US cities have never been safer in my lifetime & Logan Circle is lovely. Public disorder may or may not be worse- but old men like to carp. Serious violence seems very localized.
I think all these points are spot on, but I can’t imagine the kind of people who created the mess in the first place being able to embrace them. Those people will have to be replaced.
People who habitually break the rules are, quite simply, bad people. You're not going to change any significant number of them. People rarely change much after they reach adulthood.
Therefore if other people's lives are to be tolerable, you have to get rid of the bad people one way or another.
Prolonged incarceration is expensive, but spares delicate sensibilities.
My wife and I went to Norms (great diner in L.A.). The one we went to was in a blue collar area (all the good diners are). And we had a great breakfast.
At a nearby table a homeless person came in and order steak & eggs. We thought that was a good thing - spending his money on a decent breakfast. The waitress, who also handled our table treated him the same as any other customer.
And when he was done, he didn’t pay, and on the way out grabbed the cash tip left on another table. So stealing his meal and stealing the tip from a waitress who probably doesn’t make a whole lot.
We started to go after him when my wife saw him steal the tip. The waitress confronted him and made him give her the tip money. She then stood aside and let him leave.
So what just happened here:
According to the crime stats - this did not happen. No one reported it.
The restaurant owner clearly accepts that anyone who leaves without paying can do so.
All of the wait staff are on their own protecting their tips. And they will sometimes lose them.
Everyone there, customers & employees, feels yucky having watched this, and knowing there are no consequences for the thief.
This repeats itself a million times a million different ways in a million different places. The end result is significant - a coarsening of the public spaces. We lose faith in our society and our government.
And the people we Democrats elect to run our cities, the mayors, city councils, their appointees, etc., are directly to blame for this. They have become unwilling to hold anyone to account for anything. Every criminal has their advocates and the Democratic Party is unwilling to push back on any interest group.
And the end result? The Democratic Party is not trusted to administer or cities in the interests of the vast majority of people who want the rules to be enforced and the public spaces to be welcoming to those who are polite, considerate, and follow the rules.
And that flows upward. Does the President have anything to do with enforcing city ordnances. Not really. But this does impact voters selection for President. It has an even stronger impact on their vote for Governor (and Governors can have some impact on this). And it has a giant impact on the votes for Mayor and City Council.
Democratic candidates can point to the crime stats and say “look, crime is down.” Voters aren’t looking at the stats. They look at the locked up shelves in stores. They look at the people blatantly walking out without paying. They look at the homeless taking over public parks and other spaces. They look at all that and say - crime is a giant problem and you Democrats don’t even acknowledge it.
Be thankful that the Republican party mostly nominates crazy people. Because when they nominate thoughtful, sane, conservative candidates, they will more often than not win - on a policy of actually addressing crime. And more often than not, the Democratic opponent won’t even understand what the Republican, and the voters, mean when they discuss crime.
Democratic mayors used to be able to make hard decisions. They used to take pride in enforcing the law. What happened?
This is a great perspective. As someone who lived in NYC in the 2010s (even the DeBlasio years), things felt mostly orderly. Yes there was still crime, but not some of the odd things you see today, like smoking on the subway.
At the same time, I think we see some Dems supporting this. Harris, as you note wrote Smart on Crime. Newsom has taken positions that disappoint his voters. NYC elected an ex-cop.
But, there are two big problems. (1) Many of the rules don’t get enforced even when dems support systems. NYC has a ton of cops standing around…not enforcing the rules but getting overtime. They hate Dems and the city, and there is little accountability for them to do their jobs. There deeper cultural issues at play in a lot of our cities, especially when police won’t do their jobs.
(2) Dems have begun to espouse your beliefs. Harris’ strongest moment was when she emphasized her record as a prosecutor. During the debate Trump lied about crime stats. Voters believed it, in part (I think because he used such violent language to attack people, demonstrating that he’s anti-certain disorders. How do Dems compete when the electorate refuses to respond to nuance?
One solution to all these issues is it would be great if a few Dem cities became case studies in dealing with these issues. Obviously Adams won’t do, but I’d love to see the Mayors of a few smaller Dem cities, like a Kansas City, Charlotte and others be elevated as they deal with these issues. Work is happening, like Detroit, but we need to focus on progress not pain, which reporters love to focus on and which alternative media incenitvizes.
