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Honest question here. Are these neighborhoods “over policed” because their residents commit more crimes, or do the residents commit more crimes because their n

Honest question here. Are these neighborhoods “over policed” because their residents commit more crimes, or do the residents commit more crimes because their neighborhood is “over policed”?

mtgp1000 6y ago
Only one answer is socially acceptable, regardless of what statistics indicate. And we are building a dangerous world by going down this unscientific path. I am genuinely concerned that this will bleed into ML science and we may find ourselves collectively pursuing a rabbit hole of bad science in a vain attempt to reconcile empirical data with ideology.
- vangelis 6y ago
  Only 13 percent of the population, you say?
- narrator 6y ago
  This preference for ideology instead of data reminds me of weird stuff that would happen with science in the Soviet Union. You had things in the Soviet Union like Lysenkoism[1] where a kook got power and explained his science in ideological terms and his theories, unsupported by data, were adopted and defended to the detriment of agricultural production. Workers adopted the theories because people were so afraid of criticizing the dominant ideology that they adopted whatever "science" was mandated in order to avoid being purged. Disagreement with official science was considered proof that one was a political subversive. "More than 3,000 mainstream biologists were dismissed or imprisoned, and numerous scientists were executed in the campaign to suppress scientific opponents." [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism
  - jxramos 6y ago
    > Joseph Stalin supported the campaign. More than 3,000 mainstream biologists were dismissed or imprisoned, and numerous scientists were executed in the campaign to suppress scientific opponents. Wow, so what sort of rationale can we make of this? Is the logic, "Stalin supports bunk science theory", "other scientists critique said theory", "therefore they indirectly critique Stalin and reduce his legitimacy/credibility"? Something like that? Are politicians expected to grasp every scientific thing they must evaluate accurately? Why wouldn't they accept and admit 'yah maybe we got this one wrong, sorry honest mistake' than to go out and murder folks. That seems widely overreactive.
    - AnimalMuppet 6y ago
      When you get a paranoid murderous psychopath like Stalin in power, "rationale" may be stretching it. But I think it went something like this. Marx was "scientific" - Marx had created a "science" of economics and sociology, and it was the official truth of the USSR. If some crank could show that his crackpot theory of agriculture was the logical consequence of Marxism's established truth, then it too had to be the official truth of the USSR. The science was settled; all that was left was for everyone to fall in line and implement it. Anyone who opposed that was both unscientific and unpatriotic. Except the science was objectively wrong, and implementing it resulted in disaster.
- baddox 6y ago
  Note that even you only mentioned whether answers are socially acceptable (in your view), not which one is true.
  - mtgp1000 6y ago
    That's the fundamental problem. We are ruling out possible results in advance, based on arbitrary social conventions, not data. This is fundamentally unscientific and will lead to stagnation at best, regression at worst, and progress only in the unlikely case. At some point we will have to reconcile the fact that the same mathematical and scientific techniques which we correctly apply to other sets of data produce unacceptable results any time models are conditioned on demographic data. What then?
danielhlockard 6y ago
I would argue that non-white neighborhoods are policed heavier, and as a consequence they "catch more criminals" in those neighborhoods.
- cameronh90 6y ago
  This appears to be the primary concern raised in the article. But surely data scientists could put in guards against this, such as weighting the crime count versus the time spent policing the area? In fact, presumably any functional predictive policing system must already do that, else you'd just tend towards policing one area incredibly intensively. If they are concerned about the police arrest stats or racism biasing the data set, they could keep the input to something hard to interfere with, like where murders occur or where crimes are reported by the public, rather than where arrests occur. My opinion is that predictive policing does need regulation, but banning it entirely, to me, seems like an overreaction that will over time result in much less effective use of police resources. I suppose time will tell.
- bitcurious 6y ago
  Violent crime can be measured by victims rather than criminals, e.g. where do homicides occur?
- eanzenberg 6y ago
  Do these neighborhoods commit more violent crime, rapes and murders?
- dx87 6y ago
  That wouldn't explain things like murder and other violent crimes. It's not like people are regularly getting murdered in the suburbs, but nobody bothered to check.
  - skciva 6y ago
    I think there are a lot of factors that go into a persons environment that influence something like murder rates. Also, depending on what you consider a violent crime, lack of reporting / local police department's doing something about the report can very well have skew crime rates in certain areas.
basch 6y ago
or crime is a function of income inequality, and ways to fight it are police (reactive) or preventative social spending (proactive.) it's like arguing over fire departments vs electrical code. neglecting the latter leads to more of the former. Even things like urban planning, where you put your low income housing. If you build low income housing in high income areas, it prevents ghettos from forming.
- rectang 6y ago
  > or crime is a function of income inequality That depends how you measure. The total value of wage theft in the US is comparable to the total value of all other property theft combined. https://www.gq.com/story/wage-theft https://www.gq.com/story/wage-theft Rich people commit lots of crime. They just get away with it more often than poor people, because rich people are under-policed.
- eanzenberg 6y ago
  Is there evidence for this though? The great crime decline in cities like NYC were due to increased policing and the “broken window” policy, along with stop & frisk.
  - thenewwazoo 6y ago
