“ Most low-income people are not criminals, and it’s precisely the poorest and most vulnerable people who most need things like public spaces and public transit and affordable housing and libraries, and they need these things to be actually good.”
Yup. Our public library was a very good institution even ten years ago. Now it has become an informal homeless shelter. And a place where drug-users shoot up — there have been a number of overdoses in the library.
This is not a good outcome for any progressive values or any progressive constituencies. It’s a catastrophe for all of the things and people we care about. Not to mention that it is hell for the librarians themselves.
I was surprised Matt didn't mention(or I missed it) Ezra's podcast with Charles Fain Lehman about disorder where he defined it as the "domination of public space for private purposes".
Public spaces rely on the idea that people will share them and use them appropriately, otherwise people start to retreat to private spaces where they don't have to deal with disorder.
I highly doubt that, and not for ideological reasons. Ezra is a nerd. People like Eric Adams (NY), London breed (SF), Brandon something (Chicago) and Karen bass (LA) do not build their power base with nerds like us, and as a rule they are more focused on their cities political machinery and spoils system than they are on policy nerd stuff.
(Just kidding, I do not imagine that Breed would have survived the election if she listened to Klein's podcast (I also do not listen to Klein's podcast)).
Politicians get value from going on podcasts because it helps them get their message out. Do you think trump is a consistent listener of the Joe Rogan Podcast? Do you think Kamala is a consistent listener of "call her daddy"?
Ezra has been on fire recently. His podcast with Jennifer Pahlka is on the nose. She crushes it. I’ve been outspoken against government bureaucracy but Pahlka is much more articulate and precise than me. I think her government bureaucracy complaints are fundamental to the current Democratic party too. We need to find better balance between good processes and shot callers (leaders) leading and being accountable for outcomes.
I saw Ezra’s wife on John Stewart’s podcast and she was making sense for a while and then got triggered by too much guy talk and pushed back with some lefty passion.
And the logical conclusion is that these services get underused because they're not pleasant. And then they get underfunded because voters don't use them, and it becomes a vicious circle
Yup - it is a universal truth in politics that services used by the middle class get funded, while services used only by poor people don't. If you want services used by poor people to get funded, you need to design the service so that middle class people are willing to use them also.
If libraries become de-facto homeless shelters, middle class people who want the library experience will switch over to private book stores, leaving libraries with only the dregs of society, until they get defunded and wither away.
What also follows from this, I believe, is that it's often better to deliver a better quality (and safer) service at a higher price which will attract the better off, even if it means there are access issues for the poorest. Redistribution is much more efficiently pursued directly than trying to make every public service extremely low cost to the user (which in practice means low quality, unless there is overwhelmingly public pressure to keep quality up).
Same for me, for everyday things. But there are other ways to subsidize it. For example, good bus service to major events (like pro sports) or new+fast busses for major corridors with parkNrides and a push for big employer subsidy (hospitals are a good candidate). If you open the door to these, it can both encourage interest and investment in the whole system as well as juice up usage which can drive down marginal cost.
Strong agree. I was recently chatting with a city employee about various housing initiatives and he brought up another city that has turned its libraries into de facto homeless shelters as something we should explore. I don't think we can sustain the bait and switch of turning over a public institution to a different purpose than the one the public signed up for. This doesn't mean libraries can't deal with the reality that homeless residents are part of our community and may avail themselves of the library services, but we can't change what "library services" means to the point that its unrecognizable.
Also a big-time agree - libraries, parks, transit systems are all here and in the short term you can jam the homeless problem into them rather than build purpose-made homeless shelters. In the long run, the misuse of public services as ad-hoc homeless shelters will lead to less public support and funding for those places, and the homeless will be back on the street, but we'll also have lost the public services that progressives insisted were the only way to accommodate them.
Far better to "do the work" of building new shelters, improving existing ones, convincing/encouraging/pushing people to use them, and of course building more housing generally so that fewer people begin the slow descent into long-term homelessness.
And being able to build cheap housing…places that are made to provide basic needs and don’t cost hundreds of thousands each to construct—we need a modern version of the old SRO. Ultimately shelters are an emergency measure, to solve the problem requires permanent housing.
I have come out against most harm reduction drug policies because they seem to come with defacto drug legalization. My sister left Portland because things got so bad. My friend’s wife was told me about her 2021 trip to Portland and how terrible things had gotten.
Permissiveness is not helping people. It’s cruel and letting people slowly kill themselves.
Harm reduction is supposed to be making it so that junkies don’t have HIV and Hep C when they get into rehab, but if you take it too far it becomes a replacement for rehab.
The big problem is there often is not an incentive for seeking treatment, but there are policies that lower the cost of doing drugs (lower disease risk and informational networks that facilitate the sourcing of narcotics.) I am just tired of people dying on the street.
In your area, is drug treatment readily available so that if an addict has the impulse to get drug treatment, they can, right away, without a waiting list that would mean the impulse might be overwhelmed with the call of the drug?
More to the point, I’m not convinced harm reduction strategies are actually reducing harm, and I no longer trust advocates to fairly assess the results of the policies they advocate.
Or to rationalize things away. You probably could make arguments for things like overdose rates going down ... in circumstances where absolute numbers go up, but there are more users. That is strictly worse even if you have a better metric.
Yeah, we’ve seen this pretty vividly with marijuana legalization, which seems to have accomplished little more than creating an entire generation of stoners who have convinced themselves that it’s safer than alcohol and basically just a replacement for therapy.
I support marijuana legalization, but at this point I'm pretty convinced that it should be stigmatized & we should strive to make the marijuana experience fairly crappy. We should probably re-ban everything except loose marijuana vegetation/flower itself; no more commercial sale of vapes, edibles, oils, whatever.
Even if it is safer than alcohol, getting drunk every night was never socially acceptable, so why should getting stoned be?
The problem with cannabis / marijuana seems to be the Gin Lane problem. Every society seems to go through this period when distilled spirits are first widely and cheaply available - a significant fraction of people drink way too much and do so way too often and rapidly descend into alcoholism. Over time, a set of cultural and social norms develop, people do still get drunk, but they limit it and then drink little or nothing the rest of the time. Legalisation has made cannabis much more widely and cheaply available, but the cultural norms - the equivalents of "don't drink alone" and "don't drink every night" - haven't yet developed.
If people just got a mild buzz every other night and got really stoned once every few weeks (and only when they had the day off the following day) - a form of use that legalisation facilitates - then you don't get a horde of stoners who may not be killing themselves, but are certainly damaging their ability to stick to a regular job.
I don't know how to accelerate the process so it's OK to get a mild buzz but not to get completely incapable - in the way that two glasses of wine is one thing, and a fifth of bourbon is something very different.
Yes. I've thought about this analogy also. Commercialized THC competes on potency and people don't realize the long term effect it can have, after all it's legal and sold in stores. I've personally seen two people close to me quit and its been extremely positive.
It's always fun when Matt throws the woke set for a loop on Twitter when he says that not having enough of a police presence in high crime areas is discriminatory against disadvantaged groups. It's clearly correct but also clearly breaks a lot of minds when it's stated. Another good moment was his early moments of being the Snitch On Improper License Plates, and people like Josie Duffy Rice and others were pushing back despite admitting that lack of traffic enforcement was a problem, and that Matt had a solution to create *less* direct interaction with police officers.
it was so small fry but the Yglesias Civilian Traffic Cop episode really led to my disillusionment with prominent online liberals. It was pretty obvious that Rice and others were picking fights with Yglesias on that issue solely because they personally thought he was annoying!
I am a librarian, and this is somewhat true everywhere. Part of the issue is that there aren't services for people, and so they end up in the library. One library in my city is literally across the street from a social services office. The office tells people to go across the street and the librarians will help them with their SNAP applications or other forms that need to be filled out in the extremely cumbersome and dehumanizing process that seems to mark many of the services for poorer people. Librarians are happy to help, but they don't have the knowledge or expertise that others people do, and it is frustrating. Of course, this isn't the same as people shooting up in the bathroom, but it is indicative of how many see the library as a catch all to solve problems because it is the one place where everyone is welcome to enter and use resources for free. Librarians do call the police more often than we would like because of lack of other options in dealing with situations.
2. I hate that everything you wrote here is clearly true and doesn't have a good answer. If libraries are de facto homeless shelters, a lot of people are going to be uncomfortable visiting. If we no longer allow everyone, we've kind of defeated the purpose of libraries. If we just close libraries, that's a huge loss.
Sure. The issues she mentions, and that were mentioned elsewhere seem to be behavioral, though. They're calling the police more than they used to, removing bathroom stalls so they can check for ODs, etc..
Age, race and income don't seem to be problems. Appearance might be a problem inasmuch as it's hard to get around that smelling terrible or wearing stained or dirty clothing impact the people around you. The latter sometimes comes with being homeless so that's a tough circle to square.
Your last paragraph is largely what I'm getting at-- libraries could exclude people who are visibly homeless, but that's kind of against the purpose of libraries.
It's not literally true in terms of exact timeline, but the day my grocery store installed used needle disposal bins in the public bathrooms...that was definitely a harbinger.
I understand the impulse of "addicts are gonna come in and shoot up anyway, may as well make it slightly safer for all involved", but it feels like that cedes the premise, simply giving up on the possibility of a city where addicts don't do fentanyl in grocery stores. (Aren't there supposed to be dedicated injection sites for this sort of thing?) It'd be like if Hayes suggested putting out ashtrays in the subways - probably better than doing literally nothing, but it misses the forest for the trees. We'll still take their money if they're otherwise-behaved paying customers, of course. Functional addicts buy groceries too, just like Republicans.
This is the new normal in and around every major city on the West Coast. It's more about the progressive governance culture than any one policy. The executive of the county that Seattle is in has been trying to get the county jail shut down and still runs essentially unopposed.
One thing about Seattle that has gotten better: light rail. Two years ago, it was basically a moving homeless shelter. Taking it to anything except a sports game was a super uncomfortable experience. Since that time and at significant cost, the transit agency has hired a ton of "public safety officers" - basically unarmed guards for the platforms and trains, many of whom also check tickets (we're a proof of payment system).
This has worked wonderfully - the light rail is totally safe and pleasant to ride, and the stations are generally fine as well. The extension we recently opened exceeded ridership expectations to the point that the main complaint about the system is excessive crowding, which is a very charmingly pre-COVID transit problem to have. In fact, I think ridership may be well above the pre-pandemic level (we opened several extensions during the pandemic, so getting a like-for-like comparison is tricky). One could argue, like the article does, that automated enforcement (fare gates, more cameras) would be even better, but nonetheless I think the effort has been a major success.
It's hard to get a feel for the exact costs involved in improvements (I'm sure they're buried in government reports somewhere), but I got a constituent email from Sen. Scott Wiener not too long ago that said rider satisfaction polling for SFMTA now *exceeds* The Before Times levels. Highest in a decade, or something like that. Anecdotally, for the one train I ride regularly, things have gone from totally-empty-trains-minus-a-few-homeless-guys-and-their-droppings to basically the same level of crowding as before. So whatever mix of better transit policing, cameras, etc. are being employed, it's working. Wish to see similar improvements in other public domains.
(Weirdly enough, this doesn't seem to include fare inspection - I still haven't seen one for like 8 years or something, and fare gates are unchanged.)
That's interesting. It's the first I've heard of a public safety force actually working. I'd be curious how they interact with the police and how expensive they are compared to hiring an equivalent salary of police officers.
As a former CSO (similar type of uniformed non-sworn officer) they are generally dirt cheap compared to cops. Think meter maid (trained in house in a couple weeks, paid better than a private security guard but not that much better, no years of state training). I fully support departments building small armies of folks who can go out and handle any kind of crime that doesn't require a police officer because it dramatically improves response times - I could have easily responded to stolen bike reports or written licence plate tickets on parked cars all day while real cops focused on major crimes, and it would be a win-win for everyone.
I know! I rolled my eyes when they rolled them out as well, but I have to say that I've been pleasantly surprised. One caveat: Seattle still has tons of places to do drugs and generally misbehave, so I think most of the success of this solution has been making light rail a slightly more annoying place to engage in this activity than basically everywhere else. In a city with tons of well understood "you can do drugs anywhere, but not here" zones, we just added light rail to the list. Which is great - public transit is perhaps THE most important public space! But it does indicate that this sort of thing probably isn't a tractable solution for the entire city.
I don't know how light the light rail is in Seattle, but fare gates can be a problem for very open stations as you need to block off all other entrances/exits and most light rail doesn't have fenced-off stations in that way (and, even if you can put up a fence, the fire marshal probably won't let you, and for good reasons).
I mean yeah, this is all way downstream of the decision to have street running and open stations, which saved a few bucks at the time but has been haunting the system ever since. But even still, I think Sound Transit's proposed idea of only putting fair gates in the fully grade separated, "subway"-style stations in the core downtown tunnel (Capitol Hill, Westlake, Symphony, Pioneer Square, C/ID) would go a long way. Most rail-adjacent urban disorder is concentrated around these stations, and something like 90+% of trips either start or end at them (the big exception is Stadium), so I think it's a good way to get most of the way there on fare gating.
I think the reason we haven't seen a major backlash in big cities like in the 60's and 70's when "law and order" guys like Frank Rizzo (Philly), Sam Yorty (LA) and Charles Stenvig (Minneapolis) where shocking the political establishment and getting elected mayor is you don't really have the same sort of white working class constituency that can revolt against liberalism and the Dems at the ballot box anymore (see also Disco Demolition Night). Those people largely moved to the suburbs or Florida.
Cities have changed a lot since then and are now dominated politically by middle class white liberals, various ethnic/minority groups, and young professionals and hipsters who just aren't going to vote for that so you have a sort of weird drift and paralysis or movements to rich guy "outsiders" like in SF, rather than a major voter revolt to the GOP or an independent.
"is you don't really have the same sort of white working class constituency that can revolt against liberalism"
We do though! It's mainly working class Hispanics with a dash of blue collar immigrants from dozens of other cultures. We just saw it in the urban election shifts of the past two cycles.
It's limited in SF because of education polarization.
There's some of that in terms of voting for Trump, especially in NYC but we aren't seeing anything like Frank Rizzo running, and winning, on promising to make it easier for cops to shoot people in a major Democratic city.
Like I said there was some backlash in the presidential election but nothing like what happened in a lot places in the 60's - 80's. The "Housing Wars" in Yonkers is another great example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJVKmMdXiNM
I can’t speak for Portland, but Seattle swung a bit right last year and in our previous mayoral election. Things have been getting better when it comes to public order - homeless encampments are getting cleared out more often and that’s led to a decline in shootings.
We still have a ways to go and we really need to make progress faster. And our county executive is not going to be running for reelection.
I can't speak for others, but as a longtime resident of the Seattle area, I have noticed a big change in the focus of local progressives since the pandemic.
Prior to the pandemic, I actually voted mostly for progressives in local races, while voting for more moderate candidates in state and national races. The reason? I wanted more bike lanes and more public transit in the city, and the progressive wing seemed much more serious about it than the moderate wing, which mostly catered to people with cars.
Since the pandemic, things have changed. In 2021, the most important issue for people traveling around the city without a car was no longer how often the bus ran, but how safe you were on the bus, waiting for the bus, and walking to the bus, from homeless drug addicts. This caused lots of people I follow who are big supporters of public transit to support the more moderate candidate, in spite of having pushed for progressives in the past. At the same time, blog posts from local progressives that used to focus on general urbanism and the need to make the city less car-dominated switched their emphasis to arguments in favor of defunding the police and lax general police enforcement. In the city attorney's race, the progressive who lost to the Republican did so because she openly said she wasn't going to prosecute shoplifters.
Even public meetings held by the local transit agency about service restructures seemed to have been infiltrated by progressive politics. In 2015, I attended some meetings around bus restructures for the 2016 opening of two new light rail stations. The focus at the meetings was about improving mobility for all in the most efficient way and, even though, they had to comply with laws against racial discrimination in service allocation, race was not at all the focus of the discussions, and I felt like everyone's opinion was valued. In 2022, I attended another meeting about a service restructure planned for 2024 in a different part of town. This time, the discussion was all about race, and making sure that people of color in particular had good mobility options. I left the meeting feeling like, as someone who did not represent either people of color or disabled people, that my opinions were simply unvalued, and that the transit agency didn't give a rats ass whether people like me ever rode the bus or not.
So, yes, progressive politics in Seattle has gone too far, yes, there was a backlash. But, at the same, we have an educated population who understands that electing Donald Trump as president of the United States fixes none of it, so this backlash did not really translate into a rightward shift in the presidential election. You have to look at local races to see it.
Metro Vancouver has taken a pronounced right-wing turn; the BC Conservatives (who up until this last election were a total non-entity electorally) came within a few seats of a majority. And prior to that the ruling NDP has curtailed or reversed several of their major drug use policies, because they're left-wing but can read a poll.
It will be interesting to see, but Portland probably did take a rightward swing given the retraction of drug legalization and some neighborhoods push back on the homeless camps. But Portland also basically rewrote the way it's government is organized, they realigned how the Mayor and City Council interact, who oversees what, including the additional of a city manager. From what I've heard the expectation is this will result in less finger pointing and more responsibility. We will see....
More than just the West Coast. I genuinely have felt physically ill and unsafe at the Central Library in Denver, which is especially depressing because it's the closest library location to my house.
Boulder's main library literally had to be shut down for rehabilitation due to methamphetamine contamination.
My buddy is a city attorney for Boulder and has all the library addresses memorized because of how often law enforcement has to respond to stuff going on at them.
I'm sorry to hear that. I used to be a docent there before the pandemic. I didn't have much trouble with the homeless people, and yeah, you needed to use the bathrooms on the second-fifth floors instead of the first floor. The security staff got rid of the people who were acting out. I think they're actually going to police the bathrooms more than they used to, and naturally they don't teach that skill in library school.
I'm hoping the big remodel they recently completed will change the vibe of the place! (I attended the "open house" celebration a couple months ago or so, but haven't been inside for any length of time since then.)
The Seattle Central Public Library is, in my opinion, the coolest building on the entire west coast. It is a shame how unpleasant it has become to be inside - the bathroom stalls have had their doors removed, so that it's easier for docents to check if people are shooting up or ODing!
I overstated the case a bit - they'r these very tiny (maybe 18" tall) saloon doors, which are somehow even more absurd than the door just being absent. Like in the latter case you could at least convince yourself that they just forgot to put it on, but with these, it's very clear that there's something untoward about this bathroom...
Interestingly, for the past two Sundays I've been taking my daughter to the main branch of the San Francisco public library to play D&D (kids these days and the easy time they have getting to play D&D!!!) and it's been safe and pleasant.
libraries. But then other people talking about jailing citizens for smoking on outdoor train platforms and I remember why I am leery of the impulse for more order.
As Matt said, strong enforcement doesn't have to literally mean that, you light up a cigarette on an empty train platform, you immediately get hauled to jail. But, it does meant that, if you do it, you will be told by security that smoking is not allowed on the train platform and be asked to stop. If you continue to refuse to either stop or leave, eventually, the police will be called, and you will be hauled to jail, but at that point, you fully deserve what you are getting because you have refused repeated demands to follow the rules.
Do they have to wear hand cuffs for 60 minutes and then get to go on their way? I sort of think being publicly cuffed for an hour might be a better sanction than an actual trip to jail, it imposed mild humiliation without disruption.
I’m really leery of using coercion to avoid such trivial harms. People should also not wear clashing patterns of plaid. Having a one hour meeting with someone who is poorly dressed is much worse aesthetically than smelling a whiff of smoke on an outdoor platform. If the bar for shamming is so low freedom will teeter
Another way to think of it may be that the harm isn't just being done to the other passengers, it's a long-term harm against the "business" (or service, in this case). If a restaurant refused to kick out a smoker, I wouldn't go back.
