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In America we get the worst of both worlds: police won’t admit to domestic spying so they can’t use to solve day to day crimes. But they still spy on us, Consti
by janalsncm 3y ago
In America we get the worst of both worlds: police won’t admit to domestic spying so they can’t use to solve day to day crimes. But they still spy on us, Constitution be damned.
As a result the US has a higher crime rate than many other countries including China. If you don’t trust China’s numbers look at Singapore, which has a population density similar to NYC with an order of magnitude less crime. Singapore is safer at night than NYC is during the day. Why? Cameras. If you commit an offense, you will be caught, without question.
- kube-system 3y ago> Singapore is safer at night than NYC is during the day. Why? Cameras. If you commit an offense, you will be caught, without question. There's more to it than that. A sheisty will defeat a camera.
- echoangle 3y agoNot when you have a lot of cameras, right? You still have to put it on somewhere without being seen, and you would have to swap all clothes so you can’t be tracked by checking tapes of other locations for your clothes before you put it on.
- vundercind 3y agoSame with national ID and our fear of “papers, please”. We have all the downsides—constantly having to provide ID to everyone, government can trivially access all kinds of tracking data tied to that—but none of the benefits of an actual national ID because we have to pretend we don’t have one (we do, it’s just 80% privatized and a massive liability and inconvenience for citizens in ways that it doesn’t need to be)
- DaiPlusPlus 3y ago> constantly having to provide ID to everyone I live in WA and for the past 5+ years I've only ever presented my driver's license to TSA agents at the airport. ...unless getting carded at the store for buying beer counts?
- vundercind 3y agoDoctor, dentist, employers, educational institutions. [edit] all financial institutions, lenders, et c Unless you’re buying everything with cash, your purchasing history will be connected to it, too. Where you drive (license plate scanning and data-sharing is widespread). Facial recognition in stores means paying cash might not even help (seen the ones that highlight your face on a monitor when you walk in the store?) But we have to pretend we don’t have a national ID system any time it might be convenient to a person to have that.
- DaiPlusPlus 3y agoRight. I thought the parent post was talking about being challenged by government officials/police ("papers, please") on a regular basis - and not about private-sector use. A misunderstanding on my part.
- yardie 3y agoI literally had to present ID this morning to buy cold medicine. Had to present ID lastweek to enter my kid's school then had to present ID to their pediatrician.
- forgetfreeman 3y agoAt least two of those instances make perfect sense. Meth's a thing and we don't like unidentified individuals fucking around on school grounds these days.
- deathlight 3y agoIt's sad how in the state of Washington I have become accustomed to drawing my ID out on every transaction that involves confirming that I'm over 21 whereas cross the border into Idaho there's not a single time I have ever been asked to provide my ID in over 10 years. Clearly in Idaho they can take one look at me and go like well yeah clearly but such visual social technology is beyond the pale in the great creepy state of Washington. I'm a bit sad to think of what the children of today's children will be like when I am very old and they are very young. Maybe one day nobody will know what it was like to live in a society that was able to just tell things by looking at it.
- SpaceManNabs 3y ago> we do, it’s just 80% privatized and a massive liability and inconvenience for citizens in ways that it doesn’t need to be I am guessing to you are referring to how multiple private organizations can just poll for my social security number and I cant do anything about it? Yeah...
- vundercind 3y agoYep. It’s a pain in the ass to deal with from our end, to put it mildly, but easy to piece it all together on the other, so it’s barely an impediment to bad actors. Since there are functionally no restrictions on government using parts of that system to grab all kinds of data from private sources, it’s a national ID connected directly to a crazy-powerful dragnet spying system, too. But inconvenient, insecure, and very hard to gain oversight of. All the bad shit, none of the good. We may as well just have a national ID, it’d be less-bad than what we have now and might provide a jumping off point for making it a lot less-bad.
- forgetfreeman 3y agoThe irony of individuals freaking out over the notion of what the wildly underfunded and largely indifferent federal government might do to collect data when private industry is surveilling basically every aspect of their existence for most of every day...
- brokenmachine 3y agoPrivate industry can't directly send someone to prison.
- mlrtime 3y ago"wildly underfunded"? Do you really believe what you just wrote here? What private industry surveillance is mandatory? FFS.
- forgetfreeman 3y ago[flagged]
- throw10920 3y agoUser "forgetfreeman" has not actually looked up the budget of the US government.
- AvocadoPanic 3y agoIs it the catching or the imprisoning NYC and many other cities are struggling with in current year?