It’s necessary to create the incentive structure for the cops to do their jobs instead of pretending to do their jobs. The police reforms created incentives to proactivity and results (not without problems) and this served the public well. The Defund the Police riots created the exact opposite incentive structure, one that rewards caution, inactivity, defensiveness, and concealment. Having allowed a bunch of incontinent radicals to destroy the former, we should not be pinning the latter on the shoulders of the patrol force.
I think I disagree that not learning algebra doesn't cause sexual assaults. My understanding is that employment, marriage and other strong ties to the community do reduce crime (by socialisation, increasing the opportunity cost of crime, and increasing the direct cost from crime) and education and employment seem important ways of doing that.
"But I really do think everything needs to follow from a basic statement of values."
Yes. I think that is clearly true. As individuals and as organizations, we can be more effective if we are clear to ourselves and to others what values we are working from.
But this cuts against Matt's call for young liberals to go into law enforcement. They organizations they would work within also work from values, whether entirely openly acknowledged or not. And those values are *not* what those young liberals want to work from. They would be forced to work toward THOSE values, as they will not have the authority to decide otherwise.
When liberal people join law enforcement organizations at higher levels, they find that he organizations are firmly entrenched with those non-liberal values around law enforcement. They encounter massive resistance and backlash.
I think Matt's calls for liberals to join law enforcement are incredibly naive. I don't mean that there cannot be an an effective and wise call, but Matt hasn't put one out there. He ignores organizational culture and organizational learning. He ignore the challenges of organizational leadership. He doesn't even display an understanding of the dynamic that led to Exit, Loyalty and Voice.
He's tried talking about education policy for years. There are similar challenges in the school reform arena. I don't mean in terms of policy on paper. I mean in terms of the much harder work of implementation. The challenge of turning around professional workplaces with dysfunctional cultures, particularly in the public sector. But he never paid attention to that scholarship or the documentation challenges, more successful and less successful strategies.
But, really, established workplace cultures do not shift simply because a small handful of people try to join them at the low end. We KNOW that that doesn't work.
It sure is eye opening to see the disparity between the party platform between 2008/2012 and 2016-present. In retrospect, it feels so painfully obvious how lax and unreasonable our criminal justice stance had/has become, and I think we need to give more credence to the idea that our cities are canaries in the coal mine for issues that will eventually carry national salience.
Seattle, for example, has been mired in a heated debate over these kind of crime, homelessness and quality of issues since 2012, if not earlier. And even in a city that's far more progressive than most democratic strongholds, a pretty strong "moderate" constituency emerged and pushed back on this heavily (culminating in a near-total voting out of the incompetent progressives in the mayorship and city council in 2021). The warning signs were there for years, and the national democrats either didn't take this problem seriously, or were completely oblivious to how this would eventually bubble up into the national discourse. This strikes me as a very serious comms and organizational shortcoming of the party.
“ urban police officers being so uniformly right-wing, but part of the solution to that is to urge more young liberals to consider law enforcement careers.”
Yeah, please do this in swing states. We need more converts to conservatism, lol.
I appreciate your points from a policy perspective but I think it completely misses what's really going on here.
Most voters aren't highly informed. They vote to express their identity and their values. When the issue doesn't feel like it directly expresses an important value/identify (or it goes super bad ) voters may defer to policy guidance.
But this isn't one of those cases. How we treat people who break the law and how hard we come down on them is about as salient as you can get to values modern Americans feel very strongly about. Doesn't matter what is actually best for the poor and oppressed -- being soft on crime communicates democratic values regarding how we should think about the poor and lawbreakers.
--
There is nothing unique about this with democrats. It's a political universal. Anti-abortion advocates (even if they were consequentialists) want to communicate the value that abortion is murder and would support bans even if resulted in more net abortions (tho they'd deny that). Studies show both pro and anti gun folks are committed to expressing their gun related values more than any policy goal.
If you know of a fix short of decreasing salience or deferring to technocratic government I'd love to know.