Should we reconsider bringing back some form a corporal punishment? 5 lashings is cruel, but is it more cruel than 5 month in prison, and the loss of income, disconnect from family, etc ? We don't necessarily need to have have physical punishment, could there be modern equivalents? I'll jokingly suggest you lose access to your smartphone (only jokingly since I don't think you could enforce it, as getting another would be easy). Modern version of the stocks with social media companies required to carry your embarrassment to everyone in your area?
I do think corporal punishment might be better than a sentence of several months, but I don’t want anyone flogged for smoking in the wrong place or speeding.
Sure, but that is just about proportionality. The penalty for speeding, outside of the most reckless scenarios is usually a fine. That seems reasonable. Further punishment requires evidence of actual endangerment of others.
What should the penalty be for someone that has stolen goods worth more than, say $5k? Or what about a drunken assault that resulted in a minor injury?
Amd as far as I know it is usually a citation, I don't think police go straight to arresting, though of course any time the police are involved things can escalate.
Agree really good article for Matt to write since I think it is obviously true but I think evidenced in the Chris Hayes tweet difficult to articulate or stand up for if u are a dem politician or just someone who is liberal and doesn’t want to be the bad guy. Rhetorically I think dems have been in a bad place over this I’ve seen our progressive mayor who I like address a particularly egregious violent crime by saying she was going to invest more in our neighborhoods. It just made her look terrible to give this nonresponse response to some young girl being killed or whatever, need to equip dem politicians with better talking points and not attack them like crazy on line when they talk like normal humans.
Speaking bluntly: Chris Hayes sounds like a complete wuss in that thread.
Every law is ultimately enforced by a man (or woman) with a gun and the threat of incarceration. Every single law, whether that be speeding, tax evasion or arson. If you don't want to use those to enforce a law, then you are really saying you don't want that law at all.
This semi-law status is what a lot of these "community-based justice" models amount to. There's a lot of magical thinking around the ability of "community" to provide a social structure in which no one feels like even thinking of committing a crime.
Freddie deBoer ran a challenge among his readers to suggest what should be done with someone like George Floyd's murderer, Derek Chauvin, in a "defund the police" society, and the best anyone had was "community service, and then if he doesn't do it, he's an outlaw and has no protection from whatever people want to do him."
One of the leaders of the police abolition movement literally called for that on twitter a few years ago. It’s not the “hushed solution they don’t talk about” it’s the solution they talk about but is not communicated widely to the rest of us through the media because the sympathetic media like vox thinks is crazy or harmful to a cause they otherwise support.
It kind of follows from their premises: that policing is not actually about reducing crime, it’s about keeping poor people and especially black people in their place. If you buy that (I don’t, obviously) vigilantism from the victim’s community is likely to be a much better alternative than turning to the KKKops who are not actually interested at all in justice etc.
The bit that annoys me more than any other is that as an observational fact about some parts of some police forces in some areas that is, at the very least, plausible.
But instead of concluding that what we need is a police force that works like the ones in TV cop shows and then trying to work out how we get there from what we have, they conclude that these shows are "copaganda" and that this is an impossible fantasy.
Equally frustrating is the right-wing mirror image who also believe that violently keeping poor people in their place rather than treating everyone equally and treating crimes according to their seriousness rather than the status of their victim is a fantasy - but they like the violence and want to get police to "take the gloves off" and to be more violent, more aggressive and more discriminatory.
This brings up an intellectually interesting question for me as a political geographer: how do you then define the boundaries of the “community” that is empowered to administer justice within its jurisdiction? The thing that kills me about a lot of these “radical” proposals is that they just end up recreating the nation-state, but smaller.
The KKK was literally a community justice organization, among other things. Not the precedent you'd think progressives would turn to yet here we are! Truly insane stuff.
It was absolutely to enforce their version of public order, which was popular with a large subset of the population and needless to say very unpopular with the others.
The current President-elect is proof that social mores don’t enforce good behavior. As long as we depend on social adherence aren’t we fundamentally depending on culture homogeneity - ie. we all agree on the same unwritten rules? The Greater Evil concept says that your libertarian example may actually be correct.
Interestingly, a few of today's commentators have weighed in with "the community needs to do more" angles that were coming from the right side of this issue.
So maybe there's some common ground between the tough and soft crowd. The difference in the comment was that the social justice side sees community justice straight up replacing the police, while the other side sees it as a partnership that gradually makes aggressive policing less neccessary.
Well, I would say the conventional old-school conservative take on “community” in this context is of the “bringing up your kids right in a two-parent household” variety. The left-wing version of community tends to be much more diffuse. I think part of the left imagining of community is acknowledging that families and kinship networks often are more complex than the nuclear family ideal, which I think is totally fair enough. But they lose me when we get to the “these kinship networks qua community will provide the moral and judicial framework for peaceful coexistence” - for one thing, you’ve just reinvented the state but smaller, and for another, you’re hiding the ball on what coercive measures you will inevitably need to employ.
Most educated liberals grow up in environments that are basically de-policed. They are communities that DO work because the police so rarely have to be called. The vast majority of these communities are like Matt’s example of the smoker in the restaurant: they just don’t do it because they understand the consequences.
IMO, that should be our goal. Not abolishing the police, but establishing a universal enforcement of norms that allows society to mostly not need them. Which means you need a lot of policing up front, and then a highly professionalized force on the back end.
The problem is that higher income neighborhoods/nice restaurants are able to self police because everyone there has something to lose. I don’t open break the law at home because I don’t want my neighbors to think I’m a criminal. I don’t behave in anti-social ways in public because even a small disorderly conduct charge could potentially ruin my career. If you have severe mental health problems and are living on the streets, or even if you’re employed on and off and bouncing from house to house, none of this applies to you.
I actually do think that it's a coincidence. It has much more to do with the rise of drug trades and cultural changes than SROs.
The reason NIMBYs didn't like SROs is that they tend to attract people with poor impulse control/alcohol issues/who have less to loose. By the way, the cause and effect between having less to lose and having less impulse control is one of those both directions things.
I think you're underestimating well-meaning people looking at SROs, comparing them with the nice apartments or single-family suburban homes they live in, saying "SROs are really gross and bad, no one should be living like that", and then banning SROs so that indeed, no one lives like that (they live on the street instead).
I mean, I'm not saying it was ALL because of banning SROs. Obviously, lead was probably the strongest of about a dozen or so factors. But also, most of those factors are bidirectional, as you say. Most everything works like that!
Buddhists call it "interdependent coarising". I wish it was a more commonly understood concept, because I think it would really help discussions like these where the causality is this whole big jumble of bi- and multidirectional factors like this.
I mean… ideally you also don’t break the law because you have a conscience and care about others, right? It’s not 100% self-interested cost-benefit calculation, right?
I've never understood this logic. Yes, a wealthy suburb prices out & pushes out all the criminal elements, and then there is little need for the police there to do anything. What does that have to do with the places where the criminals live?
Also, many of these liberals do eventually live in a city, and those are obvs not de-policed, and I think then they get to experience the tension between "I need laws enforced" and "these people enforcing the laws are not really like me"
My point is that suburban-raised liberals are not used to the harsh realities of law enforcement by the time they move to the cities. Most of their contact with LE comes through traffic stops that are usually either (A) part of a transparently predatory taxation-by-citation regime, which undermines the legitimacy of LE in their eyes, or (B) transparently pretextual -- and thus inherently adversarial -- searches for higher-level violations like drug possession.
In my own experience, the handful of times I was pulled over in high school, only ONCE was the cop NOT a complete dick questioning every aspect of my story -- and usually I was just speeding a little on empty stroads on my way home from freaking CHURCH. Those sorts of experiences can bias suburban-raised libs to see most police interactions as happening in bad faith, in an environment where most people are just minding their own damned business and at most only committing minor rule-breaking like rolling stop signs or going 15-over on a stroad whose design speed is stupidly higher than its posted speed.
So yeah, all I'm saying is that this bias helps explain why their default is to shrink in horror from the brutal realities of law enforcement when they arrive in communities that aren't already highly self-ordered.
And also, I'm saying that the desire to have communities of ALL economic levels that ARE self-ordered isn't illogical, but rather SHOULD be the goal. We shouldn't WANT to live in a permanent police state, we should WANT to be more like Japan. It's just that we have to accept that the path to get there involves establishing universal enforcement of basic laws.
Addendum: I think this also explains the tolerance for “disorder”. Most traffic laws are really just covering up the fact that stroads are a shitty design concept, and municipalities happily design their roads as stroads with much higher design speeds than the posted limits.
This undermines suburbanites’ belief in traffic laws as anything but administrative fictions, and primes them to consider laws against things like loitering and other petty crimes as similar administrative fictions.
So, if your primary experience with stop signs is that they’re “mostly a suggestion”, capriciously and arbitrarily enforced, then you’re primed to also say things like, “Hey, I get away with rolling stop signs all the time, who am I to judge someone for selling loosies or lighting up on transit? It’s not what I would do, and I wouldn’t tolerate them doing it in a restaurant, but it’s all part of a corrupt system that just wants to make money off people minding their business.”
I fear there's simply no way of doing this, especially in the United States where there's such a diversity of different cultures, social classes, and upbringings that impart norms and what's acceptable behavior from birth, without having an element of top-down social coercion, like the courts, police, when people break the laws that society has collectively decided should be on the books. As the Hayes example illustrates, when people refuse to abide by society's laws, what are we supposed to do?? Just shrug our shoulders and look the other way?? Wanna shoot up n leave used needles on the street, so kids or pets could be injured or get hepatitis C from a needlestick injury?? Go for it!! Nobody's stopping you! The "progressive" approach to these issues not only degrades the quality of life for law-abiding citizens, but is deeply cruel to the most marginalized members of society like the homeless, or addicts, by allowing people to slowly kill themselves, while destroying human social capital, of people who could've become future fathers, mothers, uncles, aunts, inventors, entrepreneurs, or business owners that would collectively benefit society, if only we utilized all the tools available to us. Sometimes, that includes coercion or the threat of punishment.
They certainly did, in practice harass a bunch of innocent people. My oldest brother had long hair and tattoos and they pulled him over all the time. And we had massive problems with race discrimination.
Lol yeah my town in CT is pretty similar. My off-color joke since 2020 has been that our cops are too lazy to shoot minorities.
Of course, the truth actually is that (1) we have a pretty reasonably diverse force, (2) they don't completely ignore QOL stuff, but they also correctly prioritize more serious crimes, and (3) their biggest concern is competing for overtime hours babysitting road maintenance projects, which nets some of the best hustlers our highest public salaries -- I think they're maxing out around $250-275k right now.
If you are homeless (or even a blue collar worker with very bad teeth) you might not care so much about social ostracism. You’ll already be ostracized for your teeth, so…..
Well, no, most educated liberals grow up in overpoliced suburbs (where the cops have nothing better to do than go bust up a bunch of high school kids drinking underage) and this kind of experience really does have an impact on their thinking.
I think my version is the liberal baseline. Yours is definitely a libertarian coded baseline. I think there’s another, conservative one where cops are just unquestioningly seen as sources of order - a “yeah, you caught me there, glad to have you around doing your job” - and probably another regressive one where cops are seen as putting people in their place”.
Lots of different ways to code and interpret the typology. Mine was specific to liberals.
People LOVE "semi law". BTW not just on the Left. This is how a lot of folks on the Right think about abortion- they don't think about enforcement, but just want the "moral statement" of saying it is illegal. Back in the day they supported unenforced sodomy laws for the same reason.
But the libertatians are right on this- the purpose of laws is to facilitate punishing people who violate them, not to allow folks to express their fee-fees.
I suspect we're going to see the same thing with immigration enforcement. It's still a pretty big unknown as to harsh the Trump administration is going to be in practice. But much harsher (and perhaps more important, more visible) than current status quo seems pretty likely. I suspect a lot of people bought the rhetoric that the crackdown is only going to round up Venezuelan gangs in Aurora or the flood of panhandlers on prostitutes that came to Queens (if that NyMag article is to be believed) not realizing that if Stephen Miller gets his way, harsh enforcement is going to ensnare way more than just "criminals".
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said similar after talking to people who voted for both her and Trump. She said that even voters with undocumented people in their family sometimes said that they were glad that Trump was going to deport what he called "criminals" because they thought he meant that he was going to deport gang members, not their hard-working family members.
I think we're going to get the dictionary definition of "thermostatic reaction" when the population sees what Stephen Miller/Tom Homan/Kristi Noem/Donald Trump are about to do.
This reminds me of Freddie deBoer's interesting mini project where he tried to source people's ideas on how defunding the police would actually work.
The only response that took the prompt seriously and literally suggested a wild west approach where criminals would become outlaws whom you could murder with impuny.
This is why Freddie bothers me so much, he is clearly a smart and clever guy. He just puts his foot in his mouth for silly reasons and personal beefs too often.
I believe Freddie is against police/prison abolition. This project was IMO quite good since it took the things people were saying seriously and insisted that they do as well.
Possibly true. However, I think that if you want to make a serious argument that Freddie doesn't "mostly open his mouth to change feet," I think you have a lot more bases to cover.
I think his commenting habits are much different than his writing and interviews. I wish that he would stay and engage instead of driving by with snarky mic drop style quips.
Social pressure is no substitute for professional law enforcement. For starters, some people are sociopaths who don’t care about social pressure. Also, I have zero trust in social pressure to distinguish correctly between “this person is bad and deserves to be shunned” vs “this person is just kind of weird and I don’t like them/they’re a Bitch Eating Crackers.”
Edited to add: Also, this isn't "social pressure" exactly, but informal law enforcement systems are notorious for creating scapegoats. "All our crops failed? It's because of that weird old woman who lives alone in that hut! She must be a witch!"
TL;DR: in absence of formal systems of law/monopoly on the legitimate use of force, social norms are reinforced by gossip and ostracization, which is a lot more disturbing than it sounds at first. "Imagine a high-school cafeteria social hierarchy stamping on a human face, forever."
To somewhat disagree, I think America (and possibly other places I dunno) are starting to see just how much it HAS relied on social pressure (despite claims of it being a low trust society) instead of police.
Consider things like porch pirates, people not paying fares on buses, noise disturbances in residential areas, shoplifting, and many more examples where it is simply impossible to have enough police to form credible threats.
When the social pressure breaks down you're essentially relying on citizens to deputize themselves as quasi law enforcement. Small surprise that many bus drivers don't want to get into a potentially violent situation with someone doesn't pay their fare. (Google to find hundreds of stories of bus drivers being assaulted over fare disputes.) If you work at a retail store making barely above minimum wage are you going to detan a shoplifter and risk being shot?
Yeah I'd agree with that. I think it acts as a force multiplier but you're right, you can't multiply by zero so you need a (somewhat) credible threat backing it up.
That libertarian sentiment is some only-in-America brain poisoning. Police in Europe manage to arrest, say, a man selling loose cigarettes without murdering him.
I agree with Matt's overall point here but realizing the importance of social order and the ability to enforce it only highlights the fiasco that is our nation's routine police misconduct.
I mean the main issue with violence in American policing is that the country is awash with guns. Import 400 million firearms to Europe and see how well the cops handle every situation. The other issue is that if one cop in one city in America does something stupid one time, it becomes a "known" thing that cops can't handle that crime without killing people, rather than "one cop fucked up once". The number of otherwise rational people on Twitter who are convinced that cops are gunning down hundreds of black fare evaders on public transit is astounding.
I don't think the reputation that cops get is because someone sees one random cop doing bad things once in a while. I think cops have clearly leaned into the idea that any cop getting punished is unfair because the job is hard. Like a lot of unions, they have negotiated employment protections that protect bad cops and instead of pretending that they are being unfairly maligned, they need to be the ones that speak out most forcefully about bad actors among their ranks.
Police, very clearly to me, believe themselves to be above the law, I think that has led to a culture that is OK believing the worst about them.
This is definitely part of the problem, but the problem goes way beyond firearms. Eric Garner and George Floyd were both unarmed, were not suspected to be armed, and the police killed them without firearms.
Back when I thought universal basic income might be coming, one major un-discussed benefit of it that I saw was the possibility of law enforcement cutting benefits rather than incarcerating people. As the benefits get bigger, the size of the punishment that can be imposed with zero physical force increases.
Not enough for aggravated assault or rape or whatever, but enough to give penalties for smoking on the subway or littering or speeding without having to have a physical altercation.
I've always subscribed to a similar idea when the subject of public transit fares comes up: one advantage to charging fares is that it's easy to de facto ban disorderly people from public transit by disabling their credit cards or MetroPass cards or whatever at entry gates.
Well, law is mostly enforced by social pressure too. A society that’s consistently enforcing laws at gunpoint is more of a military occupation than a government.
You just have to have a hierarchy of enforcement mechanisms and, game theory-style, a heavy violent one at the top should other options fail.
Right, the point isn't that people always get shot if they fail to comply with the law -- obviously that's not empirically the case. It's that at the end of the day that's the end result if you resist hard enough.
>>This is sort of the Libertarian's refrain, don't make a law if you can't stand for someone one day dying over it.<<
Am I alone in finding that an easy bullet to bite if the alternative is we don't get to have rules? I just don't seem capable of registering the putative moral force of the objection given the tradeoffs implicit in any response other than "yes, and?"
Most people's sense of ethics is calibrated to be much more outraged by acts of commission than acts of omission. Meaning:
"Look at this person who got choked to death while turnstile-jumping" = outrageous! Horrible! How cruel to kill someone over such a trifling offense!
"Think of all the people who would turnstile-jump in absence of enforcement; public transit would collapse, and that would be very bad for all public transit users" = too abstract, hard to get emotional about.
I guess I don’t really make the connection in the context of enforcing pre-existing non-facially absurd public law. To me it’s more like blaming gravity for someone jumping off a cliff to their death. I mean, yes, technically it’s a sine qua non, but it’s a known pre-existing risk against which the action was taken.
I would add that a lot of the readers here are going to be left-leaning and don't relate to the more conservative emotional reaction to public disorder. Like, when I see someone smoking on the train tracks, I want to smash their head with a baseball bat. Right there in public, in front of everyone else, so everyone clearly understands the f**ing rules and gets the f*** in line.
I don't, obviously, because that would have consequences for ME, and vigilantism is not the system we have agreed to as a society. But it is how I feel, and I am surely not alone in this. Remember there was an outpouring of support for Bernie Goetz back in the day.
I get murderously angry at some movie characters sometimes. Like, Boo and I were watching Day Of The Jackal last night (really good btw!) and there's a scene where this IRA gangster has the heroine's stepdaughter at knifepoint, and all I could think was that I'd have beaten the everloving shit out of him while the cops were on the way. Leave him alive and intact enough to recover, but there are just certain types of malignant evil in the world for which the only solution is to beat them down.
I give kudos to the actors. Being able to portray that kind of malignancy is itself a praiseworthy dramatic talent.
It's interesting that you frame this as a difference in liberal / conservative emotional reaction. I think everyone has dark fantasies about retribution, but cultural and situational norms dictate how they are expressed.
If I enumerated some of the terrible things that have crossed my mind when my comically annoying neighbors are juggling chainsaws and lighting M-80's in their driveway at 3:00 AM (that is only a slight exaggeration of their actual behavior) at work, I'd get a call from HR. But in other company I could go into some detail about the appropriate type and caliber of bullet to shatter kneecaps and it would be understood as healthy venting of the feelings of impotence that unruly neighbors engender.
I guess things go off the rails when these norms come to define political movements, like the violent rhetorical style of MAGA and the "Queers for Palestine" rhetorical style of whatever we're calling woke progressives these days.
I got into a mini-argument one time with my sister, a social worker, about a video where a cop pulled a high school student out of a desk/chair combo to get them out of the room. We were ostensibly on the same overall side, that this interaction was not ideal, but my take was that the cop was way too aggressive with a high school girl, and her argument was that there shouldn't have been a cop there trying to do that in the first place, and it's like....that's a fine principle to have, and I certainly empathize with that as a base gut reaction, but once you start unpacking it, it falls apart. Assuming that this student was being disruptive, that the teacher or administrators had tried to get them to voluntarily leave the classroom, and the student had refused, and that the cop had probably tried to verbally ask them, as well....I just don't know what you do? It's not fair to the other kids, the teachers, etc., just to let one student disrupt an entire situation for everyone else.
