016/11/01/500104506/broken-windows-policing-and-the-origins-of-stop-and-frisk-and-how-it-went-wrong https://www.npr.org/2016/11/01/500104506/broken-windows-poli...
downerending 6y ago
I've called the police one time in my life. The arriving officers were a bit wary and perhaps a little dim, but they ultimately helped save my friend's life. I would have been in trouble without them.

SpicyLemonZest 6y ago

I'm not a fan either, but I think we have to acknowledge that it's an attempt to address a real problem. There really are areas where people regularly try to engage in petty crime, and the government has a duty to address that.

MiroF 6y ago
Why? And what sorts of petty crime? If the solution is more damaging than the problem, (and where I grew up, with jumpout vans driving around to stop and pat down random groups of teenagers, it certainly was) then the solution seems unnecessary. I feel like many commentators here are divorced from what policing on the ground in these places really looks like, there is no finesse or discretion to it.
- SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
  I agree that the existence of the problem doesn't justify any possible policy, and patting down random groups of teenagers does seem bad. But, I mean, crimes are bad too. Ideally nobody should have to live in a neighborhood where they're afraid of being mugged or having their car broken into, and today a lot of people do.
  - MiroF 6y ago
    > being mugged Mugging is a violent crime and should be policed - but studies also show that people vastly overestimate their risk of being mugged. It definitely happens, but I am very skeptical that "broken window" policing addresses these sorts of violent crimes. A better move would be to de-densify poverty with mixed income housing, provide support resources, and build trust with police so people will report violent crimes. > having their car broken into Cars being broken in to? That's a different matter - I really don't think we have the capacity to police this in any meaningful way, it's a problem endemic to urban neighborhoods and is incredibly hard to police in a way that isn't super disproportionate. Don't leave valuables in your car, don't lock your doors - they'll just open, rifle through, and leave. I've had my car rifled through tens of times and the most they ever got was some quarters I left in there. The utilitarian in me feels like being exposed daily to random patdowns and harassments and having people jump out on you is much worse than that. Nobody should live in a neighborhood where the law enforcement doesn't treat them with dignity, just because of the color of their skin or their class background. You can't cleanly separate what crimes you choose to care about from the policies in place. When voters tell elected officials "decrease car breakins, that's what impacts my vote" that'll translate to these disproportionate policies because the communities being policed do not have the power to sway the policy and it is easy to hide the impact of the policing from the voters.
    - mikeappell 6y ago
      > Don't leave valuables in your car, don't lock your doors - they'll just open, rifle through, and leave. I've had my car rifled through tens of times and the most they ever got was some quarters I left in there. Not sure how much of an issue this still is, but thieves used to steal airbags. That's a lot more expensive and a PITA to replace.
      - MiroF 6y ago
        Based on a quick google, you have about a ~0.01% chance of your airbag being stolen in a given year. How many black people should we stop and frisk to solve that problem, I'm a little rusty on the math?
        nitrogen 6y ago
        Just because the original policing tactic that spawned this thread is abhorrent doesn't mean we can't discuss other possibilities here. More on-foot friendly patrols (which should be perfectly doable given much higher density in cities), for example. Or maybe police actually trying to catch actual criminals instead of just acting like insurance agents.
        MiroF 6y ago
        Here's what happens: Voters vote for someone who says they will do this thing "more on-foot friendly patrols", "catch actual criminals". Police obviously continue what they've always been doing and stop & frisk, harass minorities, etc, because that's generally what happens when you stuff poor neighborhoods full of cops from a completely different background to the community they are policing. Everyone pretends this is not what is happening until some particularly blatant instance brings it to light. Turning up the pressure to catch stupid, small crimes while letting actual large problems (like consistent theft of wages that outnumbers money lost to robbery 3 to 1) will lead to stupid solutions.
        Dylan16807 6y ago
  - craftinator 6y ago
    I submit that any random searches by police breach our Constitutional Rights, are a form of mugging (or at least assault), and should be punished as such.
- rwmj 6y ago
  In tourist areas I'd quite like the police to be proactively stopping pickpockets and scam artists.
  - MiroF 6y ago
    Again - you're discounting the negative secondary effects of the policy when the police start harassing people who "look" like pickpockets. Reminder - more total money is stolen from workers in the form of wage theft than is robbed by a factor of ~3 [0], why don't we focus on policing that? [0]: https://www.epi.org/publication/wage-theft-bigger-problem-forms-theft-workers/ https://www.epi.org/publication/wage-theft-bigger-problem-fo...
    - rwmj 6y ago
      You target pickpockets by having the police pretend to be a tourist, then arresting anyone who tries to pickpocket them. There's no confusion or profiling going on. And the rest of your comment is pure whataboutery - yes, we should do both.
      - MiroF 6y ago
        It's not whataboutery in the context of limited policing resources and public attention. Accusations of tu quoque get thrown around way too quickly on the internet.
      - skinnymuch 6y ago
        There’s limited resources. How is it whataboutism?
        rwmj 6y ago
        Arresting pickpockets may be an overall gain if tourists feel safe to go out and therefore spend. And rampant wage fraud also ought to be tackled, again possibly a net overall gain if that increases tax revenue. If your country cannot fund a police force that could do both these things then you have much bigger problems.
TuringNYC 6y ago