- lupusreal 3y agoAmerican criminal subcultures treat going to prison as almost as a rite of passage, rather than something to be avoided at all costs. Sentences are too short and too easy.
- lupusreal 3y agoI think Singapore whipping the shit out of criminals probably has a lot to do with it. Not just Singapore, but most of the rest of Asian countries as well. South Korea treats their prisoners so harshly that the US military has to have a special agreement in place to ensure that US servicemen imprisoned for crimes by South Korea actually get fed more than a starvation diet and don't have to do hard labor: https://www.stripes.com/migration/for-u-s-inmates-in-s-korean-prison-time-feels-like-it-s-standing-still-1.migrated https://www.stripes.com/migration/for-u-s-inmates-in-s-korea... Of course South Koreans know better than American soldiers not to commit crimes in South Korea, because prison there is so awful. Unsurprisingly they have a much lower crime rate than America.
- 8372049 3y agoThe big downsides with horrible prison are that criminals will have a huge incentive to do anything to not get caught and convicted, including violently resisting arrest, shootouts, targeting witnesses and so on. It is mostly effective as a deterrent against financial/winning-relates crimes, but mostly ineffective against most other types of crimes. Plus, horrible prison is much less likely to actually reform the person in question. Statistically, the Norwegian system with "holiday prisons" works well, with very low recidivism rates for most types of crime.
- lupusreal 3y agoNorway's intention homicide rate is six times greater than Singapore's.
- infotainment 3y agoThat’s why execution is the ideal solution, not prisons. During a brief transition period you may have to deal with violently resisting arrest and the like, but eventually you get to the point where all the criminals are dead.
- fennecbutt 3y ago本当の殺人鬼だな、キラは.
- mrcartmeneses 3y agoSingapore isn’t safe “because cameras” it’s safe because it has high social mobility, social housing, high levels of education, high levels of income equality and is generally wealthy and much wealthier than its neighbours. And also it’s a police state where you get sentenced to death for drug smuggling and can be punished for doing drugs in another country while on holiday if you are a citizen, for example. To the naive, Singapore is a paradise, but once you visit for long enough you realise it’s just a super nice prison and it’s not very fun being with the other lags
- skhunted 3y agoThe claims made in your first paragraph are undermined by your third paragraph.
- bryanrasmussen 3y agothe first paragraph did not claim it was not a prison, it just claimed it was safe not because it was a prison but for other reasons. The third paragraph claimed it was a prison but it did not say the safety came from it being a prison. the third paragraph and first paragraph are not in conflict.
- skhunted 3y agoI know it’s not true in American prisons but generally not much crime occurs in prison. If Singapore is prison like then it seems that this would at least be a contributing factor to its lack of crime.
- skhunted 3y agoThe fact that it is a prison with much surveillance has little to do with its low crime? This is not a credible belief.
- bryanrasmussen 3y agoI wasn't saying it was wrong or not - I just said the two paragraphs were not inherently contradictory.
- observationist 3y agoNot that US institutions don't lie, but our bureaucracy and government oversight systems come with the benefit that many of the things we track and document can be verified. Other countries simply lie. The numbers you get are not a rough approximation of reality; they're simply part of whatever story that country wants to tell. Crime rate is a statistic for which a majority of countries provide numbers that are completely dissociated from reality. You can, of course, take the numbers seriously, as if the statistics are being published in good faith. Unless you have some sort of independent oversight, however, that isn't beholden to or biased by the country being assessed, then taking those numbers seriously is probably a silly thing to do. The US gets lots of independent verification and validation of crime statistics. They're frequently analyzed at local, state, and federal level by journalists, students, activists, authors, and government officials. At every level an official number is published, it gets challenged, so there are incentives keeping the politicians and bureaucrats honest. They get slammed when they get caught lying, and they get caught lying because the public and the media keep track of things and demand accountability. Some stuff, like total officer involved shootings, dog shootings by officials, abuses of power, and things of that nature, don't get publicly disclosed much of the time, so there are gaps in what we know and what officials are required to disclose. The US isn't perfect, but you can get pretty good numbers that actually correlate with reality. Even other western countries don't always have trustworthy reporting and accounting for government actions. The best you'll ever get is a glowing narrative.
- dgfitz 3y agoThis post should be stickied at the top of this topic.
- janalsncm 3y agoSingapore has very low levels of corruption. Even lower than in the United States. You can choose to dismiss them, but I think their numbers are reliable.
- LtWorf 3y agoSuch a long text for "their numbers are better than ours, they are clearly liars"