This is a hard question for me. I live in an urban district with metal detectors and police officers in the schools. Childless community activists sometimes advocate for their elimination. But at PTA meetings, I have heard moms say that they do not want them removed, and that their kids would not go to school without them. I am lucky enough to live in a part of town where I don't have a lot of worries about my kids, and there are not "beefs" among the teens in my neighborhood. So it's easy for me to say they are helping to create the "school to prison pipeline." And also, I am white and these mothers who advocate for the detectors and officers are mostly Black. If we say "listen to Black women," this is a good opportunity.
This id exactly the type of situation where a modicum of class and racial deference are in order. Similarly, blue collar clients should defer to me when I explain how the courts work. Same principle
I'm on your sister's side on that one. If you go back to Matt's restaurant smoker example. A lot of pressure --- from teachers/restaurant staff, patrons/students, escalated manager/principal --- is brought to bear before the police are called, dispatched, and arrive to apply physical force. With the police down the hall in the school essentially doing nothing but waiting for a kid to act out very little of that initial pressure occurs, and the hormone ridden, impulse impaired teenager has no time to think before you get to police officer arrives who pretty quickly tend to escalate to violence to enforce immediate compliance because that's their training. I saw this in my kid's affluent suburban high school, and I really wasn't a fan.
"pretty quickly tend to escalate to violence to enforce immediate compliance because that's their training"
Ah, that's the problem I've been trying to express. That shouldn't be the training for police officers. Police should be accustomed to noncompliance and should not expect nor seek immediate compliance. They should be prepared to escalate if necessary, but persuasion and implied violence should be where they start.
If that's the training for police officers, then that explains why people want to keep police out of interactions. In which case, that's what needs to be changed: they need to learn how to de-escalate, how to obtain compliance without the need for force, how to persuade. And only escalate to violence when faced either with violence, or egregious and persistent noncompliance in a situation where there is no reasonable alternative to violence (rather than just waiting them out).
You have to have a police force that people want to call.
"Waiting them out" is not in the police playbook. Let's say an officer asks you to step out of your car and you don't, they'll tell you to get out of your car, maybe a few times, and in a very short amount of time, like a minute or so, they'll forcefully drag you out. So noncompliance to violence in just a couple minutes. And it's that moment of violence when things can go really bad really fast --- for everyone involved. The idea that if the officer just stayed there and waited a half hour when the citizen would just give up out of boredom and inevitability just never happens.
The problem with that training is that it is inimicable with Americans' conception of how the world works. Embedded deep in our culture is the notion that no one really stands above us, and so no one can really tell us what to do, especially the government. I can tell my boss to eff off, I can tell my wife to eff off, I can tell my nosy neighbor to eff off, I can even tell the building inspector citing me for having weeds too long to eff off, and none of them can whack me over the head with a club when I do.
So in encounter with a police officer, when emotions are running high and discernment is probably low, we expect people to act contrary to their basic assumptions about their place in the world. Unnecessary violence is going to be the predictable result of that.
I'm not, in fact I've probably never told anyone to eff off, but deep in the American psyche is the sense that you have the right to say that if you want to --- "Don't tread on me" "liberty or death", live free or die", etc. And although no one would think it's without consequence, only the police can actually coerce me to do what they say. I can always find a new job, a new neighbor, and well those two anyway, but absolutely none of them can make do what I don't want to do.
"they need to learn how to de-escalate, how to obtain compliance without the need for force, how to persuade. And only escalate to violence when faced either with violence, or egregious and persistent noncompliance in a situation where there is no reasonable alternative to violence"
+eleventy gazillion, and I'd be happy to pay higher taxes for improved recruitment and training of police officers who are amenable to the above.
I think what you're missing here is the time constraints that everyone is operating under, or the economic time-value of their labor. If I'm a cop or a principal, and I spend 20 minutes trying to deescalate, that may be better, but you've just taken me away from doing my primary job or responding to another call. Maybe the principal can stay at school a half-hr later to finish all their work, but if you're a cop, the consequences could be catastrophic. What if you're late responding to a domestic violence call or first on the scene of an accident??? Maybe that's a failure of overburdened police departments, and too few officers, but that's where we are.
But that's a deliberate policy choice, not that there is inherently a need to compel compliance quickly. So we've decided have more violence rather than increase the number of available police officers.
And I'm really not sure this is a well thought out time and motion thing. I think the sense is quick compliance is utmost, even if there isn't anything else happening. Most of the time most police officers are kind of not doing anything other than patrolling. In a middle class suburb they can go days or more without there being anything truly urgent. Police already have a prioritization policy even if they're currently engaged. I was in a minor fender bender once when a call came in for I don't even remember what, officer said sorry folks gotta go, and off she went.
Somehow we managed it when I went to high school in the 90s. I guess at some point it would have escalated all the way to the police, but even when there were very occasional fistfights among students it just got broken up and they were suspended. Never saw a cop get involved in anything, and it was pretty much fine.
I don't think Chris sounds like a wuss, I think he sounds like most people would if you asked them the same question. Most people don't think too deeply about stuff like this, I don't believe. If you asked most normies if they thought people should be arrested for smoking in non-smoking areas, they'd say no, but if you asked them if SOMETHING should be done, they'd also say yes. Most people don't think too deeply about the idea that once you create a rule, your are implicitly backing it up with the threat of state-sanctioned violence if the situation devolved enough.
You better tell that to Chris’s face. He lifts weights you know.
One problem is how easy violence is in this country. In Europe a lot of social policing is done by normal citizens and strict cultural norms. In the U.S. we have offloaded a lot of this responsibility from the public to police over safety concerns.
I lived in Europe for many years and my experience is that American gun culture plays a huge role in differences between American and European policing of social norms. I was assaulted and/or physically threatened way more in Western Europe than anywhere I've lived in the US. But I've only ever been threatened with being shot in the US — never actually assaulted. (Someone at a truck stop diner did once pull a knife out and put it to my neck, but it was to illustrate a point about how dangerous humans can be.)
To a certain extent Americans have to offload responsibility for public safety to people who can legally wield guns. Smoking in a restaurant is one thing, but you never know when asking someone to put out a cigarette at a subway platform will get you shot. In many parts of Europe it is likely to get you punched, very unlikely to get you stabbed and vanishingly unlikely to get you shot.
I agree and think that, realistically, the guy smoking on the subway who looks like he could be a physical threat also hoped the turnstile.
There is a big benefit for public spaces to enforce low level rules because it keeps potentially dangerous people out. I don't want to bump into scary people in nice restaurants or on the subway!
Geez - where in Western Europe were you being assaulted on the reg?
But yes - I live in the UK, and it’s hard to overemphasize to what extent most Europeans (I’ve also lived in France and Finland) think U.S. gun culture is insane.
I mean, "regularly" being like once every three to five years, as defined by actual violence or coming very close to it. Still *way* more than in the US. Not in one country, literally all over Western Europe. Usually involving some mode or combination of modes of transportation. Like when a bunch of drunk soccer hooligans get on the train and start drinking and smoking, just looking to start something. Or people stumbling back to the train station drunk.
Once during rush hour someone clipped me with their car while I was riding a bike, became irate, ran after me, knocked me off my bike and tried very hard to pin me to the ground and beat the snot out of me. I still have a scar from that one.
Contrast that to the US where someone hit me with their car while I was riding a bike (that time I went through the windshield). They got out of their car to see if I was dead, then got back in and tried to drive away when I was a) not dead and b) looked very pissed off. (I was actually just groggy from being hit by a car.)
"They got out of their car to see if I was dead, then got back in and tried to drive away..."
Jesus. They didn't stick around to ask if you're injured, offer to call 911, give you their insurance details, ask if you needed help getting back home?
And the guy who tried to beat you up after HE clipped you with his car, just... ugh.
Safety concerns. We are a violent society over all, but the experience of violence has shifted dramatically over the last half or three quarters of a century. As a kid growing up in the sixties and seventies I and my friends were pretty routinely involved in low level fights and skirmishes, really right up through our late teen years. That reality has changed dramatically such that my own kids have never been involved in any fistfight, and school yard scuffles that were routine in my day were virtually nonexistent in my kids suburban schools. At the same time this change was happening in frankly white middle class communities, gun violence as a routine component of youth violence spiked dramatically among the urban poor.
So you have many fewer people stepping into a confrontation both for lack of experience and because of the rational view that someone acting out could also be armed, add in the ability to call 911 instantly on a cell phone, and everyone hunkers down and calls the police rather than acting themselves.
Absent an actual death, Daniel Penny would never have been charged because it would have been easy for the authorities to look at that situation and arrest crazy, violent, homeless guy Jordan Neeley. The blame for who caused the incident would have been both clear and easy to assign in one direction --- even if Penny was partly culpable. Direct to my point, if two other had joined Penny and beaten Neeley down, again absent a death, the whole thing would have looked very different and easy to conclude three people were correct and crazy guy was in the wrong.
Neeley had a history of assaulting people, left his drug treatment diversionary program, and had a huge rap sheet. He was mentally ill. He chose to feed his substance abuse rather than get treatment. He should have been institutionalized.
Monopoly on the Legitimate Use of Force (I call it MLUF for short) is probably the single most basic function of government, one on which even libertarians agree.
Sort of. Transit cops can issue public disorder citations to smokers without guns coming into it. Parking control officers generally don't carry guns while enforcing parking rules, for instance.
Sure, eventually, as with traffic citations, things can escalate. But we want more first encounters with citations to get far fewer eventual escalations with guns.
That’s not very fair. He’s frankly acknowledging that he doesn’t have good solutions to the downsides suggested by his preferred policies, which is a damn sight better than the usual “once policing is gone and society is just, there just won’t be crime (or property?) pixie dust you normally get.
But he does ultimately say, "I would rather not enforce this law than use police to enforce it." He's not willing to even let *other* people confront someone breaking the law.
Yes, he is choosing the wrong set of tradeoffs, by my lights. But at least he is pointing out the real problem that absent enforcement compliance will be compromised.
Yep. You can either be an "all taxation is theft" voluntarist / anarchist, or you have to accept that at some point, if you tell people, "You have to follow the rules," some of them are going to respond, "Yeah? Who's going to make me?" There has to be _somebody_ who can, in fact, make them accept the social contract, otherwise the contract is moot.
Yea, I understand he is trying to share an emotion that I kinda share if I look at the situation in a certain way. I've been drunk on public transport coming home from a party and I wouldnt like it if I had been cited for that. But treating that emotion as a foundation to build social stability on, and to amplify it is intellectual weakness. Its the kind of argument that should make readers feel contempt or at least a recognition of his unseriousness.
Now that's really gross, John. Actually laws are obeyed because the vast majority of citizens obey the law and respect one another not because we're afraid of being killed by a cop.
Discussions about fighting crime remind me of the nature vs. nurture debate: a false dichotomy. Public order requires enforcement and cultural norms. Enforcement and norms reinforce each other, positively or negatively.
Lefties certainly haven't hesitated to enforce rules about what views should be expressed and to punish people for violating them. It's not a belief that rules shouldn't be enforced so much as that rules shouldn't be enforced against the Right People, the Good People. An idea with which Trumpism (with its *very* different definition of the Right People) agrees with completely.
For example, I chose not to wear a mask during the last few months (?) of the subway mask mandate because I had gotten the vaccine and felt like that was cause enough to experience normal life again. I got plenty of tsk-tsks from people who clearly paid zero heed to the >75% of black dudes on the subway who also eschewed masks.
I’ve been considering writing a “Republican canards that are true” post, and the first one would absolutely be that a certain kind of NPR tote bag liberal basically sees ‘marginalized individuals’ as big dumb children. This obvious and patronizing double standard is embarrassing to those who employ it and, quite frankly, often just racist in its application.
I used to joke that the only thinking that could get you kicked off the bus in Seattle was taking off your mask for a minute…unless you were doing so to smoke fentanyl, in which case it was fine. The depressing thing is that it was pretty accurate
I also predict some people will tell on themselves in the replies with their explanations of why it’s eminently reasonable for some shit-eating Ohioan hipster in Brooklyn to feel safe bitching out big surly guys in hoodies on the subway as long as their ancestry is visibly European.
I will also reiterate, this is after vaccines had been available for a while, I was not flippant about acquiring or transmitting the virus.
COVID shined a big spotlight on how some liberals want certain rules enacted only for certain people. And the reaction to that triggered a lot of political radicalization.
The non-white dude there has a job- not to be a human being with his own wants, needs and desires. No, his job is to be a prop to allow the main character to show he isn’t completely irredeemable by saving him from Trumpism.
“I also predict some people will tell on themselves in the replies with their explanations of why it’s eminently reasonable for some shit-eating Ohioan hipster in Brooklyn to feel safe bitching out big surly guys in hoodies on the subway as long as their ancestry is visibly European.”
Oh, my comment wasn't an attempt to "refute" his claim. It's a stereotype either way if his is an accurate depiction. I was just wondering if he had considered a different spin. The OP starts off the comment by stating he was the target of rebukes for eschewing mask-wearing on the subway by people who ignored the same infraction by Black men. This is in the lead up to a subsequent claim about how a certain "NPR tote bag liberal basically sees ‘marginalized individuals’ as big dumb children."
IOW he's invoking the specter of the soft bigotry of low expectations.
I was raising the possibility that it might actually be simple fear, or indeed even respect (that is, white liberals' respect for the capacity of Black men to not take shit from the likes of them). Also, remember, we were seeing a crime surge in that era, so understandably a lot of people were feeling skittish about their personal safety. I myself had occasion to ride public transportation back in 2020—on the bus in Seattle. The city had made the bus free, and I noticed a fair amount of maskless scofflaws. The bus drivers weren't enforcing the rules, that's for sure. When I saw fellow riders going maskless, it angered me. But I refrained from admonishing them not because I viewed anyone as a "dumb child" but because I didn't want to get knifed. That town was on edge.
I have spoken to many, many people in Los Angeles that believe that the people smoking meth in the library are innocent victims of circumstance while Donald Trump should rot in jail for the rest of his life for incorrectly reporting campaign expenses.
To be fair, if people thought that was the only crime Trump had committed they probably wouldn't feel that way.
It's a bit like Capone with tax evasion. Trump is a sexual assaulter, he just can't get convicted on it. Sexual assault usually leads to serious consequences
Me though, I contain multitudes. I think the campaign finance stuff was the worst kind of politically-driven BS and sets a dangerous precedent. I also think he should be hanged for Jan 6. Details matter in a system of laws!
I think you’re not paying attention at all. They don’t believe in using police violence or arrest against anyone, even if those people express transphobic opinions or whatever. They do believe in unleashing the full force of cancellation and internet criticism on people, whether murderers or subway smokers or ableists. It’s very different from Trumpists, who really do have the definition of Right People you’re talking about. It’s a de-escalation of physical violence but an inflation of the significance of verbal violence.
It's a perfect example of one group the law binds but does not protect (decent, tax-paying citizens) and another group the law protects but does not bind (anti-social criminals).
I'm sorry, but speaking of smoking, what is Chris Hayes smoking in that thread? Not even because of the contents, but because of the date. He was still on that bullshit in February 2022? I get that half the country pretended not to know what laws are for a few weeks in June 2020, but 20 months later, really? And this was the same side of the political spectrum (idk about Hayes specifically, but his ilk) who aggressively supported COVID lockdowns. It's just absurd. "Well, I guess I never thought it all the way through but it looks like laws have to be enforced with force, and given that reality, I guess we can't have laws" in 2022 is bananas. Matt is being extremely patient here explaining "well what happens if the guy masturbating on the bus doesn't want to stop? Somebody has to do something, right?" We all know this, don't we?
Sorry, I usually try to be more substantive, but this was one of my true "what the fuck" moments of the last 4 years along with 1/6, the right suddenly sanewashing anti-vax conspiracy theories, the right suddenly supporting Putin, and the left pretending there are no differences between men and women. There's no defence of it, there's no nuance, it's just insane.
I am certainly open in my support for hummus! Makes a great dip, you can put it on sandwiches, and if you blend it with some lemon juice/vinegar, it makes pretty good salad dressing.
It’s also the onion of a rich entitled person who is completely disconnected with the average American. Tolerating minor public disorder is a lot easier when everything else in your life is pristine. When somebody’s life is unstable, it’s harder to tolerate public spaces being uncomfortable.
The internet and social media have ruined people's ability to put any brakes on their ideas once they've been stretched past their intended breaking point.
So what explains the spike in disorderly conduct on airplanes. Because I sort of feel like it’s key part of the story here. Let me explain.
I really don’t think I’m going too much out on a limb to say that there is a pretty big Venn diagram crossover between people who light up cigarettes on subways and people who shoplift; shocker, it’s likely men 16-25.
But people being unruly on airplanes? Going to guess this is NOT mostly men between 16-25 given this cohort tends not to have too much money for a variety of banal reasons. So that begs the question, what’s the tie here? Also, the other question why did incidents like this spike in America but apparently not other countries?
My hypothesis, I think we underestimate the impact of the half assed way we enforced covid restrictions. There is has been a lot of ink spilled regarding the fact that Biden and blue jurisdictions took too long to lift Covid rules (something I agree with). There has been even more ink spilled about how street protests were “allowed” but stuff like religious services.
But I don’t think there has been nearly enough ink spilled about the banal ways Covid rules were enforced on a day to day basis. And more importantly, the fact rules were enforced in an arbitrary and inconsistent manner. In theory, NY was more restrictive than Florida. RDS touted his “free state of Florida” ethos quite famously. In practice? Yeah difference was not nearly as wide. As Matt has noted, there’s only so much you can do to dictate private decisions. In Florida, restaurants may have been “open” but open table data will tell you people were still staying away. In New York, you had “rules” regarding bars and restaurants. But practically speaking it was laughable. Remember those idiotic dividers? We all knew they were a joke. There’s a reason pre vaccine death rates between blue NY and red FL weren’t that different because in reality the rules and daily life weren’t actually that different.
So what does that have to do with crime and disorder? Well internationally it explains a lot. Those of us in America I don’t think appreciate how much stricter covid rules in almost every peer country. Look how many British politicians got in trouble for what we would consider small bore violations. You can’t shoplift if you can’t even leave your house past certain times.
And in America? What it meant is that for a year we had a period where Covid rules were kind of…fugazi. Some rules were strictly enforced, others not at all. And it basically depended on not just industry (restaurants vs colleges) but even the between business themselves. Is it any wonder that in a world where for 8 months rules were sort of what you decided they were there became a brief period where that mindset took over other parts of life like behavior on airplanes?
Long post. And kind of half baked hypothesis. But I kind of think I’m on to something with this.
So, I think your timeline and cause is correct. In short I'd say we as Americans showed to Americans that the rules are not enforced. We like to blame subway smokers, and park addicts and point at the SJW for infusing a lot of race and identity into this. BUT all tiers of society saw the same thing, they saw that they could get away with things. They run a red light and nothing happens, so they do it again. Something that does feel very different is socialization, it feels to me that we all got way more selfish and entitled top to bottom. We are all fighting for space and want what's ours and we can't all have it so people got mad. I genuinely, think this is a multi-cause problem and not easily solved, social media, streaming, covid isolation, WFH, credit card debit and wealth perception. I genuinely say to myself most days (I live in NYC) remember other people exists, Fran Lebowitz was right, "pretend it's a city".
Social isolation makes people more selfish. It’s a psychological effect (which I am just quoting a researcher so I don’t know the quality of the underlying evidence.)
I remember learning that almost half of all car registrations were expired in Oregon earlier this year and it was absolutely a wtf moment. Like am I the idiot in this instance for renewing my registration??
