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It’s pretty amazing when you get the worst of both worlds—total surveillance, yet still rampant crime.
by oefrha 8mo ago
It’s pretty amazing when you get the worst of both worlds—total surveillance, yet still rampant crime.
- kgwxd 8mo agoThe rampant crime is largely made up.
- oefrha 8mo agoWho’s making up the homicide and other violent crime statistics and for what purpose?
- ses1984 8mo agoHow do the stats look compared to 5, 10, 20, 40 years ago?
- ori_b 8mo agoWhich statistics are you looking at? Crime has been dropping since the 90s, with the exception of short term regressions. https://jasher.substack.com/p/crime-is-likely-down-an-enormous https://jasher.substack.com/p/crime-is-likely-down-an-enormo...
- oefrha 8mo agoYou do realize these are still crap compared to other countries right?
- SV_BubbleTime 8mo agoSmall rich counties with vast majority homogeneous populations?
- ori_b 8mo agoAgreed, the world overall is pretty safe these days.
- oefrha 8mo agoIf you’re being sarcastic, well, congratulate yourself for being better than shitholes I guess. If you’re not, yes it is, unfortunately same can’t be said about the U.S., where my not very large social circle have experienced robbery at gun point at a gas station, street mugging, home break-in with everything stolen, smashed car window, all within the past decade. I was more fortunate but still got my bike stolen.
- Brian_K_White 8mo agoWhat statistics? These? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States#/media/File:Trend_of_Violent_Crime_from_1985_to_2022_(United_States).png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States#/me... https://ncvs.bjs.ojp.gov/year-to-year-comparison/crimeType https://ncvs.bjs.ojp.gov/year-to-year-comparison/crimeType
- jb1991 8mo agoYou should look at a comparison of American violent crime to other major western nations.
- Brian_K_White 8mo agoI think I would say the same, that you should actually look at that.
- jb1991 8mo agoFor example, Wikipedia has a page of studies and conclusions about violent crime rates in countries around the world, and the United States isn’t looking so good on that list, which compiles many studies and statistics. It’s far behind both Canada and Europe on violent crime.
- ericmay 8mo agoWhat are you basing this claim on?
- derbOac 8mo agohttps://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/2024-06-12/crime-trend-data-competes-with-perception-problem https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/2024-06-1... https://www.themarshallproject.org/2025/11/19/gallup-crime-perceptions-political-polarization https://www.themarshallproject.org/2025/11/19/gallup-crime-p... There's always the question of where exactly you're referring to and what kind of crime you're referring to. But I assumed that's what the parent post was referring to.
- danesparza 8mo agoReally? Rampant white collar crime is made up?
- jb1991 8mo agoCompared to other major western countries, the US has a serious problem with violent crime in particular.
- WarmWash 8mo agoIf you remove like 250sq mi of land from that stat you can cut the violent crime stat by 90%. There are some neighborhoods with more murders in a month than some whole states see in a couple years.
- SV_BubbleTime 8mo agoNot popular. We know exactly where the majority of crime is in the US, you are correct, down to the neighborhood. Now… let’s say you were to call the national guard in to safeguard those areas, how do you think that would go over by those cities governors and reaction media? I guess the answer depends on the year.
- throwworhtthrow 8mo agoTim Walz and Jacob Frey are both on record saying they'd love to have federal help with reducing violent crime. That is not Donald Trump's / Stephen Miller's objective in Minnesota, nor is it the outcome.
- hypeatei 8mo agoThis comment really confirms the "everyone is twelve years old now" theory. "If there's crime, let's send in the army!" Of course you'd suggest that, you're twelve.
- SV_BubbleTime 8mo agoI don’t remember suggesting that. But, go on with your strawman, you are doing great.
- 8mo ago
- AnthonyMouse 8mo agoThat's the only way it can be in a system with thousands of crimes on the books. People commit minor offenses, and often felonies without knowing it, on a regular basis. If surveillance was consistently used to actually enforce the laws, people would a) notice the surveillance[0] and then actually object to it and b) start objecting to all the ridiculous and poorly drafted laws they didn't even know existed. But they don't want the majority of people objecting to things. They want a system that provides a thousand pretexts to punish anyone who does something they don't like, even something they're supposed to have a right to do, by charging them with any of the laws that everybody violates all the time and having the surveillance apparatus in place so they can do it to anyone as long as it's not done to everyone. That doesn't work if the laws are enforced consistently and the majority thereby starts insisting that they be reasonable. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1zhe85spsw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1zhe85spsw
- harimau777 8mo agoOn the other hand, those thousands of crimes on the books exist because American society operates under a norm of "if its not explicitly illegal then its fine for people to do it". See for example, the rhetoric around maximizing shareholder value. If the only way to protect yourself from selfish people is if their actions explicitly illegal, then the logical outcome is to make more and more things explicitly illegal. IMHO, that's one of the core failures of modern Libertarian/Objectivist influenced thought.
- AnthonyMouse 8mo ago> If the only way to protect yourself from selfish people is if their actions explicitly illegal, then the logical outcome is to make more and more things explicitly illegal. Except that that isn't the only way to protect yourself from selfish people and the assumption that it is is the source of a significant proportion of the dumb laws. There is a narrow class of things that have to be prohibited by law because there is otherwise no way to prevent selfish people from doing them, like dumping industrial waste into the rivers. What these look like is causing harm to someone you're not otherwise transacting with so that they can't prevent the harm by refusing to do business with you. And then you need functional antitrust laws to ensure competitive markets. The majority of dumb laws are laws trying to work around the fact that we don't have functional antitrust laws, or indeed have the opposite and have laws propping up incumbents and limiting competition, and therefore have many concentrated markets where companies can screw customers and workers because they have inadequate alternatives. Trying to patch that with prohibitions never works because in a concentrated market there are an unlimited number of ways the incumbents can screw you and you can't explicitly prohibit every one of them; the only thing that works is to reintroduce real competition.
- 127 8mo ago...because the point of surveillance was never to solve crime.
- gmuslera 8mo agoAnd the people in power not facing the consequences of their crimes even if they come to broad light. In fact the people in charge of the surveillance is the same that hide those crimes, or convince population that there is nothing to see there.
- tonymet 8mo agoThe surveillance protects the regime, which mostly involves the US Federal government. Street crime, unless it’s organized by Cartels, is not a political threat. You can see the counter example during the 40s-70s when the FBI targeted the mafia and local political corruption to take out the remaining organized crime strongholds . Today organized crime doesn’t have much political influence. A sort of truce. So there’s no longer incentive for the feds to pursue street crime. Street crime yields no longer funnel into influence. In fact, most political corruption today is coming from entitlements , which further bolsters political control.