    That is what its proponents would want you to believe, except that it's not borne out by evidence. There were similar drops in other cities that didn't violate the civil rights of the citizens. And that's putting aside the question of whether it's right to deny people their rights in order to deter crime.
    - eanzenberg 6y ago
      It’s a challenging problem, but the way things are currently going, do you want a 70’s NYC in 2020+?
      - sambull 6y ago
        We only use lead in aviation fuels now.. so probably not.
joshgel 6y ago
I'm trying to learn more about this. What I am reading suggests this is the wrong frame. What if all the money spent over-policing these neighborhoods was instead spent on social services to support the people living there? Would that decrease the crime rate more or less than the policing? I'm not sure, but I'm becoming more convinced by this line of argument...
- alacombe 6y ago
  Food for thought, more than 50% of the federal budget is already spent on social services.
  - indigochill 6y ago
    I'm curious what your source is for that, because that's pretty remarkable, especially given the outcry about out-of-control military spending.
    - benjaminmarks 6y ago
      Arbitrarily citing https://www.cbpp.org/research/federal-budget/policy-basics-where-do-our-federal-tax-dollars-go https://www.cbpp.org/research/federal-budget/policy-basics-w... The bulk of social services spending is social security and medicare, which _each_ account for somewhere between 20-30% of federal spending. Military spending is closer to 15-20% of the federal budget
    - brchr 6y ago
      There are some semantic issues, e.g., the distinction between "mandatory" and "discretionary" expenditures, but the data is pretty easy to explore. Essentially you are "both right". > 50% of total spending is Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Whether that is "social services" is another semantic question. And > 50% of the discretionary budget is defense. But have a look for yourself: e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget
      - 6y ago
tsieling 6y ago
More crimes are documented because of extra policing, but that is different from whether more crimes are committed. Crimes of different degrees are happening all around, but if you look particularly in one area that is where you'll see crime.
jasonv 6y ago
We have data on the incarceration rates of Americans as a whole, versus other countries. I think the current activist climate is in response to the fact that the status quo is built on the premise that all that befalls the troubled populations in the US is always because they deserve it, and they brought it upon themselves. And therefore, all the prevailing cultural/ policing/ political/ fiscal positions that have been in response to these conditions are reasonable. That doesn't seem reasonable to me.
- clawedjird 6y ago
  In a hyper-connected world awash with data, holding such a perspective seems akin believing that the earth is flat.
- rhizome 6y ago
  That's called the Just-World Hypothesis, and I don't know that anybody professes it as a policy framework, though regular people do and I think it could be said to underlie a lot of prejudices and bigotries in people who do affect public policy, but it has to be hidden unless you're Steve King (R-IA). Victim-blaming is very common in the US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_hypothesis
- augustt 6y ago
  Of course it depends on which troubled population. For rural white poor people all their problems are framed as being from external uncontrollable pressures – they're losing jobs because of globalization, they're in an opioid epidemic because of pharma. Their struggles are not just dismissed as personal responsibility failures.
wonderwonder 6y ago
I used to sit on my friends porch when I was in college before pot was legalized, smoking. We are white people in a white area. If we had been black I have no doubt the increased police presence would have resulted in us getting arrested. There are tons of other stupid things I did when younger where if there had been more cops around I would have gone to jail. More police means more people are arrested for the same crimes committed with impunity in less policed areas. In addition the fact that you can be arrested for resisting arrest means that if a police officer wants to arrest you they can do so and create a crime afterwards. Recent headlines have shown very vividly how police actively encourage and look for confrontations hoping to spark a reaction. In a high crime area, everyone is a criminal in much the same way everything looks like a nail to a hammer. Imagine if this man had actually actively resisted the officer: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/06/24/man-sues-georgia-police-excessive-use-force-after-wrong-arrest/3248440001/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/06/24/man-su...
- eanzenberg 6y ago
  Unfortunately, law and order has to be standardized for everybody, regardless of background. Pot was decriminalized in many states already. Are there other things you would like to decriminalize? There are avenues for those, but it’s not a fast turn-around, those things take time.
  - wonderwonder 6y ago
    The law is standardized for everyone, its enforcement that is the issue. There are clear differences in enforcement for different races and different wealth levels. My example occurred many moons ago before pot was decriminalized any where. I am old :)
    - eanzenberg 6y ago
      Yes agreed, enforcement has to be standardized as well. Justice should be blind, except to the law. The pendulum swinging though has me worried, where dangerous crimes are currently unenforced.
baron_harkonnen 6y ago
This is not an "honest question". It's an intentional attempt to give equal weight to a fundamentally racist hypothesis to its alternatives. If you want to posit that low-income, black communities are inherently violent and need violence to keep them in line then at least don't be coward with your views.
14 6y ago
The problem as I see it is if you watch someone long enough they will break some law eventually, be it minor, which can then escalate things. For example if the person could not afford a fine they may end up in jail. So now you have to police disproportionately patrolling these neighbourhoods pulling people over. It’s unfair and certainly leads to hardships for some. Next a big issue I have is what defines a “crime” as they say? Because a poor man selling a bag of marijuana on the corner to make some grocery money will go to jail if caught but the business man can pay the fee and open a dispensary and profit immune to police. A poor man soliciting sex off the street jail, a rich man hiring an escort no issues. So they laws are discriminatory and the “crimes” these communities are supposedly breaking is questionable.