There are lots of petty crimes on Wall Street too. Check out downtown Manhattan on a Friday night and you'll find plenty of people with illegal drugs...yet...the broken windows theory seems to focus only on select [poor] neighborhoods.
- SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
  And that's a bad thing, but I'm sure you'd agree the right solution isn't for the police to permit lots of crime in poor neighborhoods.
  - LeifCarrotson 6y ago
    Permitting petty crime would be a better solution than many alternatives. One such worse solution would be, for example, proactive, racially and economically discriminatory policing, ruining fragile, impoverished, limited-opportunity lives and breeding distrust, while simultaneously ignoring white-collar crime in rich neighborhoods.
  - JackRabbitSlim 6y ago
    So inversely, it is the right solution for police to permit lots of crime in well-off areas. “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.”
    - SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
      Poor people are certainly exposed to bad policing more often, but I don't think they see the entire concept of law enforcement as unequal. Most people across all income groups don't commit or approve of crimes.
  - bikezen 6y ago
    "Permitting crime" and not hassling everyone who looks a certain way or is in a certain area are two VERY different things. People are harassed and delayed for no reason just because of the way they look or where they are coming/going from, even if its their neighborhood. They're also ticketed for minor offenses due to those same "reasons" meanwhile people elsewhere are not having those same offenses punished. You will find plenty of stories from people who lives in neighborhoods where this was applied where you literally have to allow extra time to come and go from your own home because its likely you will be stopped and questioned just going about your daily lives. That would not fly in more affluent communities. "Proactive Policing" allows implicit and other biases of the police force to be acted on directly because there needs to be no crime to stop someone, its entirely on the polices judgement on who to stop and why.
wavefunction 6y ago
Community policing is the solution to the problems that broken window policing attempts to and fails at solving. It involves building rapport with the local community so that the community and police can work together to solve the problems in the community.
stephen_g 6y ago
What you're basically saying is, "sure, this and various experiences show that this kind of policing might make things worse, but hey, at least they have good intentions". Well, plenty of terrible things have been done with good intentions. This is one of the things I really dislike about a lot of politics, I see it all too often. There's a problem, so we need to do something in the name of fixing it - doesn't matter if it helps or not, we just have to be able to say we're doing something. But maybe we should step back and look at whether there are better ways to deal with the problems.
- SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
  We should step back and look! What concerns me about policing is that a lot of proposals seem to reduce to ignoring the problem; there's a particular famous city a bit north of me where it's just become accepted that the streets should be covered in poop and shattered window glass. So I'm skeptical of alternatives which can't clearly explain how they will stop people from doing crimes.
  - craftinator 6y ago
    > Poop and shattered window glass These are symptoms of wealth inequality. Do you see wealthy people going around defecating on the ground or breaking glass? No. Do you see middle class people doing these actions? No. These are actions taken by homeless people (and teenagers), who have nothing worth while to do with their time, no money for idle entertainment, and awful living conditions.
    - SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
      This just strikes me as an intensely disrespectful hypothesis. Poor people and teenagers are people just like you and I; the vast majority of them are good citizens who feel no impulse to do crimes or poop on the street.
  - pinkfoot 6y ago
    Singapore has some ideas.
rmrfstar 6y ago
The US has the highest per-capita incarceration rate in the world [1]. US: 655/100k UK: 135/100K China: 121/100K Germany: 77/100K Iceland: 37/100K It feels like we are consuming just a little too much of the "security" product. Maybe we should try consuming the "justice" product. I hear it's pretty good. [1] https://www.prisonstudies.org/highest-to-lowest/prison_population_rate?field_region_taxonomy_tid=All https://www.prisonstudies.org/highest-to-lowest/prison_popul...
- Zecar 6y ago
  Every one of those countries has a high level of social cohesion that is not present in the USA. Don't you think that would be a huge factor?
- SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
  I agree, but the question is how to get from here to there. Releasing all the nonviolent drug addicts - which we certainly should do! - still doesn't get us close to those other countries.
  - MiroF 6y ago
    The problem with the drug war is imprisoning dealers, not addicts - and if we released them it would get us much closer to those other countries.
  - danenania 6y ago
    By the numbers, our best bet is probably revamping the prison system to focus on rehabilitation instead of punishment, and then drastically reducing the length of sentences. Our goal should be to get someone as close as possible to 0 chance of recidivism in as short a time as possible.
    - close04 6y ago
      Education is usually another good place to start. Educated people tend to make more informed choices, and informed choices tend to shape better futures.
SN76477 6y ago
I believe that petty crime is the cost of a free society. Strong arm tactics used by police do not stop it. It is simply going to happen. Spending resources to make sure everyone has what they need will drop petty crime rates. this is all my opinion.
xphilter 6y ago
Those areas are everywhere; they’re only selectively enforced in neighborhoods of color. White people don’t smoke weed, for instance? The huge rush of white folks into “legal” weed business suggests that’s not the case. But how many teenage boys in the suburbs are harassed and arrested and need to be bailed out? Imagine if all white people were stopped when they’re out in their neighborhood and actually had all those “petty” crimes enforced. (1) the policy would change overnight and (2) the arrest rate and mistrust of police would skyrocket.