The Ferguson effect, followed by the George Floyd action seem to be a more likely explanation than the vagaries of COVID-era rules enforcement. Though they likely both had an effect.
So the article in question doesn't mention disorder on airplanes. Which is sort of my point. In fact I have real real questions if a research cited "Ferguson Effect" for disorder on airplanes. There's a small rise from 2015 onwards, than huge spike in 2021. So that would mean a 6 year lag from "Ferguson" to real world effects? Not really sure about that. Also, there is a small rise from 2015 so you can maybe say there's something there. Here's the problem, who's dealing with disorderly passengers; flight attendants not cops. But also again, think of the cohort of people where Ferguson effect would have had most impact on criminal behavior and then think of the people most likely to cause problems on an airplane. There's just a lot not lining up here for me.
Regarding "Floyd effect". I think this sort of the point of my post; this is much too narrow a lens. Rules regarding all sorts of behavior became completely out of whack and much more arbitrary. We focus a lot on how much various members of the scientific community undermined their own authority by supporting protests but turning around and saying other activities are too dangerous. I'm saying it's much much bigger than that. All sorts of officials undermined the rules we were supposedly trying to follow. Trump number 1, but yes people like Cuomo as well with the arbitrary way certain activities only had to be loosely regulated (like going to restaurants) and other activities strictly regulated.
I think the airplane situation is about acting out one’s frustrations about COVID restrictions. An airplane is a place where flight attendants enforce norms and rules but they aren’t police. Airplanes are also “purple” spaces so the acting out is inflicted on “blue” people while getting some Sympathy from “red’ people.it’s the perfect stage.
I think Trump and the Republican party have legitimized being an asshole and people now feel more free to let their freak flag fly. Mostly on the right, but I think people on the left feel more liberated too.
I mean, look at Pete Hegseth whose apparent sole qualification to be Secretary of Defense (!!!) is "I'm an asshole."
Something to this. I find it personally harder to avoid speeding, given the increasing salience that people just don’t get pulled over for it much anymore (and traffic is faster because a lot of other people have noticed). I tcould be a general “the rules are a paper tiger” effect.
Speeding is a bit more complicated in that I think it's safer to speed _at the same speed as other people_ if they're speeding a bit, rather than going more slowly. Anecdotally, I don't think I've noticed _this_ any higher than pre-pandemic.
The people who are going speeding and weaving around other cars are a separate issue, and don't encourage me to speed.
Safer for who? Outside of a highway (and most speeding tickets are not on highways), drivers and passengers in modern cars with proper crumple zones and airbags are very unlikely to die or even be seriously injured. On a highway, where the speeds are much higher and you're much more likely to get a pile-up (because people don't drive far enough apart)*, speed does affect the likelihood of being injured or killed in a collision.
Speed on non-highways is primarily about safety for pedestrians, cyclists and other unprotected road users. Hit someone at 40 mph, and they're almost certainly dead; at 20 mph, and there's a 95% chance they live. If speed limits are posted for safety reasons, then the problem with the whole road layout / design speed argument is that it's about preventing collisions between vehicles - which nearly always only do property damage, not damage to the people. Posting limits for safety reasons should be about how likely a pedestrian or cyclist is to be trying to use the road, and that's not something that can be determined by the road layout features like width and straightness of lanes that drivers use to identify safety/danger.
* In ideal driving conditions, ie good quality light, dry, good quality surface, and a fully alert driver, there needs to be two seconds between cars to prevent a pile-up; add a second for each of night, a wet road, and a poor surface, e.g. potholes. Add more for ice or fog.
Safer to me to not be going a different speed than everyone else.
If the speed limit is 65 and they're going 68, it's safer for me to go 68 and have fewer people attempt to pass me/lane change.
I'm thinking of freeways/highways where there aren't pedestrians.
I do _not_ apply this logic on surface streets with traffic lights/intersections. For one thing, you're going to lane change and stop so often anyway that there's little safety benefit to you from following everyone else, and as you say lots of risks to everyone else.
Fair! I’d agree on highways (also, as an aside, I always find it weird that a country with such a strong driving culture as the US has such low speed limits. The UK’s 70 mph is low by European standards, so 65 seems really od low; 120-130 km/h, ie 75-80 mph is more usual in Europe - the other odd thing about US speed limits is that you have limits ending in 5 rather than 0).
I just think there are too many people who apply it to stroads and those are a very different story.
I think the lower speed limits have to do with the lack of transit in much of the country, making it impossible for folks without a driver’s license to get around. This keeps our driver training requirements laughably low, and I think that’s a factor in our low limits.
FWIW, the US repealed its national speed limit in 1995. Montana got rid of its numerical limit, replacing it with “reasonable and prudent,” which of course is impossible to define, and Montana went to 75 (I think) several years later.
I-10 in West Texas does get to 80 mph - extremely rural, nothing directly on the interstate, have to take off-ramp down to things. (When it was 70 I used to speed on it up to around 76, now that it's 80 I never ever speed on it)
Isn't Europe mostly using KPH? 5 mph is about 8 kph, so if you go up by 10s, it makes some sense for us go to up by 5s. (EDIT: 8kph, not 9kph, it's 1.6 multiplier not a 1.8)
You're mostly correct, but too cavalier about the effects of non-fatal car crashes. It's not like "well, nobody got killed so what's the big deal?" It's still very worthwhile to prevent nonfatal car crashes. Even with air bags and crumple zones, people can get badly hurt, cars are the second most expensive thing most people own (after houses) so having your car totaled is a big freaking deal unless you're rich, and even if you're not injured and your car isn't totaled, it's a pain in the ass to have your car towed to a shop and have to spend potentially hundreds of dollars to repair it.
I think everyone is driving faster. I find myself more tempted to get into the passing lane so I can go 15 or 20 over rather than crushing at 5 over on the right or in the middle. I don’t think it used to be as fast because people felt you were asking for a ticket once you got close to 10 over.
I think you're on to something. For me a cause of the disorder boom is that we relied on service workers like bus drivers, restaurant hosts/hostesses, cashiers to enforce the new rules around Covid protocols. The thing about masking is that it's obvious if you're obeying the rules or not, so once people saw what they could get away not masking they realized how little power or interest most service workers had enforcing other rules like "don't shoplift" or "you're not allowed to smoke here". IMO it led to this gradual weakening of the idea that there are consequences for petty crimes or public disorder, which was then exacerbated by the fact that cops were actually pulling back.
I like the disorderly conduct on airplanes numbers too because people have the idea that flight attendants are waiters/waitresses of the sky when really they have a strict mandate to enforce rules, so people continue push the envelope of acceptable behavior on an airplane (vaping, getting belligerently drunk, yelling at other passengers) without realizing that they're going incur real consequences.
There’s definitely something significant to this. But I also would want to be careful about reading too much into the numbers here. Reporting standards have surely changed for unruly in-flight behavior, and it wouldn’t surprise me if the higher number now actually reflects the same behavior that existed in 2018-2019, just with flight attendants more willing to report after the couple years when things were really elevated.
Is it possible that this is just explained by the rise of social media documenting it more, plus a bit of the "streaker effect" (the more we highlight it, the more people want to do it). Do we have any hard data that airplanes have actually become more unruly?
Yeah it's in Matt's post. Huge spike in 2020 and still ~50% above pre-pandemic baseline. Continues on past mask mandates so it's not people still arguing about that either.
It's also worth reflecting that the increase won't be equally distributed in absolute terms (and it's possible, though I'd be less confident of this, that it isn't even equally distributed in *relative* terms). So a shop that already faced elevated rates of shoplifting may now have a quite serious and persistent threat that its managers need to react to. But this also means that safe, low crime neighborhoods may not feel much different at all.
I think from the numbers- and I’m having trouble tracking down the source- that disorder is massively disproportionately on budget airlines going to and from Miami Ft. Lauderdale. Huge spike from the permanent spring break crowd of degenerates. It’s not hard to get on a $50 spirit flight and raise hell, and I suspect those people might be a subset of the paper tag smoke on the subway ride an ATV in the city crowd.
One issue really that stood out was speed and other traffic enforcement cameras. The idea being that they were completely impartial. Every car that didn’t stop for a red light or was speeding would get a ticket. But…certain marginalized groups received a disproportionate number of tickets. Because they were disproportionately speeding and running red lights. So we need to stop the program.
The key issue seems to be the idea that certain groups do engage in antisocial behavior at higher rates than other groups.
The truly enlightened solution to this is simply to say “Too bad. There is one set of rules. It applies equally to everybody. If you break X law, you pay Y penalty. It doesn’t matter who you are.”
This is the liberal approach. Progressives cannot tolerate it.
The jury is in on which approach is better and which is worse.
Men are convicted of crime at higher rates than women. The reason? Institutional misandry. The criminal justice system is systemically biased against men.
I’m not sure what if anything you’re trying to imply by making a comparison with an undoubtedly biological driver of crime, but you may wish to be careful.
Related, I recall my own Washington State mulling over ending vehicle emissions tests, as it is primarily marginalized community members who have old cars which emit a lot of fumes.
(Did this ever turn into new law? As a white guy with an above average income & a hybrid, idk!)
That’s exactly what voters see. The law abiding median voter gets a check engine light and can’t get their car legal until they pay $2200 for a repair. And the left says that’s totally OK because of pollution concerns. But then they also don’t want to stop poor people from driving so…. It comes across like rules are for median voters and not for marginalized communities.
The poor person simply pays an unscrupulous vehicle inspector $100 to pass the inspection, a thing that actually was once suggested that I do when I went to have repair work done to get it to pass inspection.
Bet you $100 progressives would then complain about how it’s racist and classist that poor and marginalized people have to live in neighborhoods with high levels of particulate pollution. /facepalm
Thanks for the link. This actually radicalized me perhaps the opposite direction intended; before I supported gradually increasing penalties based on income level, but if a fixed fee is incurred more often by poorer residents it sounds like that wouldn't work.
Why? The point of speeding tickets is to stop people from speeding. Graduated penalties are intended to ensure tickets are sufficient deterrents for rich people.
Why is it a problem at all if poor people get more tickets because they're speeding more? Presumably, over time, getting ticketed would change this.
What I took from the article was that the city had to set up a reduced fee program for the lowest income bracket because people were speeding enough to immiserate themselves. So for that group penalties were set too high, and it still didn't change their behavior. That's a design failure.
The most obvious missed assumption, to me, is that contrary to microecon different people value a dollar different amounts, not necessarily corollated to income. I have a friend, makes tons of money but tips 15% - you know the type. Whenever he sees a cop he launches into a complaint about an $80 speeding ticket he got when we were 18. But hey, he never speeds because he cherished that $80. On the flip side I have plenty of "money comes, money goes" type friends with bad credit card debt who would take a "shit happens" approach to a much bigger ticket.
A deeper problem is also whenever you add more rules to a system, you're making it not just more complicated but more opaque. So even in a perfect microecon environment people can't weigh the risk vs. reward of speeding, because if your income jumped last year, maybe you're expecting a $300 ticket and you get a $3,000 ticket.
If you were going about this honestly, you could say "it's good that speeding tickets are causing people to get their cars repossessed, they don't deserve to be on the street if they can't follow the rules." Maybe people are saying that but I didn't see it mentioned in the article. Or you could say "we, the City of Chicago, need to come up with an extra $10 million this year so we're going to soak the rich who speed" which at least follows the usual way the government generates revenue.
It’s not a design failure of a punishment system that some people break the rules and end up worse off for it. This is inevitable. It’s only a design failure if the overall rates of rule breaking don’t decline.
It could be a bad tradeoff to, say, “immiserate” x people to reduce speeding by y to save z lives, but that’s a very different argument.
I do think there are pros and cons of graduated fees - I don’t have a strong opinion there. But that’s a different question than the merits of speeding cameras and fines generally.
If the defund-the-police crowd had supported these cameras it would have helped, but they have too much opposition from normies, who really don’t like people catching them speeding.
(Actually, the big problem with traffic and specifically speeding enforcement is that it's wildly overenforced on highways and horribly underenforced in residential areas.)
Traffic cameras are one of those things where I suspect people would actually make better decisions if given hyperlocal control. I suspect that "do you want a speed camera on the street in front of your home" polls better than "do you want speed cameras statewide."
Maybe, but I think the quintessential "speed trap masquerading as a small Texas town" thing relies on the idea that the local cops just don't (zealously) enforce the speed limit on the small number of locals.
If you could say, "You can have speed cameras, but we will audit to make sure that enforcement is universal," then you can probably align incentives to make the limit on the cameras reasonable.
This skepticism towards impartial laws isn't 100% unwarranted: think of the ironic quote "The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.". But in practice this skepticism often gets taken way too far.
But that's an issue with the law, not how it is enforced, no? I struggle to think of a marginalized group that must fight their marginalization by going 55 in a 30... In this case I think the law generally is correct, whereas in the example from the aphorism, maybe not so much.
They just complain and say that the cameras are placed in a racist manner with respect to neighborhood (regardless of whether they're placed there due to traffic accident/death rates).
It's obvious now that an order-based message early in the Biden administration would have both cut off the "Democrats favor disorder" line of attack but would also could have helped people remember that crime and disorder surged under Trump. If Biden had been banging that drum from the start he could have more easily taken credit for the reductions in violent crime and disorder that occurred under his administration.
I agree that Biden should’ve talked a much tougher game about public disorder, but I’m not sure people could ever be convinced to blame the increase in disorder on Trump unless disorder got back down to pre-pandemic levels under Biden.
The increase in both disorder and “crime” (captured in the data by homicides mainly) happened right after the Blue Team waved a big flag indicating that they were becoming much more sympathetic to such conduct and less sympathetic to enforcement. Then we went to a higher-crime equilibrium. It’s not like Trump changed some policy to be softer on crime.
Later on, when there were still obvious problems, Blue Team tried to fool people by saying “what are you talking about, crime is down!” This is just taking advantage of the fact that people say “crime” when they mean “disorder.” No Upper West Side mom cares about how many gang bangers are murdered in East St. Louis. They just don’t want to be accosted on the subway.
Obviously, the data presented here on disorder is what people were talking about! And we’re still not at normal levels.
The second part parallels the inflation problem. Despite our self image as being fact driven, our first reaction to any problem when we are in power is to downplay it.
Yeah, we’re facts-driven in the same way that prosecutors are facts-driven. Present evidence to advance a conclusion subject to the constraint that you shouldn’t flat-out lie.
What's really amazing to me is how often I got these "your anecdote is not statistics" kinds of responses when talking about crime even in comments here. It does genuinely seem better now, but so many cars and car parts were getting stolen in my neighborhood 2 years ago, and literally anyone I talked to in person in California was appalled by the visible shoplifting we've seen since the pandemic. But people would come back and say "but the violent crime stats are down" as if non-violent theft isn't real crime.
Biden’s entire approach to governing AND to bully pulpit messaging was always to try to carve out a perfectly-engineered path designed to upset the fewest possible members of his fragile coalition.
He didn’t really govern or lead from any set of fixed principles. He never, as far as I can recall, took a brave stand and said “this isn’t going to be popular, but it’s the principled and wise choice, so I’m going to take the hit politically and just do the right thing here.”
The closest I think he ever came to that was refusing, albeit in a kind of tepid and meager way, to be dragged into the de-fund the police hysteria. And that refusal, as lukewarm as it was, probably turned out be his single greatest political asset.
Says a lot about a politician the things he is willing to take a political hit for. Biden always cared more about doing the right thing with foreign policy, rather than the right thing in domestic policy.
Ok, I can appreciate the distinction, but I still have my doubts that it’s true.
I think his Israel policy was very much driven by coalition management concerns rather than by any fixed principle (I expect some disagreement with that, of course).
I can’t actually make sense of his Ukraine policy under any framework that I have been able to imagine.
That particular stand did seem to be a net loser for him, politically.
But I do believe that if his basic governing approach was this (stand on principle, explain his reasoning to the public, do the right thing) in general, rather than the more instrumental coalition management approach, his political fortunes overall would have been significantly better.
Afghanistan withdrawal was extremely popular though when he was trying to make it happen. It was supposed to be an easy political W for Biden. Trump would've done it too if he won reelection for the same reason.
All polling pointed to Afghanistan withdrawal being popular.
Plus, he explicitly wanted them out by the 9/11 20th anniversary. There's no doubt he was planning a big victory lap to celebrate the accomplishment. There's zero reason to set the at deadline if he thought withdrawal might not be popular.
I would argue his efforts around student loan forgiveness and reducing enforcement along the southern border are examples where he took a principled stand and took the political hits. We may not agree with those principles, but I think those examples fit your definition.
I see what you’re saying, but I don’t think it fits in quite the way you are saying. Both of those are great examples of policies that were incredibly unpopular overall (indeed, both are arguably determinative in Trump’s win).
But, from a coalition management perspective, these were both things that pandered (and that is the right word) to certain elements of his perceived coalition.
That’s why I would still view both of these as bad policies that he nonetheless pursued for reasons of coalition management rather than principle.
It’s an interesting point though. I can see some merit on both sides.
He *was* the right edge of the coalition, that's why he had such a relentless focus on placating the left. Ultimately, the bargain the party made was to placate the left and the staffer class, in the hopes that Biden could "return [everything] to normal".
This theory, of course, failed. It COULD have worked, but it didn't, and I don't think there's any particular execution problems that we can point to as having definitively doomed it, but just that the entire theory didn't hold -- and the precise way that it failed, was indeed the way it had been predicted to fail, it just wasn't guaranteed that it WOULD fail, because hey sometimes you just can't know until you try something.
It does make me wonder if we'd have been better off going with the Bernie bankshot in 2020. Trump wouldn't have had 4 years out of official power to single-mindedly focus on retaining control of his party; instead, he'd have presided over the post-pandemic mess and caught all the blame for wrecking the economy. ALSO, his allies wouldn't have had time to regroup and plan a Project 2025; they'd have just continued all the usual infighting and backbiting that was endemic to his administration.
Ed: Also, on the off chance that Bernie won, the country would have seen that as opting for a completely different kind of experiment. Young men probably would have been on board with it. I'm not sure Trumpism would have consolidated as much power over the GOP through them as it ended up having done IRL.
Assuming the exact same economic outcomes, I don't see the Republicans blaming Trump for inflation. They are remarkably forgiving when it comes to Republican presidents.
I don’t know if I’m assuming that, but I do think that he probably overestimated the benefits of those policies with leftier elements of the coalition, and underestimated the costs with the more centrists elements (and with swing voters and persuadable independents). Maybe that amounts to the same thing?
The student loan forgiveness program always struck me much more as coalition management than as a principled stand. Blue collar Biden understood that most people don't go to college and many of the beneficiaries were much better off than non-college people. He was just the subject of a huge amount of intra-coalition pressure.
The argument against this is that the courts provided Biden with a *lot* of ready-made offramps to abandon the initiative as a good-faith effort that ran into insurmountable judicial hurdles, but he didn't take the out.
Given that it was and remains an extremely inflationary policy that's kind of a slap in the face to non-recipients who either paid off their loans or didn't incur them, the insistence on dogged pursuit of the issue throughout his administration increasingly seemed like something Biden actually believed in (maybe at a minimum because it was a campaign promise, even IMO a somewhat foolish one) rather than just a sop to his coalition.
It was a bad policy politically and he didn't need the courts to provide him an off-ramp. He should have done that on his own. But he made a different political calculation and in my opinion a bad one.
The argument against the notion that this was an act of coalition management rather than reflecting some kind of personal conviction on Biden's part. If it *wasn't* an act of personal conviction we need to account for the failure to take the various graceful outs offered by the courts as a way to jettison a bad policy.
Ed: The optics were substantially worse without the courts because while it was a bad policy either way, it was also a campaign promise and thus the appearance of a good-faith effort seems within the scope of things that might be expected out of principle.
I would expand this to the entire modern party apparatus, actually.