antoncohen 6y ago
There are a few things going on. One is that police can choose what crimes to enforce, and city police tend to enforce crimes committed by lower income people. For example lower income people are more likely to be street level drug dealers, other crimes are more likely to be committed by higher income people. Then in looking for dealers, police go to lower income neighborhoods. If you look for something you will end up finding it, if you don't look you won't find it. This leads to things like pretext traffic stops, where someone is stopped for a minor violation that wouldn't normally get someone stopped. The police can then detect something else, like the smell of drugs or drug paraphernalia in the car, which they use as cause to search the car. In searching the car they find something that can lead to criminal charges. This leads to lower income people receiving fines for minor traffic violations, and minor drug violations, at a higher rate the higher income people. The same lower income people struggle to pay those fines more, which puts them in a worse place, possibly leading to more desperate crimes. Policing is punitive, and doesn't help solve underlying problems. Imprisoning and fining poor people doesn't help them or society. I don't think this is as much of a racial issue as people make it out to be, it just happens that in the US the low income urban housing projects are predominantly non-white. Low income people in rural areas are less likely to be over policed because there are physically less police per squeal mile in rural areas. And with less people in rural areas, things are more likely to go unnoticed. If you look at somewhere like the UK, where low income urban council estates (housing projects) are often predominantly white, you see the same over policing, profiling, and pretext stops. But instead of profiling young black males in hoodies driving around a lower income neighborhood, they profile young white males in hoodies driving around a lower income neighborhood.
Miner49er 6y ago
I think the real answer is both. The fact is, lower income neighborhoods do have more crime. That's just common sense. People do what they have to to survive. This results in heavier policing, which then creates a cycle. You put people in prison for a felony, and when they come out they don't have many options. They're in a worse place then when they went in. Not many places hire prior felons. So then they end up committing crime again and going back. For more on this google "incarceration cycle" or similar. This also obviously has a bad effect on future generations. Kids are growing up on a single income cause one of their parents are in jail, and that makes it more likely they'll too eventually be forced to enter crime. I believe, and the data shows this, that the vast majority of people don't commit crime because they want to. They do it because they feel like they don't have any other good options. The only real way to break this cycle is try to do things besides policing and incarcerating. Focus on rehabilitation and social services. The initial investment will likely need to be huge, but in the long run, I think it would pay off.
- jayd16 6y ago
  >The fact is, lower income neighborhoods do have more crime. That's just common sense. Not so fast. Middle class areas might commit more felony drug crimes (marijuana possession).
rickyplouis 6y ago
For some some petty crimes (running red lights, not socially distancing, etc..), all neighborhoods actually commit them at a fairly consistent rate, but it is not enforced consistently. For instance, here in Chicago it is common to find people not following the social distancing rules, but predominately white neighborhoods largely get a pass while black and brown neighborhoods get enforced. So to answer your question, the crimes are occurring everywhere but statistically speaking black and brown people are more likely to face penalties for crime while white people are not. https://blockclubchicago.org/2020/05/26/chicago-police-only-arrested-people-for-social-distancing-on-the-south-and-west-sides-data-shows/ https://blockclubchicago.org/2020/05/26/chicago-police-only-... This also applies to parking tickets https://www.chicagotribune.com/columns/eric-zorn/ct-mayoral-candidate-forum-how-to-address-the-disparate-racial-and-economic-impact-of-chicago-s-parking-20180824-story.html https://www.chicagotribune.com/columns/eric-zorn/ct-mayoral-... and jaywalking https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/08/in-champaign-urbana-illinois-89-of-those-arrested-for-jaywalking-are-black/261522/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/08/in-ch...
- throwaway894345 6y ago
  Your source (a blog with a pretty transparent agenda) didn't mention that the neighborhoods commit them at a fairly consistent rate, it only said that Chance The Rapper said that he saw people at Millennium Park not social distancing. Chance omitted that police broke up the crowd at Millennium Park as well: > Monday protesters in Millennium Park were dispersed by police after gathering too closely as well. - https://abc7chicago.com/chicago-crime-police-officers-injured-break-up-party/6209901/ https://abc7chicago.com/chicago-crime-police-officers-injure... Your blog post did say that our mayor (who is herself black and lesbian--for those who find these identities more credible--and who has been very consistently outspoken about her concerns about racially disparate outcomes with respect to COVID) denied disproportionate enforcement in black communities: > The reality is the Chicago Police Department is active and engaged all over the city and doing it with an eye toward equity, and I would have it no other way as mayor of this city,” Lightfoot said. “I can tell you, based upon the statistics we’ve been keeping for weeks, those dispersal orders are happening all over the city — and yes, in white areas, in Latinx areas, in moneyed areas of the city. As for disparities in the number of arrests, if this isn't driven by an increase in quantity, size, or density of gatherings in minority neighborhoods, it's probably driven by an increase in brandished firearms, gunshots, etc: https://abc7chicago.com/chicago-crime-police-officers-injured-break-up-party/6209901/ https://abc7chicago.com/chicago-crime-police-officers-injure.... Anyway, this is all anecdata from late March which was very early days for the whole COVID debacle.
