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Outsiders and opportunists like to believe people in high crime areas want crime. They hate crime as much as anyone else. There is a love hate relationship wh

by mc32 5y ago

Outsiders and opportunists like to believe people in high crime areas want crime. They hate crime as much as anyone else. There is a love hate relationship when some of your relations engage in low level crime and get caught in the fight against crime for the 20th time. “Why did they have to come for Gary again, he never hurt anybody”. But Gary didn’t want to go back in for robbery, so he ran and got shot. But when mrs Jensen has her house broken into she’s upset this happened to her, not realizing her son Gary while not “dangerous” is part of the atmosphere of crime that allows her house to get broken into. One of the ways to combat that is to do what Giuliani did in New York and attack all crime including quality of life and other low level in addition to organized crime and gangs. The other way is to do it the Soviet way and have neighbor rat on neighbor and ship the baddies off to the gulags (often they did worse than that). What doesn’t seem to work is being nice to crime and suggest crime to go away. It needs persistent pushback whether in the US, Albania, China, Belize, etc. One thing which would help is to have better funnels away from crime to divert people at high risk of joining crime into regular sustainable jobs. But this takes culture. If all your friends are making "good" money stealing catalytic converters and they constantly nag you to join them, it's hard to not get involved.

geofft 5y ago
New York also has been getting increasingly richer. Mrs. Jensen's kids almost certainly don't have a deep-seated desire to commit robbery, they want the material results of having committed a robbery. If you want to stop robbery, getting better at catching Gary only makes him faster at running; you need to prevent Gary from deciding that joining his friends in a robbery is the most rational option. There are a few criminals who genuinely are motivated by the crime itself (serial killers, rapists, etc.), aka "want crime" - but for exactly that reason, they're unlikely to be influenced by a change in the "atmosphere of crime." For most quality-of-life crime (including organized crime!), criminals are rational economic actors like anyone else. They don't want crime, they want to get up the first layer of Maslow's pyramid. During Giuliani's tenure, unemployment in Manhattan dropped from almost 10% to 5%: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/NYNEWY1URN https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/NYNEWY1URN The median income rose from $54K to $93K, which even adjusting for inflation is a >40% increase: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PCPI36061 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PCPI36061 The number of people below the poverty line dropped from 340K to 270K even as population grew slightly: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PCPI36061 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PCPI36061 (None of this is to say Giuliani was or wasn't responsible for the changes, just to propose an alternative causality than the attack on crime. Nor does it ask where the unemployed or poor in Manhattan went or to defend it, it's only looking at the statistics. And also none of this is to say that Gary isn't morally culpable for his deeds, it's just that the goal of reducing crime isn't the same as the goal of assigning moral culpability.)
- nverno 5y ago
  "I'm not a gangster. I'm a businessman, and my business is crime." --Bobby Cummines
throwaway0a5e 5y ago
The problem I have with targeting "quality of life" crime is often synonymous with extracting revenue and catering to the morals of the crowd that has the spare fucks to give about that sort of thing. The cops where I live are very reasonable. They don't have the spare resources to waste their time handing out tickets for drinking on your porch or investigating other the victimless stuff. That said, the letter of the law is absolutely not consistent with the way people live in all but the wealthiest neighborhoods of my city.
- mc32 5y ago
  That attitude depends on your station in life and gender (not many women will wish for that). Regardless of country or race, most people, if they had the means would move to less chaotic neighborhoods. It's not like quiet neighborhoods and suburbs don't exist in Nairobi or Sao Paolo or Moscow, etc., where people seek a quieter life. Getting there is a matter of slow transformation. Even in Beijing or Tokyo, life wasn't always quiet and peaceful. It happened gradually as society evolved to a point where minor crime was more or less eliminated. I'm sure there is always a small group of people who wish for wild-west frontier like chaos, it has some appeal, but after a while the majority of people just want peace and quiet and to be left alone.
- TheCoelacanth 5y ago
  > That said, the letter of the law is absolutely not consistent with the way people live in all but the wealthiest neighborhoods of my city. Even there, it's not consistent. The cops just know better than to try to enforce the stupidest laws against people who might actually have political power.

by mc32 5y ago

geofft 5y ago

New York also has been getting increasingly richer. Mrs. Jensen's kids almost certainly don't have a deep-seated desire to commit robbery, they want the material results of having committed a robbery. If you want to stop robbery, getting better at catching Gary only makes him faster at running; you need to prevent Gary from deciding that joining his friends in a robbery is the most rational option. There are a few criminals who genuinely are motivated by the crime itself (serial killers, rapists, etc.), aka "want crime" - but for exactly that reason, they're unlikely to be influenced by a change in the "atmosphere of crime." For most quality-of-life crime (including organized crime!), criminals are rational economic actors like anyone else. They don't want crime, they want to get up the first layer of Maslow's pyramid. During Giuliani's tenure, unemployment in Manhattan dropped from almost 10% to 5%: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/NYNEWY1URN https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/NYNEWY1URN The median income rose from $54K to $93K, which even adjusting for inflation is a >40% increase: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PCPI36061 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PCPI36061 The number of people below the poverty line dropped from 340K to 270K even as population grew slightly: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PCPI36061 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PCPI36061 (None of this is to say Giuliani was or wasn't responsible for the changes, just to propose an alternative causality than the attack on crime. Nor does it ask where the unemployed or poor in Manhattan went or to defend it, it's only looking at the statistics. And also none of this is to say that Gary isn't morally culpable for his deeds, it's just that the goal of reducing crime isn't the same as the goal of assigning moral culpability.)

nverno 5y ago
"I'm not a gangster. I'm a businessman, and my business is crime." --Bobby Cummines

throwaway0a5e 5y ago

The problem I have with targeting "quality of life" crime is often synonymous with extracting revenue and catering to the morals of the crowd that has the spare fucks to give about that sort of thing. The cops where I live are very reasonable. They don't have the spare resources to waste their time handing out tickets for drinking on your porch or investigating other the victimless stuff. That said, the letter of the law is absolutely not consistent with the way people live in all but the wealthiest neighborhoods of my city.

mc32 5y ago
That attitude depends on your station in life and gender (not many women will wish for that). Regardless of country or race, most people, if they had the means would move to less chaotic neighborhoods. It's not like quiet neighborhoods and suburbs don't exist in Nairobi or Sao Paolo or Moscow, etc., where people seek a quieter life. Getting there is a matter of slow transformation. Even in Beijing or Tokyo, life wasn't always quiet and peaceful. It happened gradually as society evolved to a point where minor crime was more or less eliminated. I'm sure there is always a small group of people who wish for wild-west frontier like chaos, it has some appeal, but after a while the majority of people just want peace and quiet and to be left alone.
TheCoelacanth 5y ago
> That said, the letter of the law is absolutely not consistent with the way people live in all but the wealthiest neighborhoods of my city. Even there, it's not consistent. The cops just know better than to try to enforce the stupidest laws against people who might actually have political power.