Up until 2016, both parties basically operated like this. They were getting really good at "the politics of the perfectly-engineered-path". The GOP was already on a long slide away from this: from Nixon through Reagan and Gingrich on to Fox News, the Tea Party, and McConnell, employing strategic norm-breaking to gain a slight edge over the Democrats' increasingly more professionally-well-engineered machine politics. And then, as the saying about bankruptcy goes, Trump turned this slow break into an all-at-once, breaking the party's ability to engineer anything, and converting to an "all-id" approach: fight on everything, beat strategic retreats when necessary, break any norms in your way, but in such a way that the anti-antis on your side will always defend you.
I think what most of us on the Yglesias-Klein-et-al side of the Democratic coalition ultimately want here is for our own party to ALSO abandon the politics of the perfectly-engineered path, and chart a bold abundance agenda while leaving behind as many of our engineered-path-era liabilities as possible. Arguably, if we'd done it much sooner, maybe we'd have been able to avoid the present disaster.
Great point. I think Dems could have leveraged Donald Trump’s personal lawlessness and indecency as a way to blame him for the increase in antisocial behavior that started under his watch. Had this rhetoric been paired with an attempt to actually _do something_ about public disorder it could have been all wrapped up nicely for them to blame him for the spike and profit from the fall, but their unwillingness to even say they had a problem with what was going on obviously doomed that approach.
I disagree with this. Liberals have to accept that their personal revulsion to President Elect Trump's conduct is a political loser. Normie voters don't care (just like they didn't care about Clinton banging interns). There wasn't some magical way to use that better. We needed to stop talking about it and address voter concerns instead.
Fair point but I agree with Matt that Trump is not actually an amazing candidate and that a generic Republican that espoused the same issue positioning as he did would have won by a much bigger margin. If that’s the case, then it’s not true that Donald Trump’s lawlessness is a niche concern, it’s just that voters had bigger concerns, not that it was some kind of major tactical error to talk about the fact that Trump is a bad guy, or that this fact couldn’t have been used to greater effect.
It was a major tactical error. The voters who thought Trump was a bad man already were voting for Harris. Hell, Liz and Dick Cheney voted for Harris!
The problem was this is at the core of what liberals already voting for Harris wanted to say about Trump, but swing voters who were open to voting for Trump didn't want to hear it.
"A major tactical error" does not mean "I am certain it cost them the election". It just means, it was clearly the wrong message to reach swing voters. Whatever the right message was, or if there even was a right message, is a different issue.
My working theory is that Trump's biggest strength is/was his ability to circumvent the traditional GOP donor channels, due both to name rec and ability to attract small-dollar donations, which meant he didn't have to kowtow to the politically unpopular parts of the agenda that the Kochs/Adelson want any GOP candidate to do.
I don't think we could've used his personal lawlessness and indecency, but they certainly could've built something around Trump's utterly incompetent and disorderly response to the pandemic as the root of a lot of problems.
Put differently, address voters' top concerns until they're no longer top concerns. Rinse and repeat. Then maybe eventually the thing you do want to talk about (like Trump) does become a top concern.
Maybe. I feel like the GOP gets a pass when disorder happens in cities (even if they're in the White House) just as Dems get a pass if a racially motivated police shooting happens in a blue jurisdiction.
How do Democrats "get a pass if a racially motivated police shooting happens in a blue jurisdiction"? Seems to me like there's been a lot of negative reporting about police use of force in NYC and other "blue" cities.
But then the Wokies would have pulled up the 90s crime bill and started whining with activist bullhorns, and the post 2016 strategy was to appease activist elements of the Democratic coalition.
They had the dream team for it too - just like how Trump can say something totally out of bounds and JD Vance can sane-wash it you could have had Kamala saying things like "Joe Biden's 'superpredator' comments were an exaggeration for effect, but as a prosecutor I know that the criminal justice system works better for everyone when repeat criminals stay off the streets".
Unfortunately no going back from the 2020 primary.
His example is "support the troops" during the awful pro-Iraq War phase of the early 2000s. But it applies to things like saying, "This library is for everyone." You need to differentiate everyone:
everyone_1 = people who feel comfortable using heroin in libraries (to use a silly and extreme example)
everyone_2 = grandmas and toddlers who do not feel safe in a library where people use heroin.
It helps to clarify which "everyone" you're talking about. Same with compassion, or really any phrase or broad population definition that seems to be universal but really isn't.
Every single accommodation/dispensation for antisocial and lawbreaking behavior is a restriction on the prosocial and law-abiding members of the community.
You can’t be universally tolerant of everyone. You are implicitly prioritizing one group over the other. We may as well be explicit about the choices we are making, and ensure that our public policies really do reflect the choices we actually prefer to make as a society.
We aren’t currently doing a very good job of this. We are instead simply governing by comforting self-delusions.
There is an awful lot of this, not just in the United States, but throughout the entire liberal/democratic west.
"We aren’t currently doing a very good job of this."
I think we are, it's just that our leadership's choice of who the winners and losers should be is ludicrous, so we don't like the results. Not the same thing as not doing a good job of making those explicit choices.
The “public” defines the community. People who are shooting drugs up in public have alienated themselves from the community unless the expectations of the broad public is that their behavior is acceptable.
The problem is that activist types pretend to represent the “public” when they usually represent a fringe.
it is always journalists and celebrities who contend that living with public disorder, squalor and chaos is just part of "living in a city." but these people are often insulated from it.
I've heard that line from people of all kinds in cities. It also isn't aspirational, the implication behind complaining that something has been a part of life for so long is that you want it to change.
"But people don’t smoke on the subway because they don’t have a job. No one commits sexual assault because they didn’t learn algebra."
This reminds me of an old "Weeds" episode where you made this point and it seems like your co-hosts might of disagreed or might have felt that police reform advocates disagreed.(I believe it was "Is gun violence fixable?") It was after a mass shooting that killed several Asian American women.
Sometimes there is a sort of sense that people think we need to destroy capitalism before we can enforce laws.
My favorite Weeds moment like this was during a discussion of the Brock Turner rape case and Sarah Kliff wondered aloud about how we can make sentencing harsher for white dudes but more lenient for marginalized groups to prevent mass incarceration (Dara Lind, who clearly agreed, had to point out that this would be clearly unconstitutional).
In fact we have empirical evidence that shows that shows that sentencing got harsher after the Persky recall, which mainly fell on men of color. The whole combination of criminal justice reform AND carceral feminism at the same time was always incoherent.
As someone that does support criminal justice reform and creating far more humane prisons, ect., certain segments of the left during this era were depressing. They didn't really want any of that. They just wanted different people to suffer.
That seems really unfair and seems not to focus on the rights of victims for justice. They just assert that some criminals are less culpable (which I can understand, if you are raised well then you are taught that what you are doing is wrong which is a greater social violation than someone who was raised to believe that doing wrong is normal conduct.)
There's a really good post here on why that's difficult to do in America vs. Europe, because of the prohibition on Terry stops and stricter standards for evidence gathering.
In certain circles, this is more than just a sense; you will encounter the assertion that law enforcement *as such* is solely devoted to propping up the capitalist order. And interestingly, you can find different flavors of this - more orthodox Marxist base/superstructure-type arguments, (neo-)Gramscian cultural hegemoncy arguments, and critical race theory-type arguments that transmorgify the Marxist class analysis into race analysis.
But they're the *People's* police! (And I'm not even being ironic -- that was basically the explanation given by various communist apologists for decades if you pointed out that communist countries also had police who enforced laws.)
Building off of srynerson below, the critique is that the *wrong* people are being policed. This is the kind of contradiction you can easily pull out when you ask people who support abolition “what should happen to people who e.g. disobey pandemic lockdown orders?”
And Western Europe - which has a police who do operate more like how some liberals would want (ie they enforce laws, even when they personally don't agree with them, and do so relatively neutrally as to the suspect, and the victim) did have rigorous enforcement of pandemic lockdowns and has rigorous enforcement of homeless nuisance laws. It's weird how the policy of enforcing all the laws results in all the laws being enforced. Of course, that means building a very different sort of police force.
I don't know if this is still true, but I also note that in the 90s, Western European police sure spent a lot of time patrolling train stations with assault rifles in hand.
The thing I don't get is the inherent inconsistency in the idea that enforcing laws is ONLY done to prop up capitalist's interests. The anti-capitalists tend to be highly educated and must have had some coursework covering rates of psychopathy, sociopathy, other anti-social personality disorders, and substance abuse disorder in the general population.
How do they square their theory with the fact that 5-10% of people in any population are struggling with these disorders and will likely act out eventually, especially if there aren't at least some deterrents in place?
Not to be flippant, but I think they literally do not know what the f*** they are talking about. They have not been around actual criminals. I grew up poor - some kids I knew in HS became criminals, and I have a relative serving time. Knowing actual criminals makes you LESS sympathetic to them, I think. But these sheltered kids just imagine criminals are people like them who took a slight wrong turn somehow. Nope.
Personality disorders can’t be treated. There are some coping strategies that can be taught and with tremendous effort they can sometimes work. But it’s a very tough nut to crack.
This is a pretty black and white take. I might agree if you said personality disorders can't be cured, in most cases.
Sort of like obesity. If we consider it an illness, then those who struggle with it are never really cured; they (hopefully) just manage it, with varying degrees of success. "Healthy" is just an asymptote you can get arbitrarily close to, but never actually transcend into permanently. And maybe a lot of maladies are better thought of this way, essentially incurable but not unmanageable.
Some robust data on empirical interventions to reduce smoking and drinking during pregnancy, poverty and other social determinants of crime would be helpful.
Oh gosh, I totally forgot about the Weeds podcast. I read this and was thinking, "Who is David referring to? Who here was on that TV series, Weeds? Thanks for the morning laugh.
"The question of to what extent shoplifting has actually increased in sharply contested"
This is not a question. If you think it's a question then you have no idea what you're talking about. Theft or inventory "shrink" is reported in a public company's financials. If a CEO or CFO states publicly that theft is problem and historically at an all time high -- then that's a factual statement which has been vetted by their legal teams for accuracy. Walmart is currently running at 1.8% net margin. If "shrink" goes from 1% to 2% or - god forbid - hit 3% like it did for Walgreens -- this is going to compress net margins on the order of 50%.
When an idiot Progressive "questions" these factual statement what they're really saying is ... I don't care about theft because they don't think anyone can own anything because they're a Marxist.
I'm curious if you know how much Facebook Marketplace facilitated or encouraged the rise of shoplifting? Do you know if that had anything to do with it, causally, or is it just the grey market of choice?
I don't but my sense is the explosion in shoplifting is coming from large, sophisticated rings and I'd imagine most are flowing the inventory back through non-traditional but actual retail locations (e.g., corner stores).
I remember when I lived in a let’s say very downscale part of Houston a local corner store would sell just a completely random assortment of crap and some of it was store-brand stuff from grocery stores, which seemed odd but they were likely getting fenced goods.
I know that a lot of people like to blame Facebook Marketplace (including Matt), but I've never seen it explained as to why Facebook Marketplace would facilitate fencing shoplifted goods any more than, e.g., Craigslist.
Genuinely unsure how much hard data exists on that angle - all I know is that it's usually included in press releases from the CA DA and other top LE brass when they bust a large organized theft ring. Goods are always claimed to be fenced through FB Marketplace, Amazon, or locally in informal street vending. I don't shop any of those venues, but certainly there's an...interestingly diverse...variety of goods on sale if one wanders down certain streets in SF. It's easy enough to remove the brand labels from certain well-known and highly-traded goods.
Sometimes the hawkers are pretty bold - we occasionally get phone calls from bulk resellers who ask our store management if it's cool if they pick up 100 packs of tortillas or whatever. And we're like, well, are you a restaurant or a charity or something? And they're like, no, this is how I get inventory for my favela. Which, lol, no, we're not taking that order...
My view has been for a while that the progressive approach to local governance, especially as pertains to criminal justice, has been thoroughly discredited. It is basically nihilism, and it simply doesn’t work. It’s been *proven* not to work.
For a while, the stakes on this were relatively low. Formerly great cities (San Francisco, Chicago, etc.) were in various stages of decline and, depending on who you asked, were anywhere from “still wonderful” to “utter shithole.”
But it was all a local problem. If the voters of <city x> wanted to live their lives sidestepping urban war zones and avoiding public spaces and watching all their downtown businesses slowly close and move out, then who am I to tell them otherwise?
But we seem to have crossed an important threshold. Now the local dysfunction of nihilistic and denialistic progressive leaders appears to be a liability for democratic politics at the national level. And in the world where the Republican Party is now a nakedly authoritarian one, the stakes could not be higher.
It’s past time for state and local democratic leaders to pull their heads out of their asses, dispense with the weird fiction that enforcing rules and laws and providing public order is somehow equivalent to oppression, and start focusing on delivering sane and positive results for their communities.
Stop governing around and for the lowest common denominator. Govern for the regular people who just want to live a normal, law-abiding life and maybe raise a few kids in peace.
If we can normalize a message that “you can vote for a local politician who wants to send rapists and murderers to prison, and you’ll still be a good person,” then the weird “all crime should be legal” type progressives will naturally be replaced by normies.
In general I hate Soros conspiracy theories, but the number of "progressive" prosecutors funded by Soros and their track record once in office is one place where people really should pay attention to who they're voting for.
You forget that voters in those cities can vote too. So in a closely divided state if the margins in the cities move R+10 then that can easily swing the state.
Shoot New Jersey came a lot closer than expected too.
> “You forget that voters in those cities can vote too.”
I don’t think I forgot this.
But if 10% of voters who had previously elected this type of government in their own city had suddenly decided to register their displeasure by voting against national democrats rather than voting differently in municipal elections, then that’s not very different, as far as I can tell, from the “important threshold” I mentioned above.
Virtually all major cities in the US are run by more or less corrupt ethnic political machines embedded in state and local Democratic Party organizations. They are single-party regimes in which officeholders are mostly appointed rather than elected. Their governing philosophy is purely extractive and they do a terrible job, delivering poor-quality services at high cost. You’d think that the Republicans would put in some money and effort to compete for these millions of votes, if nothing else to make things difficult for Democrats. I, personally, would accept a lot of Republican flaws to get back some choice and accountability. Doesn’t seem worth their while though.
Some laws and norms are enforced by well meaning ordinary citizens telling the violator what they're doing is wrong and pestering them until the violation stops. Minor offenses like smoking in restaurants, playing loud music on mass transit, and littering relied on this level of common enforcement.
Calling these people "Karens", frequently accusing them of racism, and high profile incidents of one-sided narratives destroying their lives weakened this guard rail. Ordinary folks rightly blame the progressive 2020 mania for this.
The Karen thing, which is actually a sociological phenomenon with VERY deep roots (hostility of a lot of Black women towards white women has a lot of historical antecedents), was clearly a mistake politically, theoretically, and substantively.
The problem is that there is a real phenomenon of customers going into a store and making life hell for service workers, demanding unreasonable things, that the “Karen” term was supposed to pick out.
Yeah the original archetype that “Karen” referred to is the kind of person who says, “I want to speak to your manager.” Hence the joke, “What do you call a group of Karens? A homeowners association.”
I think one underrated thing that happened in the shift around this is that for a lot of people who were less engaged with this issue through, say, 2020 (me, I'm talking about me) there was a developing sense that the police weren't really concerned with maintaining public order as evidenced by the fact that one of their core interests appeared to be demanding that they themselves not be held to any standard of order or discipline. I live in NYC and there are three events that I remember that basically led me, as someone who is innately a rule follower and is interested in seeing rules enforced to, more or less, write off the police. I never wanted to abolish them, but I still have very little sympathy for law enforcement that acts like this.
First, in 2015, there was an event where at a funeral (and possibly later at a police academy graduation) where thousands of police turned their back on the mayor when he was speaking. I mean this legitimately: I did not understand at the time, and still do not understand, why they were not all immediately fired. My mental model for this is if a bunch of enlisted soldiers did something similar to a general or the president. I think we would all rightly understand that such an act would show profound breakdown in the chain of command and unit discipline, things that are extremely important when you give people guns and have them walk around deploying violence on behalf of the state. If that happened at West Point we would dishonorably discharge everyone involved. But when its the police we just let them do it. It was absurd.
Second, Eric Garner. For New Yorkers I still think this was a bigger deal than people realize. Not so much the actual incident, which was bad, but the fact that the full police force backed the officer that *everyone agreed did not follow department rules* and demanded that he face no sanction. Again, the reason people don't want the police to arrest the guy smoking on the subway platform is because it has been conclusively established that the police themselves will not act with discipline when engaging in enforcement, and if people can't trust that the police will police themselves then a lot of them are going to end up where Chris Hayes found himself in those tweets.
Third, this "police simply believe themselves to be above the law" vibe is reinforced daily by the way that they do a million little things in the city right down to the fact that they park their cars on the sidewalks around police stations despite the fact that (1) everyone agrees its against the rules and (2) people complain about it all the time. Again, there can be no trust when the police themselves thumb their noses at the very notion that they should try to earn the trust of the people they serve (or maybe they don't really conceive of themselves as public servants at all, which is a big part of the problem). Residents of NYC didn't wake up one day and decide that we didn't like cops, we have been living for decades with cops who very clearly don't like us and don't think they should be subject to any restraint or accountability. At some point that frays the public trust to the point where it's simply broken and we have to understand that this is a two way street if that trust is ever going to be restored.
This is still where I'm at roughly with the police. I supported the idea of defunding the police, mostly because I think the "brand" of the police is so tarnished that it would be easier to start a new department of "safety rangers" with completely different uniforms, recruiting priorities, and more modern practices (why is it that a guy with a gun has to come by to take my statement when my car was stolen many hours ago?). But with crime, people are so fixated on the current model of cops and long sentences that they have trouble even imagining anything else.
If you want to do that in SF or Minneapolis or wherever you are, go ahead. If it works out I hope it's copied and spreads. But most Americans are happy with their local police force. The police in my township aren't broken, so I just ask that you please don't try to fix them with untested methods.
I’m sympathetic, but you might consider that New York City has an especially awful police union. I don’t know that this is true, but I suspect that it is, partly because the incident that you mentioned are so egregious that they don’t generalize easily to other cities.
“ Most low-income people are not criminals, and it’s precisely the poorest and most vulnerable people who most need things like public spaces and public transit and affordable housing and libraries, and they need these things to be actually good.”
Yup. Our public library was a very good institution even ten years ago. Now it has become an informal homeless shelter. And a place where drug-users shoot up — there have been a number of overdoses in the library.
This is not a good outcome for any progressive values or any progressive constituencies. It’s a catastrophe for all of the things and people we care about. Not to mention that it is hell for the librarians themselves.
I was surprised Matt didn't mention(or I missed it) Ezra's podcast with Charles Fain Lehman about disorder where he defined it as the "domination of public space for private purposes".
Public spaces rely on the idea that people will share them and use them appropriately, otherwise people start to retreat to private spaces where they don't have to deal with disorder.
Charles Fain Lehman needs to advise some moderate big city mayor
I imagine there are many big city mayors who listen to the Ezra Klein podcast.
I highly doubt that, and not for ideological reasons. Ezra is a nerd. People like Eric Adams (NY), London breed (SF), Brandon something (Chicago) and Karen bass (LA) do not build their power base with nerds like us, and as a rule they are more focused on their cities political machinery and spoils system than they are on policy nerd stuff.
And look how that worked out for Breed!
(Just kidding, I do not imagine that Breed would have survived the election if she listened to Klein's podcast (I also do not listen to Klein's podcast)).
I haven't listened to the episode but it looks like on October 1, 2021 Eric Adams was on the Ezra Klein podcast.
Adams was a great politician. He went everywhere and generally made the people he interacted with seen/heard/validated.
Tragic that he ended up being a corrupt sociopath.
Politicians get value from going on podcasts because it helps them get their message out. Do you think trump is a consistent listener of the Joe Rogan Podcast? Do you think Kamala is a consistent listener of "call her daddy"?