shadowgovt 6y ago
The answer, in general (and this is a bad place to generalize because it really varies from place-to-place), is "yes." The correlation between poverty and higher crime is real, and the police find more crime in places they're looking than in places they don't.
danans 6y ago
> Are these neighborhoods “over policed” because their residents commit more crimes, or do the residents commit more crimes because their neighborhood is “over policed”? Your question is flawed because it omits too many variables, including the racial differences in what is enforced as a crime, the endemic poverty and resulting tattered social fabric in high crime neighborhoods that pushes residents - especially younger ones - into situations where committing crime becomes an ever more "rational" choice.
alexashka 6y ago
It's a false dichotomy. Point a) Some neighbourhoods have more police in them, because they have more criminal activity. They are almost always poor neighbourhoods. We want there to be more police, the same way we want more doctors in places where the sick people are (hospitals). Point b) Police officers have mandatory quotas - to fulfill those quotas, they go to places where they're more likely to make arrests, the same way fishermen go fishing where the fish are more likely to be. Because police work based on quotas, they'll bust people for whatever is easiest to catch while satisfying the quota criteria. If you want to be informed on this subject in more detail, the best resource I've found is interviews with Dr Michael Wood, he has a youtube channel and has been on Joe Rogan a couple of times.
wigl 6y ago
Grew up in Harlem though not black. While I'm sure there are good police out there, broken windows policies effectively act as a safe haven for a subset of cops to enforce arbitrary (usually racial) bias whenever they feel like it. There's no impetus to actually do the neighborhood policing they claim aspire to--just a universal excuse to allocate resources and attention in the name of making neighborhoods "safe". Metric gaming is real. Ex. strapped for money or not meeting your quota? Stop some drunk teens on a weekend night before the end of your shift and you can make time and a half because your lookup is "still processing" well past 5 PM. End up writing a citation for the kids, tell yourself that they can afford it, tell them that they should be grateful, and wash your hands clean of it all because you're doing "neighborhood policing". What if there's an actual crime to report in these neighborhoods? Two squad cars pulled up to my building. The first thing said to me: "OK who was it? Black? Hispanic?" They have me ride with them as they stopped every non-white group of kids, at least 30 over the course of ~2 hours despite my repeated remarks that no one had actually seen the perpetrator(s). I wanted to back out at this point, but they had to have a case to justify their time. Frustrated, they took me back to the station and had me go through a photo book of juvenile delinquents in the neighborhood they had compiled. It was photos of entirely black and hispanic youth captioned by their name, address (at which they could be arrested), and some minor crime that was enough to put them in the book. They were practically begging me to just point out any dark face. I just wanted to report a stolen phone.
- ericjang 6y ago
  This is horrific. When did this happen? Was this in Harlem?
  - wigl 6y ago
    9-10 years ago. Spanish Harlem during peak stop and frisk era/doctrine. What I remember most was how routine it all was for everyone involved. Driver would sometimes pull the car up on kids drug raid style, swerving into the sidewalk. They'd turn on the high-beams and within a few words and seconds, it was a pop-up police lineup. The only description of the suspects was this: a group of kids, one of them was wearing a bright hoodie. No one had even seen their faces. I was adamant about this as well but these cops didn't believe me. They instead kept asking me to "be real" with them and that I shouldn't "feel the need to be PC" around them. They acted as if I was self-censoring for virtue signalling instead of being honest. I just wanted them to log my IMEI and keep a lookout for my phone on CL/eBay because they had been doing press releases about it at the time. Apparently that was the less accessible option. It scares me to think how much negative impact that one group of police might've had. When I think about how frustrated they became when I told them the truth over and over. Maybe they're used to more central park Karen type of crime reports.
thescriptkiddie 6y ago
Given that the USA has the highest incarceration rate in the world, I'm going to go with the latter. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarceration_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarcera...
- throwaway894345 6y ago
  This might be true for certain kinds of crime (possession or sale of drugs). We know it's not true for many other kinds of crime (especially violent crime) because these communities report crimes at a higher rate and because the murder rate in these communities is much higher. Crime reports and murder rates aren't functions of police presence (they don't depend on police stumbling upon a crime in progress). There are also more shootings, stabbings, assaults, etc as reported by healthcare officials. (I shouldn't have to say this, but none of my argument above suggests that the US incarceration rate is ideal or otherwise not a problem).
chippy 6y ago
its an honest question but it is not possible to give an honest answer currently.
nodox92 6y ago
Stats for Part I offenses are based on incidents reported to the police, not arrests made by the police. These offenses include homicide, aggravated assault, robbery, burglary, rape, theft, etc. This is how cities typically measure their crime rate and how high crime areas are identified. Stats for Part II offenses are based on arrests only. These offenses include minor assaults, fraud, forgery, drugs crimes, prostitution, weapon violations, loitering, etc. A large subset of Part II offenses do not have a specific victim so the stats are driven by police enforcement.