kspacewalk2 6y ago

You seem to suggest "broken window policing" has to come with abuse of power. But it is in fact the abuse of power that breeds mistrust. The broken window theory itself seems quite sound to me - if you let small crimes slide without appropriate, lawful and proportionate response and punishment, it does indeed breed contempt for the law and does indeed lead to increases in more serious crimes. I think the same is true with upholding traffic laws, for example. My home province of Ontario loves to create rules that sound great (and sometimes overly strict) on paper, and then proceed to not enforce them, ever. Municipal police services have essentially given up on speeding unless it's truly outrageous, like 50kmh over. But what they fail to realize is the causal link between small offences and large ones. Hypocrisy about "small" offences breeds general contempt for rules of all kind.

mc32 6y ago
Indeed. Anyone who lived under Edward I. Koch’s mayorship would agree that the broken window theory has merit. As you say it also requires proportional response with the intention of steering behavior towards a better society rather than looking at it as purely “punishment”.
- vmception 6y ago
  > Anyone who lived under Edward I. Koch’s mayorship would agree that the broken window theory has merit. There are subsequent studies that suggest it didn't have as much merit as people imagined it did.
  - mc32 6y ago
    “Not as much” doesn’t mean no merit. Even empty storefronts with no broken windows, if they dominate, take out the spirit of a location. Cities could, if they have resources, lease and use them for community centered services to entice some form of vibrance.
    - vmception 6y ago
      Which is why I wrote not as much instead of no merit. Words.