Ezra has been on fire recently. His podcast with Jennifer Pahlka is on the nose. She crushes it. I’ve been outspoken against government bureaucracy but Pahlka is much more articulate and precise than me. I think her government bureaucracy complaints are fundamental to the current Democratic party too. We need to find better balance between good processes and shot callers (leaders) leading and being accountable for outcomes.
I saw Ezra’s wife on John Stewart’s podcast and she was making sense for a while and then got triggered by too much guy talk and pushed back with some lefty passion.
And the logical conclusion is that these services get underused because they're not pleasant. And then they get underfunded because voters don't use them, and it becomes a vicious circle
Yup - it is a universal truth in politics that services used by the middle class get funded, while services used only by poor people don't. If you want services used by poor people to get funded, you need to design the service so that middle class people are willing to use them also.
If libraries become de-facto homeless shelters, middle class people who want the library experience will switch over to private book stores, leaving libraries with only the dregs of society, until they get defunded and wither away.
What also follows from this, I believe, is that it's often better to deliver a better quality (and safer) service at a higher price which will attract the better off, even if it means there are access issues for the poorest. Redistribution is much more efficiently pursued directly than trying to make every public service extremely low cost to the user (which in practice means low quality, unless there is overwhelmingly public pressure to keep quality up).
In my metro, the current bus would need to pay *me* five bucks a ride to take it. My time's worth more than that.
Same for me, for everyday things. But there are other ways to subsidize it. For example, good bus service to major events (like pro sports) or new+fast busses for major corridors with parkNrides and a push for big employer subsidy (hospitals are a good candidate). If you open the door to these, it can both encourage interest and investment in the whole system as well as juice up usage which can drive down marginal cost.
Strong agree. I was recently chatting with a city employee about various housing initiatives and he brought up another city that has turned its libraries into de facto homeless shelters as something we should explore. I don't think we can sustain the bait and switch of turning over a public institution to a different purpose than the one the public signed up for. This doesn't mean libraries can't deal with the reality that homeless residents are part of our community and may avail themselves of the library services, but we can't change what "library services" means to the point that its unrecognizable.
Also a big-time agree - libraries, parks, transit systems are all here and in the short term you can jam the homeless problem into them rather than build purpose-made homeless shelters. In the long run, the misuse of public services as ad-hoc homeless shelters will lead to less public support and funding for those places, and the homeless will be back on the street, but we'll also have lost the public services that progressives insisted were the only way to accommodate them.
Far better to "do the work" of building new shelters, improving existing ones, convincing/encouraging/pushing people to use them, and of course building more housing generally so that fewer people begin the slow descent into long-term homelessness.
And being able to build cheap housing…places that are made to provide basic needs and don’t cost hundreds of thousands each to construct—we need a modern version of the old SRO. Ultimately shelters are an emergency measure, to solve the problem requires permanent housing.
I have come out against most harm reduction drug policies because they seem to come with defacto drug legalization. My sister left Portland because things got so bad. My friend’s wife was told me about her 2021 trip to Portland and how terrible things had gotten.
Permissiveness is not helping people. It’s cruel and letting people slowly kill themselves.
Harm reduction is supposed to be making it so that junkies don’t have HIV and Hep C when they get into rehab, but if you take it too far it becomes a replacement for rehab.
The big problem is there often is not an incentive for seeking treatment, but there are policies that lower the cost of doing drugs (lower disease risk and informational networks that facilitate the sourcing of narcotics.) I am just tired of people dying on the street.
In your area, is drug treatment readily available so that if an addict has the impulse to get drug treatment, they can, right away, without a waiting list that would mean the impulse might be overwhelmed with the call of the drug?
More to the point, I’m not convinced harm reduction strategies are actually reducing harm, and I no longer trust advocates to fairly assess the results of the policies they advocate.
The people in the problem discussion/management business may not have an incentive to fix the problem.
Or to rationalize things away. You probably could make arguments for things like overdose rates going down ... in circumstances where absolute numbers go up, but there are more users. That is strictly worse even if you have a better metric.
Yeah, we’ve seen this pretty vividly with marijuana legalization, which seems to have accomplished little more than creating an entire generation of stoners who have convinced themselves that it’s safer than alcohol and basically just a replacement for therapy.
I support marijuana legalization, but at this point I'm pretty convinced that it should be stigmatized & we should strive to make the marijuana experience fairly crappy. We should probably re-ban everything except loose marijuana vegetation/flower itself; no more commercial sale of vapes, edibles, oils, whatever.
Ugh, I know so many people who say just that about marijuana. It probably is safer than alcohol, but that's not saying much.
Even if it is safer than alcohol, getting drunk every night was never socially acceptable, so why should getting stoned be?
The problem with cannabis / marijuana seems to be the Gin Lane problem. Every society seems to go through this period when distilled spirits are first widely and cheaply available - a significant fraction of people drink way too much and do so way too often and rapidly descend into alcoholism. Over time, a set of cultural and social norms develop, people do still get drunk, but they limit it and then drink little or nothing the rest of the time. Legalisation has made cannabis much more widely and cheaply available, but the cultural norms - the equivalents of "don't drink alone" and "don't drink every night" - haven't yet developed.
If people just got a mild buzz every other night and got really stoned once every few weeks (and only when they had the day off the following day) - a form of use that legalisation facilitates - then you don't get a horde of stoners who may not be killing themselves, but are certainly damaging their ability to stick to a regular job.
I don't know how to accelerate the process so it's OK to get a mild buzz but not to get completely incapable - in the way that two glasses of wine is one thing, and a fifth of bourbon is something very different.
Yes. I've thought about this analogy also. Commercialized THC competes on potency and people don't realize the long term effect it can have, after all it's legal and sold in stores. I've personally seen two people close to me quit and its been extremely positive.
I wonder if we’ll develop a similar immune response to social and modern news media.
It's always fun when Matt throws the woke set for a loop on Twitter when he says that not having enough of a police presence in high crime areas is discriminatory against disadvantaged groups. It's clearly correct but also clearly breaks a lot of minds when it's stated. Another good moment was his early moments of being the Snitch On Improper License Plates, and people like Josie Duffy Rice and others were pushing back despite admitting that lack of traffic enforcement was a problem, and that Matt had a solution to create *less* direct interaction with police officers.
it was so small fry but the Yglesias Civilian Traffic Cop episode really led to my disillusionment with prominent online liberals. It was pretty obvious that Rice and others were picking fights with Yglesias on that issue solely because they personally thought he was annoying!
I am a librarian, and this is somewhat true everywhere. Part of the issue is that there aren't services for people, and so they end up in the library. One library in my city is literally across the street from a social services office. The office tells people to go across the street and the librarians will help them with their SNAP applications or other forms that need to be filled out in the extremely cumbersome and dehumanizing process that seems to mark many of the services for poorer people. Librarians are happy to help, but they don't have the knowledge or expertise that others people do, and it is frustrating. Of course, this isn't the same as people shooting up in the bathroom, but it is indicative of how many see the library as a catch all to solve problems because it is the one place where everyone is welcome to enter and use resources for free. Librarians do call the police more often than we would like because of lack of other options in dealing with situations.
Thank you for your service. :)
Non-ironically, thank you (the librarian) for your service.
1. Thank you for being a librarian.
2. I hate that everything you wrote here is clearly true and doesn't have a good answer. If libraries are de facto homeless shelters, a lot of people are going to be uncomfortable visiting. If we no longer allow everyone, we've kind of defeated the purpose of libraries. If we just close libraries, that's a huge loss.
I don't think the point of libraries was ever to allow literally everyone. It's a community space, not a safe space for the most destitute or unruly.
I mean "everyone" in the sense that there isn't discrimination by age, race, income, appearance, so on.
Behavior is different. That's something people do, not who they are.
Sure. The issues she mentions, and that were mentioned elsewhere seem to be behavioral, though. They're calling the police more than they used to, removing bathroom stalls so they can check for ODs, etc..
Age, race and income don't seem to be problems. Appearance might be a problem inasmuch as it's hard to get around that smelling terrible or wearing stained or dirty clothing impact the people around you. The latter sometimes comes with being homeless so that's a tough circle to square.
Your last paragraph is largely what I'm getting at-- libraries could exclude people who are visibly homeless, but that's kind of against the purpose of libraries.
It's not literally true in terms of exact timeline, but the day my grocery store installed used needle disposal bins in the public bathrooms...that was definitely a harbinger.
I understand the impulse of "addicts are gonna come in and shoot up anyway, may as well make it slightly safer for all involved", but it feels like that cedes the premise, simply giving up on the possibility of a city where addicts don't do fentanyl in grocery stores. (Aren't there supposed to be dedicated injection sites for this sort of thing?) It'd be like if Hayes suggested putting out ashtrays in the subways - probably better than doing literally nothing, but it misses the forest for the trees. We'll still take their money if they're otherwise-behaved paying customers, of course. Functional addicts buy groceries too, just like Republicans.
Dedicated injection sites are illegal at the federal level and so I think only NY opened one, SF considered it but backed down.
What policies in your town led to drug abuse in a library to be an offense that isn’t policed?
This is the new normal in and around every major city on the West Coast. It's more about the progressive governance culture than any one policy. The executive of the county that Seattle is in has been trying to get the county jail shut down and still runs essentially unopposed.
Why has Seattle and Portland not seen the rightward turn other big cities has? Or has it, and it hasn’t been as big of a news story?
One thing about Seattle that has gotten better: light rail. Two years ago, it was basically a moving homeless shelter. Taking it to anything except a sports game was a super uncomfortable experience. Since that time and at significant cost, the transit agency has hired a ton of "public safety officers" - basically unarmed guards for the platforms and trains, many of whom also check tickets (we're a proof of payment system).
This has worked wonderfully - the light rail is totally safe and pleasant to ride, and the stations are generally fine as well. The extension we recently opened exceeded ridership expectations to the point that the main complaint about the system is excessive crowding, which is a very charmingly pre-COVID transit problem to have. In fact, I think ridership may be well above the pre-pandemic level (we opened several extensions during the pandemic, so getting a like-for-like comparison is tricky). One could argue, like the article does, that automated enforcement (fare gates, more cameras) would be even better, but nonetheless I think the effort has been a major success.
It's hard to get a feel for the exact costs involved in improvements (I'm sure they're buried in government reports somewhere), but I got a constituent email from Sen. Scott Wiener not too long ago that said rider satisfaction polling for SFMTA now *exceeds* The Before Times levels. Highest in a decade, or something like that. Anecdotally, for the one train I ride regularly, things have gone from totally-empty-trains-minus-a-few-homeless-guys-and-their-droppings to basically the same level of crowding as before. So whatever mix of better transit policing, cameras, etc. are being employed, it's working. Wish to see similar improvements in other public domains.
(Weirdly enough, this doesn't seem to include fare inspection - I still haven't seen one for like 8 years or something, and fare gates are unchanged.)
I did almost get a ticket from MUNI in November of 2019 (my previous swipe expired about 6 minutes before I got off) so they do exist!
What would REALLY be better would be if we could get some commerce — kiosks, snack shops, etc. — in the stations!
That's interesting. It's the first I've heard of a public safety force actually working. I'd be curious how they interact with the police and how expensive they are compared to hiring an equivalent salary of police officers.
As a former CSO (similar type of uniformed non-sworn officer) they are generally dirt cheap compared to cops. Think meter maid (trained in house in a couple weeks, paid better than a private security guard but not that much better, no years of state training). I fully support departments building small armies of folks who can go out and handle any kind of crime that doesn't require a police officer because it dramatically improves response times - I could have easily responded to stolen bike reports or written licence plate tickets on parked cars all day while real cops focused on major crimes, and it would be a win-win for everyone.
I know! I rolled my eyes when they rolled them out as well, but I have to say that I've been pleasantly surprised. One caveat: Seattle still has tons of places to do drugs and generally misbehave, so I think most of the success of this solution has been making light rail a slightly more annoying place to engage in this activity than basically everywhere else. In a city with tons of well understood "you can do drugs anywhere, but not here" zones, we just added light rail to the list. Which is great - public transit is perhaps THE most important public space! But it does indicate that this sort of thing probably isn't a tractable solution for the entire city.
I don't know how light the light rail is in Seattle, but fare gates can be a problem for very open stations as you need to block off all other entrances/exits and most light rail doesn't have fenced-off stations in that way (and, even if you can put up a fence, the fire marshal probably won't let you, and for good reasons).
I mean yeah, this is all way downstream of the decision to have street running and open stations, which saved a few bucks at the time but has been haunting the system ever since. But even still, I think Sound Transit's proposed idea of only putting fair gates in the fully grade separated, "subway"-style stations in the core downtown tunnel (Capitol Hill, Westlake, Symphony, Pioneer Square, C/ID) would go a long way. Most rail-adjacent urban disorder is concentrated around these stations, and something like 90+% of trips either start or end at them (the big exception is Stadium), so I think it's a good way to get most of the way there on fare gating.
I think the reason we haven't seen a major backlash in big cities like in the 60's and 70's when "law and order" guys like Frank Rizzo (Philly), Sam Yorty (LA) and Charles Stenvig (Minneapolis) where shocking the political establishment and getting elected mayor is you don't really have the same sort of white working class constituency that can revolt against liberalism and the Dems at the ballot box anymore (see also Disco Demolition Night). Those people largely moved to the suburbs or Florida.
Cities have changed a lot since then and are now dominated politically by middle class white liberals, various ethnic/minority groups, and young professionals and hipsters who just aren't going to vote for that so you have a sort of weird drift and paralysis or movements to rich guy "outsiders" like in SF, rather than a major voter revolt to the GOP or an independent.
"is you don't really have the same sort of white working class constituency that can revolt against liberalism"
We do though! It's mainly working class Hispanics with a dash of blue collar immigrants from dozens of other cultures. We just saw it in the urban election shifts of the past two cycles.
It's limited in SF because of education polarization.
There's some of that in terms of voting for Trump, especially in NYC but we aren't seeing anything like Frank Rizzo running, and winning, on promising to make it easier for cops to shoot people in a major Democratic city.
Didn't we just have an election that could be considered a working class backlash? It wasn't white only, but that still was the majority.
Like I said there was some backlash in the presidential election but nothing like what happened in a lot places in the 60's - 80's. The "Housing Wars" in Yonkers is another great example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJVKmMdXiNM
You do seem to get a class of a elected Sheriff that runs on daring criminals to do something where they can shoot them.
I can’t speak for Portland, but Seattle swung a bit right last year and in our previous mayoral election. Things have been getting better when it comes to public order - homeless encampments are getting cleared out more often and that’s led to a decline in shootings.
We still have a ways to go and we really need to make progress faster. And our county executive is not going to be running for reelection.
I can't speak for others, but as a longtime resident of the Seattle area, I have noticed a big change in the focus of local progressives since the pandemic.
Prior to the pandemic, I actually voted mostly for progressives in local races, while voting for more moderate candidates in state and national races. The reason? I wanted more bike lanes and more public transit in the city, and the progressive wing seemed much more serious about it than the moderate wing, which mostly catered to people with cars.
Since the pandemic, things have changed. In 2021, the most important issue for people traveling around the city without a car was no longer how often the bus ran, but how safe you were on the bus, waiting for the bus, and walking to the bus, from homeless drug addicts. This caused lots of people I follow who are big supporters of public transit to support the more moderate candidate, in spite of having pushed for progressives in the past. At the same time, blog posts from local progressives that used to focus on general urbanism and the need to make the city less car-dominated switched their emphasis to arguments in favor of defunding the police and lax general police enforcement. In the city attorney's race, the progressive who lost to the Republican did so because she openly said she wasn't going to prosecute shoplifters.
Even public meetings held by the local transit agency about service restructures seemed to have been infiltrated by progressive politics. In 2015, I attended some meetings around bus restructures for the 2016 opening of two new light rail stations. The focus at the meetings was about improving mobility for all in the most efficient way and, even though, they had to comply with laws against racial discrimination in service allocation, race was not at all the focus of the discussions, and I felt like everyone's opinion was valued. In 2022, I attended another meeting about a service restructure planned for 2024 in a different part of town. This time, the discussion was all about race, and making sure that people of color in particular had good mobility options. I left the meeting feeling like, as someone who did not represent either people of color or disabled people, that my opinions were simply unvalued, and that the transit agency didn't give a rats ass whether people like me ever rode the bus or not.
So, yes, progressive politics in Seattle has gone too far, yes, there was a backlash. But, at the same, we have an educated population who understands that electing Donald Trump as president of the United States fixes none of it, so this backlash did not really translate into a rightward shift in the presidential election. You have to look at local races to see it.
ooc, did you vote Woo or Rinck?
Yep, I think the backlash hit Seattle first and is now spreading to San Francisco, LA, and Portland. We elected a Republican city attorney in 2021.
Metro Vancouver has taken a pronounced right-wing turn; the BC Conservatives (who up until this last election were a total non-entity electorally) came within a few seats of a majority. And prior to that the ruling NDP has curtailed or reversed several of their major drug use policies, because they're left-wing but can read a poll.
It will be interesting to see, but Portland probably did take a rightward swing given the retraction of drug legalization and some neighborhoods push back on the homeless camps. But Portland also basically rewrote the way it's government is organized, they realigned how the Mayor and City Council interact, who oversees what, including the additional of a city manager. From what I've heard the expectation is this will result in less finger pointing and more responsibility. We will see....
More than just the West Coast. I genuinely have felt physically ill and unsafe at the Central Library in Denver, which is especially depressing because it's the closest library location to my house.
“Here are your taxpayer supplied needles. Now use this designated children’s playground as your fentanyl market.”
Boulder's main library literally had to be shut down for rehabilitation due to methamphetamine contamination.
My buddy is a city attorney for Boulder and has all the library addresses memorized because of how often law enforcement has to respond to stuff going on at them.
I'm sorry to hear that. I used to be a docent there before the pandemic. I didn't have much trouble with the homeless people, and yeah, you needed to use the bathrooms on the second-fifth floors instead of the first floor. The security staff got rid of the people who were acting out. I think they're actually going to police the bathrooms more than they used to, and naturally they don't teach that skill in library school.
I'm hoping the big remodel they recently completed will change the vibe of the place! (I attended the "open house" celebration a couple months ago or so, but haven't been inside for any length of time since then.)
Denver is an exclave of the West Coast now.
The Seattle Central Public Library is, in my opinion, the coolest building on the entire west coast. It is a shame how unpleasant it has become to be inside - the bathroom stalls have had their doors removed, so that it's easier for docents to check if people are shooting up or ODing!
Wow! I don't think my kidneys would cooperate in a public bathroom stall with no door!
I overstated the case a bit - they'r these very tiny (maybe 18" tall) saloon doors, which are somehow even more absurd than the door just being absent. Like in the latter case you could at least convince yourself that they just forgot to put it on, but with these, it's very clear that there's something untoward about this bathroom...
Interestingly, for the past two Sundays I've been taking my daughter to the main branch of the San Francisco public library to play D&D (kids these days and the easy time they have getting to play D&D!!!) and it's been safe and pleasant.
That’s too bad. Their intentions need to be left behind because clearly the results are not good. The backlash is coming. Matt needs to get their ear.
Exclusionary zoning.
I’m totally against shooting up in
libraries. But then other people talking about jailing citizens for smoking on outdoor train platforms and I remember why I am leery of the impulse for more order.
As Matt said, strong enforcement doesn't have to literally mean that, you light up a cigarette on an empty train platform, you immediately get hauled to jail. But, it does meant that, if you do it, you will be told by security that smoking is not allowed on the train platform and be asked to stop. If you continue to refuse to either stop or leave, eventually, the police will be called, and you will be hauled to jail, but at that point, you fully deserve what you are getting because you have refused repeated demands to follow the rules.
Arresting people for smoking on subway platforms is different from jailing them.