Honest question here. Are these neighborhoods “over policed” because their residents commit more crimes, or do the residents commit more crimes because their neighborhood is “over policed”?

mtgp1000 6y ago

Only one answer is socially acceptable, regardless of what statistics indicate. And we are building a dangerous world by going down this unscientific path. I am genuinely concerned that this will bleed into ML science and we may find ourselves collectively pursuing a rabbit hole of bad science in a vain attempt to reconcile empirical data with ideology.

vangelis 6y ago
Only 13 percent of the population, you say?
narrator 6y ago
This preference for ideology instead of data reminds me of weird stuff that would happen with science in the Soviet Union. You had things in the Soviet Union like Lysenkoism[1] where a kook got power and explained his science in ideological terms and his theories, unsupported by data, were adopted and defended to the detriment of agricultural production. Workers adopted the theories because people were so afraid of criticizing the dominant ideology that they adopted whatever "science" was mandated in order to avoid being purged. Disagreement with official science was considered proof that one was a political subversive. "More than 3,000 mainstream biologists were dismissed or imprisoned, and numerous scientists were executed in the campaign to suppress scientific opponents." [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism
- jxramos 6y ago
  > Joseph Stalin supported the campaign. More than 3,000 mainstream biologists were dismissed or imprisoned, and numerous scientists were executed in the campaign to suppress scientific opponents. Wow, so what sort of rationale can we make of this? Is the logic, "Stalin supports bunk science theory", "other scientists critique said theory", "therefore they indirectly critique Stalin and reduce his legitimacy/credibility"? Something like that? Are politicians expected to grasp every scientific thing they must evaluate accurately? Why wouldn't they accept and admit 'yah maybe we got this one wrong, sorry honest mistake' than to go out and murder folks. That seems widely overreactive.
  - AnimalMuppet 6y ago
    When you get a paranoid murderous psychopath like Stalin in power, "rationale" may be stretching it. But I think it went something like this. Marx was "scientific" - Marx had created a "science" of economics and sociology, and it was the official truth of the USSR. If some crank could show that his crackpot theory of agriculture was the logical consequence of Marxism's established truth, then it too had to be the official truth of the USSR. The science was settled; all that was left was for everyone to fall in line and implement it. Anyone who opposed that was both unscientific and unpatriotic. Except the science was objectively wrong, and implementing it resulted in disaster.
baddox 6y ago
Note that even you only mentioned whether answers are socially acceptable (in your view), not which one is true.
- mtgp1000 6y ago
  That's the fundamental problem. We are ruling out possible results in advance, based on arbitrary social conventions, not data. This is fundamentally unscientific and will lead to stagnation at best, regression at worst, and progress only in the unlikely case. At some point we will have to reconcile the fact that the same mathematical and scientific techniques which we correctly apply to other sets of data produce unacceptable results any time models are conditioned on demographic data. What then?

danielhlockard 6y ago

I would argue that non-white neighborhoods are policed heavier, and as a consequence they "catch more criminals" in those neighborhoods.

cameronh90 6y ago
This appears to be the primary concern raised in the article. But surely data scientists could put in guards against this, such as weighting the crime count versus the time spent policing the area? In fact, presumably any functional predictive policing system must already do that, else you'd just tend towards policing one area incredibly intensively. If they are concerned about the police arrest stats or racism biasing the data set, they could keep the input to something hard to interfere with, like where murders occur or where crimes are reported by the public, rather than where arrests occur. My opinion is that predictive policing does need regulation, but banning it entirely, to me, seems like an overreaction that will over time result in much less effective use of police resources. I suppose time will tell.
bitcurious 6y ago
Violent crime can be measured by victims rather than criminals, e.g. where do homicides occur?
eanzenberg 6y ago
Do these neighborhoods commit more violent crime, rapes and murders?
dx87 6y ago
That wouldn't explain things like murder and other violent crimes. It's not like people are regularly getting murdered in the suburbs, but nobody bothered to check.
- skciva 6y ago
  I think there are a lot of factors that go into a persons environment that influence something like murder rates. Also, depending on what you consider a violent crime, lack of reporting / local police department's doing something about the report can very well have skew crime rates in certain areas.

basch 6y ago

or crime is a function of income inequality, and ways to fight it are police (reactive) or preventative social spending (proactive.) it's like arguing over fire departments vs electrical code. neglecting the latter leads to more of the former. Even things like urban planning, where you put your low income housing. If you build low income housing in high income areas, it prevents ghettos from forming.

rectang 6y ago
> or crime is a function of income inequality That depends how you measure. The total value of wage theft in the US is comparable to the total value of all other property theft combined. https://www.gq.com/story/wage-theft https://www.gq.com/story/wage-theft Rich people commit lots of crime. They just get away with it more often than poor people, because rich people are under-policed.
eanzenberg 6y ago
Is there evidence for this though? The great crime decline in cities like NYC were due to increased policing and the “broken window” policy, along with stop & frisk.
- thenewwazoo 6y ago
  That is what its proponents would want you to believe, except that it's not borne out by evidence. There were similar drops in other cities that didn't violate the civil rights of the citizens. And that's putting aside the question of whether it's right to deny people their rights in order to deter crime.
  - eanzenberg 6y ago
    It’s a challenging problem, but the way things are currently going, do you want a 70’s NYC in 2020+?
    - sambull 6y ago
      We only use lead in aviation fuels now.. so probably not.