We need someone to fight back against schools that don't punish kids for bad behavior. Teachers are getting abused by students, and the principal puts them right back in class the same day. Kids can't learn and teachers are scared and burned out. The school-to-prison pipeline was better than this. But since it's something that gets implemented on a local level, we can't just stop it by voting for different representatives, or even school board members.
I personally find the idea of transitioning into a law enforcement career to be an exciting idea. If only the pay was competitive with what I'm earning now, then it would be a real temptation.
I had the unfortunate *shudders* pleasure of being one of my community members who made a point about spreading word that one of local panhandlers was also masturbating in front of the homes of women in the neighborhood after he did it in front of my and my friend’s house and was caught on camera (we identified him by his purple backpack, he hid his face in a hoodie).
Ultimately what I learned going on Next Door and Facebook to try and just make people aware who he was was that for a lot of well meaning Liberals and Progressives the “they need mental health treatment” was basically the equivalent of “thoughts and prayers” for conservatives that we basically mock.
This was a man who had been arrested some 9 times in a decade for the same behavior, had somehow always escaped ending up on the sex offender registry, and who had basically told me on camera to my face in my driveway he didn’t care if he was arrested because he “knew” the women “liked it”.
None of this information really changed the “he needs mental health treatment” folks…and I honestly didn’t know what to do with them other than completely disregard them from that point on.
Ultimately, this guy got rearrested for the 11th time and spent a year in jail because a woman angry enough to about the experience followed through on the whole process (i had called the police to report him masturbating in my yard which is literally next door to a Magnet High School and was told it was a “victimless” crime 4 months prior). Somehow he is STILL not on the sex offender list and instead keeps pleading down to misdemeanor “obscenity”…
I'm sincerely sad to hear you had to go through this. I'd have a hard time handling it without going off the deep end.
Are you somewhere on the West Coast? I'm curious because this particular sort of screwy thinking about "victimless" crime seems to particularly predominate there.
US cities have never been safer in my lifetime & Logan Circle is lovely. Public disorder may or may not be worse- but old men like to carp. Serious violence seems very localized.
I think all these points are spot on, but I can’t imagine the kind of people who created the mess in the first place being able to embrace them. Those people will have to be replaced.
People who habitually break the rules are, quite simply, bad people. You're not going to change any significant number of them. People rarely change much after they reach adulthood.
Therefore if other people's lives are to be tolerable, you have to get rid of the bad people one way or another.
Prolonged incarceration is expensive, but spares delicate sensibilities.
Bring back insane asylums
My wife and I went to Norms (great diner in L.A.). The one we went to was in a blue collar area (all the good diners are). And we had a great breakfast.
At a nearby table a homeless person came in and order steak & eggs. We thought that was a good thing - spending his money on a decent breakfast. The waitress, who also handled our table treated him the same as any other customer.
And when he was done, he didn’t pay, and on the way out grabbed the cash tip left on another table. So stealing his meal and stealing the tip from a waitress who probably doesn’t make a whole lot.
We started to go after him when my wife saw him steal the tip. The waitress confronted him and made him give her the tip money. She then stood aside and let him leave.
So what just happened here:
According to the crime stats - this did not happen. No one reported it.
The restaurant owner clearly accepts that anyone who leaves without paying can do so.
All of the wait staff are on their own protecting their tips. And they will sometimes lose them.
Everyone there, customers & employees, feels yucky having watched this, and knowing there are no consequences for the thief.
This repeats itself a million times a million different ways in a million different places. The end result is significant - a coarsening of the public spaces. We lose faith in our society and our government.
And the people we Democrats elect to run our cities, the mayors, city councils, their appointees, etc., are directly to blame for this. They have become unwilling to hold anyone to account for anything. Every criminal has their advocates and the Democratic Party is unwilling to push back on any interest group.
And the end result? The Democratic Party is not trusted to administer or cities in the interests of the vast majority of people who want the rules to be enforced and the public spaces to be welcoming to those who are polite, considerate, and follow the rules.
And that flows upward. Does the President have anything to do with enforcing city ordnances. Not really. But this does impact voters selection for President. It has an even stronger impact on their vote for Governor (and Governors can have some impact on this). And it has a giant impact on the votes for Mayor and City Council.