Do they have to wear hand cuffs for 60 minutes and then get to go on their way? I sort of think being publicly cuffed for an hour might be a better sanction than an actual trip to jail, it imposed mild humiliation without disruption.
Maybe they could just not smoke on train platforms.
I’m really leery of using coercion to avoid such trivial harms. People should also not wear clashing patterns of plaid. Having a one hour meeting with someone who is poorly dressed is much worse aesthetically than smelling a whiff of smoke on an outdoor platform. If the bar for shamming is so low freedom will teeter
I think the vast majority of people would agree that smoking on a subway platform is offensive in a way that dressing badly isn't.
Speak for yourself. I can tolerate the plaid better than the disgusting smoke.
Another way to think of it may be that the harm isn't just being done to the other passengers, it's a long-term harm against the "business" (or service, in this case). If a restaurant refused to kick out a smoker, I wouldn't go back.
Should we reconsider bringing back some form a corporal punishment? 5 lashings is cruel, but is it more cruel than 5 month in prison, and the loss of income, disconnect from family, etc ? We don't necessarily need to have have physical punishment, could there be modern equivalents? I'll jokingly suggest you lose access to your smartphone (only jokingly since I don't think you could enforce it, as getting another would be easy). Modern version of the stocks with social media companies required to carry your embarrassment to everyone in your area?
I do think corporal punishment might be better than a sentence of several months, but I don’t want anyone flogged for smoking in the wrong place or speeding.
Sure, but that is just about proportionality. The penalty for speeding, outside of the most reckless scenarios is usually a fine. That seems reasonable. Further punishment requires evidence of actual endangerment of others.
What should the penalty be for someone that has stolen goods worth more than, say $5k? Or what about a drunken assault that resulted in a minor injury?
Amd as far as I know it is usually a citation, I don't think police go straight to arresting, though of course any time the police are involved things can escalate.
Agree really good article for Matt to write since I think it is obviously true but I think evidenced in the Chris Hayes tweet difficult to articulate or stand up for if u are a dem politician or just someone who is liberal and doesn’t want to be the bad guy. Rhetorically I think dems have been in a bad place over this I’ve seen our progressive mayor who I like address a particularly egregious violent crime by saying she was going to invest more in our neighborhoods. It just made her look terrible to give this nonresponse response to some young girl being killed or whatever, need to equip dem politicians with better talking points and not attack them like crazy on line when they talk like normal humans.
Speaking bluntly: Chris Hayes sounds like a complete wuss in that thread.
Every law is ultimately enforced by a man (or woman) with a gun and the threat of incarceration. Every single law, whether that be speeding, tax evasion or arson. If you don't want to use those to enforce a law, then you are really saying you don't want that law at all.
This is sort of the Libertarian's refrain, don't make a law if you can't stand for someone one day dying over it.
It feels like some people are yearning for something semi-law status, maybe just enforced by social pressure.
This semi-law status is what a lot of these "community-based justice" models amount to. There's a lot of magical thinking around the ability of "community" to provide a social structure in which no one feels like even thinking of committing a crime.
Posse and vigilante violence.
When I hear prison and police abolition people talk, they are just calling for barbarism.
Freddie deBoer ran a challenge among his readers to suggest what should be done with someone like George Floyd's murderer, Derek Chauvin, in a "defund the police" society, and the best anyone had was "community service, and then if he doesn't do it, he's an outlaw and has no protection from whatever people want to do him."
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/winner-the-derek-chauvin-defund-challenge
One of the leaders of the police abolition movement literally called for that on twitter a few years ago. It’s not the “hushed solution they don’t talk about” it’s the solution they talk about but is not communicated widely to the rest of us through the media because the sympathetic media like vox thinks is crazy or harmful to a cause they otherwise support.
"No one's calling for vigilante justice to replace policing."
"Vigilante justice is replacing policing only in places where the police have pulled back."
"Actually, it's good for vigilante justice to replace policing."
It kind of follows from their premises: that policing is not actually about reducing crime, it’s about keeping poor people and especially black people in their place. If you buy that (I don’t, obviously) vigilantism from the victim’s community is likely to be a much better alternative than turning to the KKKops who are not actually interested at all in justice etc.
The bit that annoys me more than any other is that as an observational fact about some parts of some police forces in some areas that is, at the very least, plausible.
But instead of concluding that what we need is a police force that works like the ones in TV cop shows and then trying to work out how we get there from what we have, they conclude that these shows are "copaganda" and that this is an impossible fantasy.
Equally frustrating is the right-wing mirror image who also believe that violently keeping poor people in their place rather than treating everyone equally and treating crimes according to their seriousness rather than the status of their victim is a fantasy - but they like the violence and want to get police to "take the gloves off" and to be more violent, more aggressive and more discriminatory.
This brings up an intellectually interesting question for me as a political geographer: how do you then define the boundaries of the “community” that is empowered to administer justice within its jurisdiction? The thing that kills me about a lot of these “radical” proposals is that they just end up recreating the nation-state, but smaller.
They’re just blind to the fact that “community justice” and “frontier justice” are invariably the same thing.
The KKK was literally a community justice organization, among other things. Not the precedent you'd think progressives would turn to yet here we are! Truly insane stuff.
I think there are less extreme examples than the klan, whose mission in any event was never to enforce the law.
It was absolutely to enforce their version of public order, which was popular with a large subset of the population and needless to say very unpopular with the others.
The current President-elect is proof that social mores don’t enforce good behavior. As long as we depend on social adherence aren’t we fundamentally depending on culture homogeneity - ie. we all agree on the same unwritten rules? The Greater Evil concept says that your libertarian example may actually be correct.
Afghanistan has community-based justice. You could call it restorative.
Interestingly, a few of today's commentators have weighed in with "the community needs to do more" angles that were coming from the right side of this issue.
So maybe there's some common ground between the tough and soft crowd. The difference in the comment was that the social justice side sees community justice straight up replacing the police, while the other side sees it as a partnership that gradually makes aggressive policing less neccessary.
Well, I would say the conventional old-school conservative take on “community” in this context is of the “bringing up your kids right in a two-parent household” variety. The left-wing version of community tends to be much more diffuse. I think part of the left imagining of community is acknowledging that families and kinship networks often are more complex than the nuclear family ideal, which I think is totally fair enough. But they lose me when we get to the “these kinship networks qua community will provide the moral and judicial framework for peaceful coexistence” - for one thing, you’ve just reinvented the state but smaller, and for another, you’re hiding the ball on what coercive measures you will inevitably need to employ.
Most educated liberals grow up in environments that are basically de-policed. They are communities that DO work because the police so rarely have to be called. The vast majority of these communities are like Matt’s example of the smoker in the restaurant: they just don’t do it because they understand the consequences.
IMO, that should be our goal. Not abolishing the police, but establishing a universal enforcement of norms that allows society to mostly not need them. Which means you need a lot of policing up front, and then a highly professionalized force on the back end.
The problem is that higher income neighborhoods/nice restaurants are able to self police because everyone there has something to lose. I don’t open break the law at home because I don’t want my neighbors to think I’m a criminal. I don’t behave in anti-social ways in public because even a small disorderly conduct charge could potentially ruin my career. If you have severe mental health problems and are living on the streets, or even if you’re employed on and off and bouncing from house to house, none of this applies to you.
Indeed, which is why it would be wonderful to have even extremely low rent housing like SROs make a comeback.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the banning of SROs in the 50’s and 60’s preceded the 70s-90s crime wave.
I actually do think that it's a coincidence. It has much more to do with the rise of drug trades and cultural changes than SROs.
The reason NIMBYs didn't like SROs is that they tend to attract people with poor impulse control/alcohol issues/who have less to loose. By the way, the cause and effect between having less to lose and having less impulse control is one of those both directions things.
I think you're underestimating well-meaning people looking at SROs, comparing them with the nice apartments or single-family suburban homes they live in, saying "SROs are really gross and bad, no one should be living like that", and then banning SROs so that indeed, no one lives like that (they live on the street instead).
I mean, I'm not saying it was ALL because of banning SROs. Obviously, lead was probably the strongest of about a dozen or so factors. But also, most of those factors are bidirectional, as you say. Most everything works like that!
Buddhists call it "interdependent coarising". I wish it was a more commonly understood concept, because I think it would really help discussions like these where the causality is this whole big jumble of bi- and multidirectional factors like this.
It's not just SROs - NIMBYs don't like new housing anywhere, period. They lobby against multi-family housing too!
Oh, that guy’s job sucks, let’s put him in the unemployment line! We’re stopping injustice!
Oh, that guy’s housing sucks, let’s put him on the street! We’re stopping injustice!
And so goes the march of progress.
Not MY progress. But yes.
I mean… ideally you also don’t break the law because you have a conscience and care about others, right? It’s not 100% self-interested cost-benefit calculation, right?
I've never understood this logic. Yes, a wealthy suburb prices out & pushes out all the criminal elements, and then there is little need for the police there to do anything. What does that have to do with the places where the criminals live?
Also, many of these liberals do eventually live in a city, and those are obvs not de-policed, and I think then they get to experience the tension between "I need laws enforced" and "these people enforcing the laws are not really like me"
My point is that suburban-raised liberals are not used to the harsh realities of law enforcement by the time they move to the cities. Most of their contact with LE comes through traffic stops that are usually either (A) part of a transparently predatory taxation-by-citation regime, which undermines the legitimacy of LE in their eyes, or (B) transparently pretextual -- and thus inherently adversarial -- searches for higher-level violations like drug possession.
In my own experience, the handful of times I was pulled over in high school, only ONCE was the cop NOT a complete dick questioning every aspect of my story -- and usually I was just speeding a little on empty stroads on my way home from freaking CHURCH. Those sorts of experiences can bias suburban-raised libs to see most police interactions as happening in bad faith, in an environment where most people are just minding their own damned business and at most only committing minor rule-breaking like rolling stop signs or going 15-over on a stroad whose design speed is stupidly higher than its posted speed.
So yeah, all I'm saying is that this bias helps explain why their default is to shrink in horror from the brutal realities of law enforcement when they arrive in communities that aren't already highly self-ordered.
And also, I'm saying that the desire to have communities of ALL economic levels that ARE self-ordered isn't illogical, but rather SHOULD be the goal. We shouldn't WANT to live in a permanent police state, we should WANT to be more like Japan. It's just that we have to accept that the path to get there involves establishing universal enforcement of basic laws.
Addendum: I think this also explains the tolerance for “disorder”. Most traffic laws are really just covering up the fact that stroads are a shitty design concept, and municipalities happily design their roads as stroads with much higher design speeds than the posted limits.
This undermines suburbanites’ belief in traffic laws as anything but administrative fictions, and primes them to consider laws against things like loitering and other petty crimes as similar administrative fictions.
So, if your primary experience with stop signs is that they’re “mostly a suggestion”, capriciously and arbitrarily enforced, then you’re primed to also say things like, “Hey, I get away with rolling stop signs all the time, who am I to judge someone for selling loosies or lighting up on transit? It’s not what I would do, and I wouldn’t tolerate them doing it in a restaurant, but it’s all part of a corrupt system that just wants to make money off people minding their business.”
I fear there's simply no way of doing this, especially in the United States where there's such a diversity of different cultures, social classes, and upbringings that impart norms and what's acceptable behavior from birth, without having an element of top-down social coercion, like the courts, police, when people break the laws that society has collectively decided should be on the books. As the Hayes example illustrates, when people refuse to abide by society's laws, what are we supposed to do?? Just shrug our shoulders and look the other way?? Wanna shoot up n leave used needles on the street, so kids or pets could be injured or get hepatitis C from a needlestick injury?? Go for it!! Nobody's stopping you! The "progressive" approach to these issues not only degrades the quality of life for law-abiding citizens, but is deeply cruel to the most marginalized members of society like the homeless, or addicts, by allowing people to slowly kill themselves, while destroying human social capital, of people who could've become future fathers, mothers, uncles, aunts, inventors, entrepreneurs, or business owners that would collectively benefit society, if only we utilized all the tools available to us. Sometimes, that includes coercion or the threat of punishment.
I don't know about other semi liberals but the bedroom suburb I grew up in (Burbank) was famously OVER policed. We had cops at every doughnut shop.
Is their job basically just to harass ‘undesirables’ until they leave? What’s their point?
They certainly did, in practice harass a bunch of innocent people. My oldest brother had long hair and tattoos and they pulled him over all the time. And we had massive problems with race discrimination.
That place sounds like hell on earth.
It's a joke. In New England whenever one see's a police car with the lights flashing, the joke is that they're trying to get to a Dunkin'.
Lol yeah my town in CT is pretty similar. My off-color joke since 2020 has been that our cops are too lazy to shoot minorities.
Of course, the truth actually is that (1) we have a pretty reasonably diverse force, (2) they don't completely ignore QOL stuff, but they also correctly prioritize more serious crimes, and (3) their biggest concern is competing for overtime hours babysitting road maintenance projects, which nets some of the best hustlers our highest public salaries -- I think they're maxing out around $250-275k right now.
If you are homeless (or even a blue collar worker with very bad teeth) you might not care so much about social ostracism. You’ll already be ostracized for your teeth, so…..
Well, no, most educated liberals grow up in overpoliced suburbs (where the cops have nothing better to do than go bust up a bunch of high school kids drinking underage) and this kind of experience really does have an impact on their thinking.
Sounds like you're saying the exact same thing.
Sort of? I wouldn’t call that “de-policed.” It’s more that a particular mindset stems from “cops just bust up our fun.”
I think my version is the liberal baseline. Yours is definitely a libertarian coded baseline. I think there’s another, conservative one where cops are just unquestioningly seen as sources of order - a “yeah, you caught me there, glad to have you around doing your job” - and probably another regressive one where cops are seen as putting people in their place”.
Lots of different ways to code and interpret the typology. Mine was specific to liberals.
People LOVE "semi law". BTW not just on the Left. This is how a lot of folks on the Right think about abortion- they don't think about enforcement, but just want the "moral statement" of saying it is illegal. Back in the day they supported unenforced sodomy laws for the same reason.
But the libertatians are right on this- the purpose of laws is to facilitate punishing people who violate them, not to allow folks to express their fee-fees.
I suspect we're going to see the same thing with immigration enforcement. It's still a pretty big unknown as to harsh the Trump administration is going to be in practice. But much harsher (and perhaps more important, more visible) than current status quo seems pretty likely. I suspect a lot of people bought the rhetoric that the crackdown is only going to round up Venezuelan gangs in Aurora or the flood of panhandlers on prostitutes that came to Queens (if that NyMag article is to be believed) not realizing that if Stephen Miller gets his way, harsh enforcement is going to ensnare way more than just "criminals".
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said similar after talking to people who voted for both her and Trump. She said that even voters with undocumented people in their family sometimes said that they were glad that Trump was going to deport what he called "criminals" because they thought he meant that he was going to deport gang members, not their hard-working family members.
Leopards, face, etc.
I think we're going to get the dictionary definition of "thermostatic reaction" when the population sees what Stephen Miller/Tom Homan/Kristi Noem/Donald Trump are about to do.
The more tough talk, the more people repatriate themselves, and the less harsh the enforcement needs to be.
Also how they think about paying taxes lol
This reminds me of Freddie deBoer's interesting mini project where he tried to source people's ideas on how defunding the police would actually work.
The only response that took the prompt seriously and literally suggested a wild west approach where criminals would become outlaws whom you could murder with impuny.
This is why Freddie bothers me so much, he is clearly a smart and clever guy. He just puts his foot in his mouth for silly reasons and personal beefs too often.
I believe Freddie is against police/prison abolition. This project was IMO quite good since it took the things people were saying seriously and insisted that they do as well.
Possibly true. However, I think that if you want to make a serious argument that Freddie doesn't "mostly open his mouth to change feet," I think you have a lot more bases to cover.
I think his commenting habits are much different than his writing and interviews. I wish that he would stay and engage instead of driving by with snarky mic drop style quips.
IIRC, he was asking for answers from other people not providing this answer himself.
Social pressure is no substitute for professional law enforcement. For starters, some people are sociopaths who don’t care about social pressure. Also, I have zero trust in social pressure to distinguish correctly between “this person is bad and deserves to be shunned” vs “this person is just kind of weird and I don’t like them/they’re a Bitch Eating Crackers.”
Edited to add: Also, this isn't "social pressure" exactly, but informal law enforcement systems are notorious for creating scapegoats. "All our crops failed? It's because of that weird old woman who lives alone in that hut! She must be a witch!"
Relatedly, social pressure is likely to be more biased than the police are, not less.
Yes! Recommended reading: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-the-dawn-of-everything?utm_source=publication-search
TL;DR: in absence of formal systems of law/monopoly on the legitimate use of force, social norms are reinforced by gossip and ostracization, which is a lot more disturbing than it sounds at first. "Imagine a high-school cafeteria social hierarchy stamping on a human face, forever."
To somewhat disagree, I think America (and possibly other places I dunno) are starting to see just how much it HAS relied on social pressure (despite claims of it being a low trust society) instead of police.
Consider things like porch pirates, people not paying fares on buses, noise disturbances in residential areas, shoplifting, and many more examples where it is simply impossible to have enough police to form credible threats.
When the social pressure breaks down you're essentially relying on citizens to deputize themselves as quasi law enforcement. Small surprise that many bus drivers don't want to get into a potentially violent situation with someone doesn't pay their fare. (Google to find hundreds of stories of bus drivers being assaulted over fare disputes.) If you work at a retail store making barely above minimum wage are you going to detan a shoplifter and risk being shot?
OK, very good point!
Let me amend my previous comment: social pressure has its place, BUT it works best when it's backed up by the threat of professional law enforcement.
Yeah I'd agree with that. I think it acts as a force multiplier but you're right, you can't multiply by zero so you need a (somewhat) credible threat backing it up.
That libertarian sentiment is some only-in-America brain poisoning. Police in Europe manage to arrest, say, a man selling loose cigarettes without murdering him.
I agree with Matt's overall point here but realizing the importance of social order and the ability to enforce it only highlights the fiasco that is our nation's routine police misconduct.
I mean the main issue with violence in American policing is that the country is awash with guns. Import 400 million firearms to Europe and see how well the cops handle every situation. The other issue is that if one cop in one city in America does something stupid one time, it becomes a "known" thing that cops can't handle that crime without killing people, rather than "one cop fucked up once". The number of otherwise rational people on Twitter who are convinced that cops are gunning down hundreds of black fare evaders on public transit is astounding.
I don't think the reputation that cops get is because someone sees one random cop doing bad things once in a while. I think cops have clearly leaned into the idea that any cop getting punished is unfair because the job is hard. Like a lot of unions, they have negotiated employment protections that protect bad cops and instead of pretending that they are being unfairly maligned, they need to be the ones that speak out most forcefully about bad actors among their ranks.
Police, very clearly to me, believe themselves to be above the law, I think that has led to a culture that is OK believing the worst about them.
This is definitely part of the problem, but the problem goes way beyond firearms. Eric Garner and George Floyd were both unarmed, were not suspected to be armed, and the police killed them without firearms.
“Police in Europe manage to arrest, say, a man selling loose cigarettes without murdering him”
Same in the US.
Eric Garner, of "I can't breathe" fame, was choked to death by NYPD for selling loose cigarettes.
No, he was choked while resisting arrest, which is a different crime.
In a free society, we should expect the police to enforce the law without killing suspects.
Back when I thought universal basic income might be coming, one major un-discussed benefit of it that I saw was the possibility of law enforcement cutting benefits rather than incarcerating people. As the benefits get bigger, the size of the punishment that can be imposed with zero physical force increases.
Not enough for aggravated assault or rape or whatever, but enough to give penalties for smoking on the subway or littering or speeding without having to have a physical altercation.
Great point!
I've always subscribed to a similar idea when the subject of public transit fares comes up: one advantage to charging fares is that it's easy to de facto ban disorderly people from public transit by disabling their credit cards or MetroPass cards or whatever at entry gates.