joshgel 6y ago

I'm trying to learn more about this. What I am reading suggests this is the wrong frame. What if all the money spent over-policing these neighborhoods was instead spent on social services to support the people living there? Would that decrease the crime rate more or less than the policing? I'm not sure, but I'm becoming more convinced by this line of argument...

alacombe 6y ago
Food for thought, more than 50% of the federal budget is already spent on social services.
- indigochill 6y ago
  I'm curious what your source is for that, because that's pretty remarkable, especially given the outcry about out-of-control military spending.
  - benjaminmarks 6y ago
    Arbitrarily citing https://www.cbpp.org/research/federal-budget/policy-basics-where-do-our-federal-tax-dollars-go https://www.cbpp.org/research/federal-budget/policy-basics-w... The bulk of social services spending is social security and medicare, which _each_ account for somewhere between 20-30% of federal spending. Military spending is closer to 15-20% of the federal budget
  - brchr 6y ago
    There are some semantic issues, e.g., the distinction between "mandatory" and "discretionary" expenditures, but the data is pretty easy to explore. Essentially you are "both right". > 50% of total spending is Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Whether that is "social services" is another semantic question. And > 50% of the discretionary budget is defense. But have a look for yourself: e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget
    - 6y ago

tsieling 6y ago

More crimes are documented because of extra policing, but that is different from whether more crimes are committed. Crimes of different degrees are happening all around, but if you look particularly in one area that is where you'll see crime.

jasonv 6y ago

We have data on the incarceration rates of Americans as a whole, versus other countries. I think the current activist climate is in response to the fact that the status quo is built on the premise that all that befalls the troubled populations in the US is always because they deserve it, and they brought it upon themselves. And therefore, all the prevailing cultural/ policing/ political/ fiscal positions that have been in response to these conditions are reasonable. That doesn't seem reasonable to me.

clawedjird 6y ago
In a hyper-connected world awash with data, holding such a perspective seems akin believing that the earth is flat.
rhizome 6y ago
That's called the Just-World Hypothesis, and I don't know that anybody professes it as a policy framework, though regular people do and I think it could be said to underlie a lot of prejudices and bigotries in people who do affect public policy, but it has to be hidden unless you're Steve King (R-IA). Victim-blaming is very common in the US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_hypothesis
augustt 6y ago
Of course it depends on which troubled population. For rural white poor people all their problems are framed as being from external uncontrollable pressures – they're losing jobs because of globalization, they're in an opioid epidemic because of pharma. Their struggles are not just dismissed as personal responsibility failures.

wonderwonder 6y ago

I used to sit on my friends porch when I was in college before pot was legalized, smoking. We are white people in a white area. If we had been black I have no doubt the increased police presence would have resulted in us getting arrested. There are tons of other stupid things I did when younger where if there had been more cops around I would have gone to jail. More police means more people are arrested for the same crimes committed with impunity in less policed areas. In addition the fact that you can be arrested for resisting arrest means that if a police officer wants to arrest you they can do so and create a crime afterwards. Recent headlines have shown very vividly how police actively encourage and look for confrontations hoping to spark a reaction. In a high crime area, everyone is a criminal in much the same way everything looks like a nail to a hammer. Imagine if this man had actually actively resisted the officer: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/06/24/man-sues-georgia-police-excessive-use-force-after-wrong-arrest/3248440001/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/06/24/man-su...

eanzenberg 6y ago
Unfortunately, law and order has to be standardized for everybody, regardless of background. Pot was decriminalized in many states already. Are there other things you would like to decriminalize? There are avenues for those, but it’s not a fast turn-around, those things take time.
- wonderwonder 6y ago
  The law is standardized for everyone, its enforcement that is the issue. There are clear differences in enforcement for different races and different wealth levels. My example occurred many moons ago before pot was decriminalized any where. I am old :)
  - eanzenberg 6y ago
    Yes agreed, enforcement has to be standardized as well. Justice should be blind, except to the law. The pendulum swinging though has me worried, where dangerous crimes are currently unenforced.

baron_harkonnen 6y ago

This is not an "honest question". It's an intentional attempt to give equal weight to a fundamentally racist hypothesis to its alternatives. If you want to posit that low-income, black communities are inherently violent and need violence to keep them in line then at least don't be coward with your views.