Democratic candidates can point to the crime stats and say “look, crime is down.” Voters aren’t looking at the stats. They look at the locked up shelves in stores. They look at the people blatantly walking out without paying. They look at the homeless taking over public parks and other spaces. They look at all that and say - crime is a giant problem and you Democrats don’t even acknowledge it.
Be thankful that the Republican party mostly nominates crazy people. Because when they nominate thoughtful, sane, conservative candidates, they will more often than not win - on a policy of actually addressing crime. And more often than not, the Democratic opponent won’t even understand what the Republican, and the voters, mean when they discuss crime.
Democratic mayors used to be able to make hard decisions. They used to take pride in enforcing the law. What happened?
from: https://liberalandlovingit.substack.com/p/the-degradation-of-our-public-spaces
May I humbly submit: https://cathyreisenwitz.substack.com/p/the-acab-case-for-weaksauce-police
This is a great perspective. As someone who lived in NYC in the 2010s (even the DeBlasio years), things felt mostly orderly. Yes there was still crime, but not some of the odd things you see today, like smoking on the subway.
At the same time, I think we see some Dems supporting this. Harris, as you note wrote Smart on Crime. Newsom has taken positions that disappoint his voters. NYC elected an ex-cop.
But, there are two big problems. (1) Many of the rules don’t get enforced even when dems support systems. NYC has a ton of cops standing around…not enforcing the rules but getting overtime. They hate Dems and the city, and there is little accountability for them to do their jobs. There deeper cultural issues at play in a lot of our cities, especially when police won’t do their jobs.
(2) Dems have begun to espouse your beliefs. Harris’ strongest moment was when she emphasized her record as a prosecutor. During the debate Trump lied about crime stats. Voters believed it, in part (I think because he used such violent language to attack people, demonstrating that he’s anti-certain disorders. How do Dems compete when the electorate refuses to respond to nuance?
One solution to all these issues is it would be great if a few Dem cities became case studies in dealing with these issues. Obviously Adams won’t do, but I’d love to see the Mayors of a few smaller Dem cities, like a Kansas City, Charlotte and others be elevated as they deal with these issues. Work is happening, like Detroit, but we need to focus on progress not pain, which reporters love to focus on and which alternative media incenitvizes.
It’s necessary to create the incentive structure for the cops to do their jobs instead of pretending to do their jobs. The police reforms created incentives to proactivity and results (not without problems) and this served the public well. The Defund the Police riots created the exact opposite incentive structure, one that rewards caution, inactivity, defensiveness, and concealment. Having allowed a bunch of incontinent radicals to destroy the former, we should not be pinning the latter on the shoulders of the patrol force.
I think I disagree that not learning algebra doesn't cause sexual assaults. My understanding is that employment, marriage and other strong ties to the community do reduce crime (by socialisation, increasing the opportunity cost of crime, and increasing the direct cost from crime) and education and employment seem important ways of doing that.
Kind of a tangent here…but do any Fairfax County Slowborers know if Steve descano is likely to have a viable challenger next year?
"But I really do think everything needs to follow from a basic statement of values."
Yes. I think that is clearly true. As individuals and as organizations, we can be more effective if we are clear to ourselves and to others what values we are working from.
But this cuts against Matt's call for young liberals to go into law enforcement. They organizations they would work within also work from values, whether entirely openly acknowledged or not. And those values are *not* what those young liberals want to work from. They would be forced to work toward THOSE values, as they will not have the authority to decide otherwise.
When liberal people join law enforcement organizations at higher levels, they find that he organizations are firmly entrenched with those non-liberal values around law enforcement. They encounter massive resistance and backlash.
I think Matt's calls for liberals to join law enforcement are incredibly naive. I don't mean that there cannot be an an effective and wise call, but Matt hasn't put one out there. He ignores organizational culture and organizational learning. He ignore the challenges of organizational leadership. He doesn't even display an understanding of the dynamic that led to Exit, Loyalty and Voice.
He's tried talking about education policy for years. There are similar challenges in the school reform arena. I don't mean in terms of policy on paper. I mean in terms of the much harder work of implementation. The challenge of turning around professional workplaces with dysfunctional cultures, particularly in the public sector. But he never paid attention to that scholarship or the documentation challenges, more successful and less successful strategies.