apotecaryman 6y ago

What is your definition of broken windows policing? When I google it, it says: "The broken windows theory is a criminological theory that states that visible signs of crime, anti-social behavior, and civil disorder create an urban environment that encourages further crime and disorder, including serious crimes." Now when you look at a riot such as the one in Minneapolis and in in prior cases such as California 92, how do you not see a further increase in crime and disorder once a subset of the population realizes that something seems to have gone unpunished? Even in smaller cases such as graffiti, an area tends to have a higher rate of graffiti the more graffiti there is in the area. The reason is simple, others came before and managed to do, opportunistic individuals with broken morals will abuse it.

kaitai 6y ago
As someone from the Twin Cities, the opportunists here include white supremacists and outside agitators as well as local folks who took advantage of this loss of control. We had hockey riots too, & burned cars, in 2003 and 2014; no one made your argument there. We have a strong civic community here, and there are many more protestors taking care of each other, taking care of small businesses, and trying to keep the peace here. Yes, sh*& is going down here. We need change. The arrest of Omar Jimenez of CNN on camera accurately represents the situation for black men in Minneapolis. This is not about broken windows or graffiti. This is about George Floyd, Philando Castile, Jamar Clark, the fact that Devin Chauvin who killed George Floyd has been involved in multiple shootings and has never been prosecuted -- even after killing other people. That's your broken window, hah.
zaksoup 6y ago
If you had scrolled down a bit on the Wikipedia article you might have found a rather well cited section that shows the causal link you imply here is extremely weak in follow-up studies. Sure you can say intuitively "if people see crimes go unpunished they may be inclined to commit further crimes" but the problem is that policing is an aggregate function of society, not an individual one. Communities rightfully question the efficacy policing petty property crimes with the total value of white collar crime vastly dwarfs the value of property crime. Often these white collar criminals are connected to or directly the cause of economic devastation in these communities, yet the communities themselves are the ones who bear the brunt of over-policing and the violence that causes.

hedora 6y ago

I’ve had no luck calling the police. Certified crazy friend wanted to shoot people at a synagogue. Family, friends, employer and psychiatrist agree he needs to be taken in? Nothing. Witnessed a person hit my car, give them the license plate? Nothing. Multiple burglaries in a remote area, with video footage and time stamps? Do they run a Google location tracking query after I point out they can and should? Of course not. Hand them the address of a repeated trespasser that’s threatened to damage my property, with video footage? They’ll enforce the law ($500 fine next offense, misdemeanor after that) if I spend $10k’s on a civil case, and the court orders them to do so. If I do nothing, they’ll encumber the deed to my property with a prescriptive easement for the jackass. Nightly drug deals in my back yard keep waking me up? They’ll have a patrol car drive by in 5 hours. That time the DMV received, recorded but failed to process my smog check? >$1000 in fines, and two days missed work. Once a black lady ran a light in a car I‘d sold. That was the crime of the century! They tracked me down and threatened to take legal action against me if I didn’t say who she was. I had no idea; it went to an auction house. It took multiple phone calls and two letters to prove I hadn’t had a sex change and somehow switched races. They “resolved” it by saying they’d either drop charges, or they’d assume I waived my right to trial and issue an arrest warrant. They said there was no way for me to tell me which of those things they did. It’s been a few years, and no one’s arrested me. I guess I’m good? Each incident happened in a different city in the SF bay area.

8ytecoder 6y ago
Here I was thinking police not enforcing pedestrian safety rules and not even moving a finger to find my lost bike was a big deal. I feel you. I have dealt with police in two countries and it’s the same story. There are very few service minded individuals in the department.
annoyingnoob 6y ago
The DMV is a whole different kind of crazy.

Abishek_Muthian 6y ago

For those who would like to learn about the origins of Broken Windows, which the parent mentions - Hidden Brain (NPR) has a great episode on Broken Windows[1]. [1]https://www.npr.org/2016/11/01/500104506/broken-windows-policing-and-the-origins-of-stop-and-frisk-and-how-it-went-wrong https://www.npr.org/2016/11/01/500104506/broken-windows-poli...

downerending 6y ago

I've called the police one time in my life. The arriving officers were a bit wary and perhaps a little dim, but they ultimately helped save my friend's life. I would have been in trouble without them.