14 6y ago

The problem as I see it is if you watch someone long enough they will break some law eventually, be it minor, which can then escalate things. For example if the person could not afford a fine they may end up in jail. So now you have to police disproportionately patrolling these neighbourhoods pulling people over. It’s unfair and certainly leads to hardships for some. Next a big issue I have is what defines a “crime” as they say? Because a poor man selling a bag of marijuana on the corner to make some grocery money will go to jail if caught but the business man can pay the fee and open a dispensary and profit immune to police. A poor man soliciting sex off the street jail, a rich man hiring an escort no issues. So they laws are discriminatory and the “crimes” these communities are supposedly breaking is questionable.

antoncohen 6y ago

There are a few things going on. One is that police can choose what crimes to enforce, and city police tend to enforce crimes committed by lower income people. For example lower income people are more likely to be street level drug dealers, other crimes are more likely to be committed by higher income people. Then in looking for dealers, police go to lower income neighborhoods. If you look for something you will end up finding it, if you don't look you won't find it. This leads to things like pretext traffic stops, where someone is stopped for a minor violation that wouldn't normally get someone stopped. The police can then detect something else, like the smell of drugs or drug paraphernalia in the car, which they use as cause to search the car. In searching the car they find something that can lead to criminal charges. This leads to lower income people receiving fines for minor traffic violations, and minor drug violations, at a higher rate the higher income people. The same lower income people struggle to pay those fines more, which puts them in a worse place, possibly leading to more desperate crimes. Policing is punitive, and doesn't help solve underlying problems. Imprisoning and fining poor people doesn't help them or society. I don't think this is as much of a racial issue as people make it out to be, it just happens that in the US the low income urban housing projects are predominantly non-white. Low income people in rural areas are less likely to be over policed because there are physically less police per squeal mile in rural areas. And with less people in rural areas, things are more likely to go unnoticed. If you look at somewhere like the UK, where low income urban council estates (housing projects) are often predominantly white, you see the same over policing, profiling, and pretext stops. But instead of profiling young black males in hoodies driving around a lower income neighborhood, they profile young white males in hoodies driving around a lower income neighborhood.

Miner49er 6y ago

I think the real answer is both. The fact is, lower income neighborhoods do have more crime. That's just common sense. People do what they have to to survive. This results in heavier policing, which then creates a cycle. You put people in prison for a felony, and when they come out they don't have many options. They're in a worse place then when they went in. Not many places hire prior felons. So then they end up committing crime again and going back. For more on this google "incarceration cycle" or similar. This also obviously has a bad effect on future generations. Kids are growing up on a single income cause one of their parents are in jail, and that makes it more likely they'll too eventually be forced to enter crime. I believe, and the data shows this, that the vast majority of people don't commit crime because they want to. They do it because they feel like they don't have any other good options. The only real way to break this cycle is try to do things besides policing and incarcerating. Focus on rehabilitation and social services. The initial investment will likely need to be huge, but in the long run, I think it would pay off.

jayd16 6y ago
>The fact is, lower income neighborhoods do have more crime. That's just common sense. Not so fast. Middle class areas might commit more felony drug crimes (marijuana possession).

rickyplouis 6y ago

For some some petty crimes (running red lights, not socially distancing, etc..), all neighborhoods actually commit them at a fairly consistent rate, but it is not enforced consistently. For instance, here in Chicago it is common to find people not following the social distancing rules, but predominately white neighborhoods largely get a pass while black and brown neighborhoods get enforced. So to answer your question, the crimes are occurring everywhere but statistically speaking black and brown people are more likely to face penalties for crime while white people are not. https://blockclubchicago.org/2020/05/26/chicago-police-only-arrested-people-for-social-distancing-on-the-south-and-west-sides-data-shows/ https://blockclubchicago.org/2020/05/26/chicago-police-only-... This also applies to parking tickets https://www.chicagotribune.com/columns/eric-zorn/ct-mayoral-candidate-forum-how-to-address-the-disparate-racial-and-economic-impact-of-chicago-s-parking-20180824-story.html https://www.chicagotribune.com/columns/eric-zorn/ct-mayoral-... and jaywalking https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/08/in-champaign-urbana-illinois-89-of-those-arrested-for-jaywalking-are-black/261522/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/08/in-ch...

throwaway894345 6y ago
Your source (a blog with a pretty transparent agenda) didn't mention that the neighborhoods commit them at a fairly consistent rate, it only said that Chance The Rapper said that he saw people at Millennium Park not social distancing. Chance omitted that police broke up the crowd at Millennium Park as well: > Monday protesters in Millennium Park were dispersed by police after gathering too closely as well. - https://abc7chicago.com/chicago-crime-police-officers-injured-break-up-party/6209901/ https://abc7chicago.com/chicago-crime-police-officers-injure... Your blog post did say that our mayor (who is herself black and lesbian--for those who find these identities more credible--and who has been very consistently outspoken about her concerns about racially disparate outcomes with respect to COVID) denied disproportionate enforcement in black communities: > The reality is the Chicago Police Department is active and engaged all over the city and doing it with an eye toward equity, and I would have it no other way as mayor of this city,” Lightfoot said. “I can tell you, based upon the statistics we’ve been keeping for weeks, those dispersal orders are happening all over the city — and yes, in white areas, in Latinx areas, in moneyed areas of the city. As for disparities in the number of arrests, if this isn't driven by an increase in quantity, size, or density of gatherings in minority neighborhoods, it's probably driven by an increase in brandished firearms, gunshots, etc: https://abc7chicago.com/chicago-crime-police-officers-injured-break-up-party/6209901/ https://abc7chicago.com/chicago-crime-police-officers-injure.... Anyway, this is all anecdata from late March which was very early days for the whole COVID debacle.