But, really, established workplace cultures do not shift simply because a small handful of people try to join them at the low end. We KNOW that that doesn't work.
It sure is eye opening to see the disparity between the party platform between 2008/2012 and 2016-present. In retrospect, it feels so painfully obvious how lax and unreasonable our criminal justice stance had/has become, and I think we need to give more credence to the idea that our cities are canaries in the coal mine for issues that will eventually carry national salience.
Seattle, for example, has been mired in a heated debate over these kind of crime, homelessness and quality of issues since 2012, if not earlier. And even in a city that's far more progressive than most democratic strongholds, a pretty strong "moderate" constituency emerged and pushed back on this heavily (culminating in a near-total voting out of the incompetent progressives in the mayorship and city council in 2021). The warning signs were there for years, and the national democrats either didn't take this problem seriously, or were completely oblivious to how this would eventually bubble up into the national discourse. This strikes me as a very serious comms and organizational shortcoming of the party.
“ urban police officers being so uniformly right-wing, but part of the solution to that is to urge more young liberals to consider law enforcement careers.”
Yeah, please do this in swing states. We need more converts to conservatism, lol.
I appreciate your points from a policy perspective but I think it completely misses what's really going on here.
Most voters aren't highly informed. They vote to express their identity and their values. When the issue doesn't feel like it directly expresses an important value/identify (or it goes super bad ) voters may defer to policy guidance.
But this isn't one of those cases. How we treat people who break the law and how hard we come down on them is about as salient as you can get to values modern Americans feel very strongly about. Doesn't matter what is actually best for the poor and oppressed -- being soft on crime communicates democratic values regarding how we should think about the poor and lawbreakers.
--
There is nothing unique about this with democrats. It's a political universal. Anti-abortion advocates (even if they were consequentialists) want to communicate the value that abortion is murder and would support bans even if resulted in more net abortions (tho they'd deny that). Studies show both pro and anti gun folks are committed to expressing their gun related values more than any policy goal.
If you know of a fix short of decreasing salience or deferring to technocratic government I'd love to know.
We need someone to fight back against schools that don't punish kids for bad behavior. Teachers are getting abused by students, and the principal puts them right back in class the same day. Kids can't learn and teachers are scared and burned out. The school-to-prison pipeline was better than this. But since it's something that gets implemented on a local level, we can't just stop it by voting for different representatives, or even school board members.
I personally find the idea of transitioning into a law enforcement career to be an exciting idea. If only the pay was competitive with what I'm earning now, then it would be a real temptation.
I had the unfortunate *shudders* pleasure of being one of my community members who made a point about spreading word that one of local panhandlers was also masturbating in front of the homes of women in the neighborhood after he did it in front of my and my friend’s house and was caught on camera (we identified him by his purple backpack, he hid his face in a hoodie).
Ultimately what I learned going on Next Door and Facebook to try and just make people aware who he was was that for a lot of well meaning Liberals and Progressives the “they need mental health treatment” was basically the equivalent of “thoughts and prayers” for conservatives that we basically mock.
This was a man who had been arrested some 9 times in a decade for the same behavior, had somehow always escaped ending up on the sex offender registry, and who had basically told me on camera to my face in my driveway he didn’t care if he was arrested because he “knew” the women “liked it”.
None of this information really changed the “he needs mental health treatment” folks…and I honestly didn’t know what to do with them other than completely disregard them from that point on.
Ultimately, this guy got rearrested for the 11th time and spent a year in jail because a woman angry enough to about the experience followed through on the whole process (i had called the police to report him masturbating in my yard which is literally next door to a Magnet High School and was told it was a “victimless” crime 4 months prior). Somehow he is STILL not on the sex offender list and instead keeps pleading down to misdemeanor “obscenity”…
Even as a liberal I'm on board with a 10+ year sentence and maybe even a nice beatdown by the cops on this piece of garbage.
I guess I'm a Florida liberal.
I'm sincerely sad to hear you had to go through this. I'd have a hard time handling it without going off the deep end.
Are you somewhere on the West Coast? I'm curious because this particular sort of screwy thinking about "victimless" crime seems to particularly predominate there.
This is on the Gulf Coast
Oh wow, I guess I don't know anything about the South.