shadowgovt 6y ago

The answer, in general (and this is a bad place to generalize because it really varies from place-to-place), is "yes." The correlation between poverty and higher crime is real, and the police find more crime in places they're looking than in places they don't.

danans 6y ago

> Are these neighborhoods “over policed” because their residents commit more crimes, or do the residents commit more crimes because their neighborhood is “over policed”? Your question is flawed because it omits too many variables, including the racial differences in what is enforced as a crime, the endemic poverty and resulting tattered social fabric in high crime neighborhoods that pushes residents - especially younger ones - into situations where committing crime becomes an ever more "rational" choice.

alexashka 6y ago

It's a false dichotomy. Point a) Some neighbourhoods have more police in them, because they have more criminal activity. They are almost always poor neighbourhoods. We want there to be more police, the same way we want more doctors in places where the sick people are (hospitals). Point b) Police officers have mandatory quotas - to fulfill those quotas, they go to places where they're more likely to make arrests, the same way fishermen go fishing where the fish are more likely to be. Because police work based on quotas, they'll bust people for whatever is easiest to catch while satisfying the quota criteria. If you want to be informed on this subject in more detail, the best resource I've found is interviews with Dr Michael Wood, he has a youtube channel and has been on Joe Rogan a couple of times.

wigl 6y ago

Grew up in Harlem though not black. While I'm sure there are good police out there, broken windows policies effectively act as a safe haven for a subset of cops to enforce arbitrary (usually racial) bias whenever they feel like it. There's no impetus to actually do the neighborhood policing they claim aspire to--just a universal excuse to allocate resources and attention in the name of making neighborhoods "safe". Metric gaming is real. Ex. strapped for money or not meeting your quota? Stop some drunk teens on a weekend night before the end of your shift and you can make time and a half because your lookup is "still processing" well past 5 PM. End up writing a citation for the kids, tell yourself that they can afford it, tell them that they should be grateful, and wash your hands clean of it all because you're doing "neighborhood policing". What if there's an actual crime to report in these neighborhoods? Two squad cars pulled up to my building. The first thing said to me: "OK who was it? Black? Hispanic?" They have me ride with them as they stopped every non-white group of kids, at least 30 over the course of ~2 hours despite my repeated remarks that no one had actually seen the perpetrator(s). I wanted to back out at this point, but they had to have a case to justify their time. Frustrated, they took me back to the station and had me go through a photo book of juvenile delinquents in the neighborhood they had compiled. It was photos of entirely black and hispanic youth captioned by their name, address (at which they could be arrested), and some minor crime that was enough to put them in the book. They were practically begging me to just point out any dark face. I just wanted to report a stolen phone.

ericjang 6y ago
This is horrific. When did this happen? Was this in Harlem?
- wigl 6y ago
  9-10 years ago. Spanish Harlem during peak stop and frisk era/doctrine. What I remember most was how routine it all was for everyone involved. Driver would sometimes pull the car up on kids drug raid style, swerving into the sidewalk. They'd turn on the high-beams and within a few words and seconds, it was a pop-up police lineup. The only description of the suspects was this: a group of kids, one of them was wearing a bright hoodie. No one had even seen their faces. I was adamant about this as well but these cops didn't believe me. They instead kept asking me to "be real" with them and that I shouldn't "feel the need to be PC" around them. They acted as if I was self-censoring for virtue signalling instead of being honest. I just wanted them to log my IMEI and keep a lookout for my phone on CL/eBay because they had been doing press releases about it at the time. Apparently that was the less accessible option. It scares me to think how much negative impact that one group of police might've had. When I think about how frustrated they became when I told them the truth over and over. Maybe they're used to more central park Karen type of crime reports.

thescriptkiddie 6y ago

Given that the USA has the highest incarceration rate in the world, I'm going to go with the latter. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarceration_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarcera...

throwaway894345 6y ago
This might be true for certain kinds of crime (possession or sale of drugs). We know it's not true for many other kinds of crime (especially violent crime) because these communities report crimes at a higher rate and because the murder rate in these communities is much higher. Crime reports and murder rates aren't functions of police presence (they don't depend on police stumbling upon a crime in progress). There are also more shootings, stabbings, assaults, etc as reported by healthcare officials. (I shouldn't have to say this, but none of my argument above suggests that the US incarceration rate is ideal or otherwise not a problem).

chippy 6y ago

its an honest question but it is not possible to give an honest answer currently.

nodox92 6y ago

Stats for Part I offenses are based on incidents reported to the police, not arrests made by the police. These offenses include homicide, aggravated assault, robbery, burglary, rape, theft, etc. This is how cities typically measure their crime rate and how high crime areas are identified. Stats for Part II offenses are based on arrests only. These offenses include minor assaults, fraud, forgery, drugs crimes, prostitution, weapon violations, loitering, etc. A large subset of Part II offenses do not have a specific victim so the stats are driven by police enforcement.