I never have looked at it from this angle. To ensure that fines are paid you would just subtract it from their UBI distribution.
That's an interesting idea.
Well, law is mostly enforced by social pressure too. A society that’s consistently enforcing laws at gunpoint is more of a military occupation than a government.
You just have to have a hierarchy of enforcement mechanisms and, game theory-style, a heavy violent one at the top should other options fail.
Right, the point isn't that people always get shot if they fail to comply with the law -- obviously that's not empirically the case. It's that at the end of the day that's the end result if you resist hard enough.
>>This is sort of the Libertarian's refrain, don't make a law if you can't stand for someone one day dying over it.<<
Am I alone in finding that an easy bullet to bite if the alternative is we don't get to have rules? I just don't seem capable of registering the putative moral force of the objection given the tradeoffs implicit in any response other than "yes, and?"
Most people's sense of ethics is calibrated to be much more outraged by acts of commission than acts of omission. Meaning:
"Look at this person who got choked to death while turnstile-jumping" = outrageous! Horrible! How cruel to kill someone over such a trifling offense!
"Think of all the people who would turnstile-jump in absence of enforcement; public transit would collapse, and that would be very bad for all public transit users" = too abstract, hard to get emotional about.
I guess I don’t really make the connection in the context of enforcing pre-existing non-facially absurd public law. To me it’s more like blaming gravity for someone jumping off a cliff to their death. I mean, yes, technically it’s a sine qua non, but it’s a known pre-existing risk against which the action was taken.
I don't think so. I think they want a fantasy world of no conflict that looks to them like "punching down." After all, "Karen's" are so derided now.
I would add that a lot of the readers here are going to be left-leaning and don't relate to the more conservative emotional reaction to public disorder. Like, when I see someone smoking on the train tracks, I want to smash their head with a baseball bat. Right there in public, in front of everyone else, so everyone clearly understands the f**ing rules and gets the f*** in line.
I don't, obviously, because that would have consequences for ME, and vigilantism is not the system we have agreed to as a society. But it is how I feel, and I am surely not alone in this. Remember there was an outpouring of support for Bernie Goetz back in the day.
Most men feel this way when they see blatant assholery. We just don’t act or emote on it.
I get murderously angry at some movie characters sometimes. Like, Boo and I were watching Day Of The Jackal last night (really good btw!) and there's a scene where this IRA gangster has the heroine's stepdaughter at knifepoint, and all I could think was that I'd have beaten the everloving shit out of him while the cops were on the way. Leave him alive and intact enough to recover, but there are just certain types of malignant evil in the world for which the only solution is to beat them down.
I give kudos to the actors. Being able to portray that kind of malignancy is itself a praiseworthy dramatic talent.
Not just men…
There's a great scene in the FX show Mr. Inbetween, if you have 3 spare minutes:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0z1ofdgOSRQ
The world is full of assholes, you do realize that?
Yeah, y'know why?
Why?
Because people let them get away with it.
See also, lack of sympathy for people who get run over while blocking traffic for a protest...
I have ranted before about the misguided idea of "I will inconvenience you until you agree with me" disruptions!
Not to mention the sheer stupidity of blocking a vehicle which could kill you. It's just Darwin at that point if you get hurt.
It's interesting that you frame this as a difference in liberal / conservative emotional reaction. I think everyone has dark fantasies about retribution, but cultural and situational norms dictate how they are expressed.
If I enumerated some of the terrible things that have crossed my mind when my comically annoying neighbors are juggling chainsaws and lighting M-80's in their driveway at 3:00 AM (that is only a slight exaggeration of their actual behavior) at work, I'd get a call from HR. But in other company I could go into some detail about the appropriate type and caliber of bullet to shatter kneecaps and it would be understood as healthy venting of the feelings of impotence that unruly neighbors engender.
I guess things go off the rails when these norms come to define political movements, like the violent rhetorical style of MAGA and the "Queers for Palestine" rhetorical style of whatever we're calling woke progressives these days.
If liberal/conservative is the wrong axis, here are six other axes to consider
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hofstede%27s_cultural_dimensions_theory
On this issue, I don't think the readership here tends to be as left-leaning as you might predict.
Clearly not. It's rather terrifying that I share the public square with so very many bloodthirsty and vengeful people.
Sitting in traffic and watching car after car flying by me, violating the HOV lane rules, never punished, is absolutely enraging.
Grace and tolerance are better
I mean, a lot of the 2010s feminist discourse around street harassment had that same vibe at times.
I got into a mini-argument one time with my sister, a social worker, about a video where a cop pulled a high school student out of a desk/chair combo to get them out of the room. We were ostensibly on the same overall side, that this interaction was not ideal, but my take was that the cop was way too aggressive with a high school girl, and her argument was that there shouldn't have been a cop there trying to do that in the first place, and it's like....that's a fine principle to have, and I certainly empathize with that as a base gut reaction, but once you start unpacking it, it falls apart. Assuming that this student was being disruptive, that the teacher or administrators had tried to get them to voluntarily leave the classroom, and the student had refused, and that the cop had probably tried to verbally ask them, as well....I just don't know what you do? It's not fair to the other kids, the teachers, etc., just to let one student disrupt an entire situation for everyone else.
This is a hard question for me. I live in an urban district with metal detectors and police officers in the schools. Childless community activists sometimes advocate for their elimination. But at PTA meetings, I have heard moms say that they do not want them removed, and that their kids would not go to school without them. I am lucky enough to live in a part of town where I don't have a lot of worries about my kids, and there are not "beefs" among the teens in my neighborhood. So it's easy for me to say they are helping to create the "school to prison pipeline." And also, I am white and these mothers who advocate for the detectors and officers are mostly Black. If we say "listen to Black women," this is a good opportunity.
This id exactly the type of situation where a modicum of class and racial deference are in order. Similarly, blue collar clients should defer to me when I explain how the courts work. Same principle
This is also the situation at my son's high school, to a T.
I'm on your sister's side on that one. If you go back to Matt's restaurant smoker example. A lot of pressure --- from teachers/restaurant staff, patrons/students, escalated manager/principal --- is brought to bear before the police are called, dispatched, and arrive to apply physical force. With the police down the hall in the school essentially doing nothing but waiting for a kid to act out very little of that initial pressure occurs, and the hormone ridden, impulse impaired teenager has no time to think before you get to police officer arrives who pretty quickly tend to escalate to violence to enforce immediate compliance because that's their training. I saw this in my kid's affluent suburban high school, and I really wasn't a fan.
"pretty quickly tend to escalate to violence to enforce immediate compliance because that's their training"
Ah, that's the problem I've been trying to express. That shouldn't be the training for police officers. Police should be accustomed to noncompliance and should not expect nor seek immediate compliance. They should be prepared to escalate if necessary, but persuasion and implied violence should be where they start.
If that's the training for police officers, then that explains why people want to keep police out of interactions. In which case, that's what needs to be changed: they need to learn how to de-escalate, how to obtain compliance without the need for force, how to persuade. And only escalate to violence when faced either with violence, or egregious and persistent noncompliance in a situation where there is no reasonable alternative to violence (rather than just waiting them out).
You have to have a police force that people want to call.
"Waiting them out" is not in the police playbook. Let's say an officer asks you to step out of your car and you don't, they'll tell you to get out of your car, maybe a few times, and in a very short amount of time, like a minute or so, they'll forcefully drag you out. So noncompliance to violence in just a couple minutes. And it's that moment of violence when things can go really bad really fast --- for everyone involved. The idea that if the officer just stayed there and waited a half hour when the citizen would just give up out of boredom and inevitability just never happens.
The problem with that training is that it is inimicable with Americans' conception of how the world works. Embedded deep in our culture is the notion that no one really stands above us, and so no one can really tell us what to do, especially the government. I can tell my boss to eff off, I can tell my wife to eff off, I can tell my nosy neighbor to eff off, I can even tell the building inspector citing me for having weeds too long to eff off, and none of them can whack me over the head with a club when I do.
So in encounter with a police officer, when emotions are running high and discernment is probably low, we expect people to act contrary to their basic assumptions about their place in the world. Unnecessary violence is going to be the predictable result of that.
"I can tell my boss to eff off, I can tell my wife to eff off, I can tell my nosy neighbor to eff off"
Not if you expect to have gainful employment, a happy marriage, or reasonably ok relationships with your neighbors, you can't.
Seriously! What is the matter with people? Why are so many people such angry, confrontational assholes?
I'm not, in fact I've probably never told anyone to eff off, but deep in the American psyche is the sense that you have the right to say that if you want to --- "Don't tread on me" "liberty or death", live free or die", etc. And although no one would think it's without consequence, only the police can actually coerce me to do what they say. I can always find a new job, a new neighbor, and well those two anyway, but absolutely none of them can make do what I don't want to do.
"they need to learn how to de-escalate, how to obtain compliance without the need for force, how to persuade. And only escalate to violence when faced either with violence, or egregious and persistent noncompliance in a situation where there is no reasonable alternative to violence"
+eleventy gazillion, and I'd be happy to pay higher taxes for improved recruitment and training of police officers who are amenable to the above.
Both are good, but will have limited effect without better management who can cultivate some esprit de corps and desire to serve the public.
I think what you're missing here is the time constraints that everyone is operating under, or the economic time-value of their labor. If I'm a cop or a principal, and I spend 20 minutes trying to deescalate, that may be better, but you've just taken me away from doing my primary job or responding to another call. Maybe the principal can stay at school a half-hr later to finish all their work, but if you're a cop, the consequences could be catastrophic. What if you're late responding to a domestic violence call or first on the scene of an accident??? Maybe that's a failure of overburdened police departments, and too few officers, but that's where we are.
But that's a deliberate policy choice, not that there is inherently a need to compel compliance quickly. So we've decided have more violence rather than increase the number of available police officers.
And I'm really not sure this is a well thought out time and motion thing. I think the sense is quick compliance is utmost, even if there isn't anything else happening. Most of the time most police officers are kind of not doing anything other than patrolling. In a middle class suburb they can go days or more without there being anything truly urgent. Police already have a prioritization policy even if they're currently engaged. I was in a minor fender bender once when a call came in for I don't even remember what, officer said sorry folks gotta go, and off she went.
Somehow we managed it when I went to high school in the 90s. I guess at some point it would have escalated all the way to the police, but even when there were very occasional fistfights among students it just got broken up and they were suspended. Never saw a cop get involved in anything, and it was pretty much fine.
I don't think Chris sounds like a wuss, I think he sounds like most people would if you asked them the same question. Most people don't think too deeply about stuff like this, I don't believe. If you asked most normies if they thought people should be arrested for smoking in non-smoking areas, they'd say no, but if you asked them if SOMETHING should be done, they'd also say yes. Most people don't think too deeply about the idea that once you create a rule, your are implicitly backing it up with the threat of state-sanctioned violence if the situation devolved enough.
You better tell that to Chris’s face. He lifts weights you know.
One problem is how easy violence is in this country. In Europe a lot of social policing is done by normal citizens and strict cultural norms. In the U.S. we have offloaded a lot of this responsibility from the public to police over safety concerns.
I lived in Europe for many years and my experience is that American gun culture plays a huge role in differences between American and European policing of social norms. I was assaulted and/or physically threatened way more in Western Europe than anywhere I've lived in the US. But I've only ever been threatened with being shot in the US — never actually assaulted. (Someone at a truck stop diner did once pull a knife out and put it to my neck, but it was to illustrate a point about how dangerous humans can be.)
To a certain extent Americans have to offload responsibility for public safety to people who can legally wield guns. Smoking in a restaurant is one thing, but you never know when asking someone to put out a cigarette at a subway platform will get you shot. In many parts of Europe it is likely to get you punched, very unlikely to get you stabbed and vanishingly unlikely to get you shot.
I agree and think that, realistically, the guy smoking on the subway who looks like he could be a physical threat also hoped the turnstile.
There is a big benefit for public spaces to enforce low level rules because it keeps potentially dangerous people out. I don't want to bump into scary people in nice restaurants or on the subway!
Geez - where in Western Europe were you being assaulted on the reg?
But yes - I live in the UK, and it’s hard to overemphasize to what extent most Europeans (I’ve also lived in France and Finland) think U.S. gun culture is insane.
I mean, "regularly" being like once every three to five years, as defined by actual violence or coming very close to it. Still *way* more than in the US. Not in one country, literally all over Western Europe. Usually involving some mode or combination of modes of transportation. Like when a bunch of drunk soccer hooligans get on the train and start drinking and smoking, just looking to start something. Or people stumbling back to the train station drunk.
Once during rush hour someone clipped me with their car while I was riding a bike, became irate, ran after me, knocked me off my bike and tried very hard to pin me to the ground and beat the snot out of me. I still have a scar from that one.
Contrast that to the US where someone hit me with their car while I was riding a bike (that time I went through the windshield). They got out of their car to see if I was dead, then got back in and tried to drive away when I was a) not dead and b) looked very pissed off. (I was actually just groggy from being hit by a car.)
"They got out of their car to see if I was dead, then got back in and tried to drive away..."
Jesus. They didn't stick around to ask if you're injured, offer to call 911, give you their insurance details, ask if you needed help getting back home?
And the guy who tried to beat you up after HE clipped you with his car, just... ugh.
Too many people are just plain shitty.
Is it safety concerns, or watching what happens to the Daniel Pennys of the world?
Safety concerns. We are a violent society over all, but the experience of violence has shifted dramatically over the last half or three quarters of a century. As a kid growing up in the sixties and seventies I and my friends were pretty routinely involved in low level fights and skirmishes, really right up through our late teen years. That reality has changed dramatically such that my own kids have never been involved in any fistfight, and school yard scuffles that were routine in my day were virtually nonexistent in my kids suburban schools. At the same time this change was happening in frankly white middle class communities, gun violence as a routine component of youth violence spiked dramatically among the urban poor.
So you have many fewer people stepping into a confrontation both for lack of experience and because of the rational view that someone acting out could also be armed, add in the ability to call 911 instantly on a cell phone, and everyone hunkers down and calls the police rather than acting themselves.
Absent an actual death, Daniel Penny would never have been charged because it would have been easy for the authorities to look at that situation and arrest crazy, violent, homeless guy Jordan Neeley. The blame for who caused the incident would have been both clear and easy to assign in one direction --- even if Penny was partly culpable. Direct to my point, if two other had joined Penny and beaten Neeley down, again absent a death, the whole thing would have looked very different and easy to conclude three people were correct and crazy guy was in the wrong.
Neeley had a history of assaulting people, left his drug treatment diversionary program, and had a huge rap sheet. He was mentally ill. He chose to feed his substance abuse rather than get treatment. He should have been institutionalized.
I am a lot more fearful of doing social policing in the US because of the abundance of guns.
Is that still true in Europe, now that they have a more diverse society?
+1000
Monopoly on the Legitimate Use of Force (I call it MLUF for short) is probably the single most basic function of government, one on which even libertarians agree.
Sort of. Transit cops can issue public disorder citations to smokers without guns coming into it. Parking control officers generally don't carry guns while enforcing parking rules, for instance.
And if those citations are ignored? Enforcement escalation happens and that falls to a man with a gun.
Sure, eventually, as with traffic citations, things can escalate. But we want more first encounters with citations to get far fewer eventual escalations with guns.
That’s not very fair. He’s frankly acknowledging that he doesn’t have good solutions to the downsides suggested by his preferred policies, which is a damn sight better than the usual “once policing is gone and society is just, there just won’t be crime (or property?) pixie dust you normally get.
But he does ultimately say, "I would rather not enforce this law than use police to enforce it." He's not willing to even let *other* people confront someone breaking the law.
Yes, he is choosing the wrong set of tradeoffs, by my lights. But at least he is pointing out the real problem that absent enforcement compliance will be compromised.
Yep. You can either be an "all taxation is theft" voluntarist / anarchist, or you have to accept that at some point, if you tell people, "You have to follow the rules," some of them are going to respond, "Yeah? Who's going to make me?" There has to be _somebody_ who can, in fact, make them accept the social contract, otherwise the contract is moot.
Yea, I understand he is trying to share an emotion that I kinda share if I look at the situation in a certain way. I've been drunk on public transport coming home from a party and I wouldnt like it if I had been cited for that. But treating that emotion as a foundation to build social stability on, and to amplify it is intellectual weakness. Its the kind of argument that should make readers feel contempt or at least a recognition of his unseriousness.
Now that's really gross, John. Actually laws are obeyed because the vast majority of citizens obey the law and respect one another not because we're afraid of being killed by a cop.
Discussions about fighting crime remind me of the nature vs. nurture debate: a false dichotomy. Public order requires enforcement and cultural norms. Enforcement and norms reinforce each other, positively or negatively.
If the left doesn't establish public order, the fascists will, and they'll do it in a much less just and much more inhumane was.
I agree with Freddie on a thing!
You should have it framed!
You misspelled your name David Frum.
Lefties certainly haven't hesitated to enforce rules about what views should be expressed and to punish people for violating them. It's not a belief that rules shouldn't be enforced so much as that rules shouldn't be enforced against the Right People, the Good People. An idea with which Trumpism (with its *very* different definition of the Right People) agrees with completely.
For example, I chose not to wear a mask during the last few months (?) of the subway mask mandate because I had gotten the vaccine and felt like that was cause enough to experience normal life again. I got plenty of tsk-tsks from people who clearly paid zero heed to the >75% of black dudes on the subway who also eschewed masks.
I’ve been considering writing a “Republican canards that are true” post, and the first one would absolutely be that a certain kind of NPR tote bag liberal basically sees ‘marginalized individuals’ as big dumb children. This obvious and patronizing double standard is embarrassing to those who employ it and, quite frankly, often just racist in its application.
I used to joke that the only thinking that could get you kicked off the bus in Seattle was taking off your mask for a minute…unless you were doing so to smoke fentanyl, in which case it was fine. The depressing thing is that it was pretty accurate
I also predict some people will tell on themselves in the replies with their explanations of why it’s eminently reasonable for some shit-eating Ohioan hipster in Brooklyn to feel safe bitching out big surly guys in hoodies on the subway as long as their ancestry is visibly European.
I will also reiterate, this is after vaccines had been available for a while, I was not flippant about acquiring or transmitting the virus.
COVID shined a big spotlight on how some liberals want certain rules enacted only for certain people. And the reaction to that triggered a lot of political radicalization.
Lefties seeing marginalized people as big dumb children - so obviously true. Remember this ad?
https://youtu.be/PDOLkGV4-Ls?si=BFTmfwVoPNcbDqEN
The non-white dude there has a job- not to be a human being with his own wants, needs and desires. No, his job is to be a prop to allow the main character to show he isn’t completely irredeemable by saving him from Trumpism.
Have you considered the possibility that tsk-tsking you seemed *safer* than tsk-tsking a Black dude?
(Or, maybe you really can read minds!)
“I also predict some people will tell on themselves in the replies with their explanations of why it’s eminently reasonable for some shit-eating Ohioan hipster in Brooklyn to feel safe bitching out big surly guys in hoodies on the subway as long as their ancestry is visibly European.”
- me, above
You just caused me to spit coffee on the keyboard laughing. That was a very nearly perfect example of what you were talking about.
That's not really refuting the point though . . . .
Oh, my comment wasn't an attempt to "refute" his claim. It's a stereotype either way if his is an accurate depiction. I was just wondering if he had considered a different spin. The OP starts off the comment by stating he was the target of rebukes for eschewing mask-wearing on the subway by people who ignored the same infraction by Black men. This is in the lead up to a subsequent claim about how a certain "NPR tote bag liberal basically sees ‘marginalized individuals’ as big dumb children."
IOW he's invoking the specter of the soft bigotry of low expectations.
I was raising the possibility that it might actually be simple fear, or indeed even respect (that is, white liberals' respect for the capacity of Black men to not take shit from the likes of them). Also, remember, we were seeing a crime surge in that era, so understandably a lot of people were feeling skittish about their personal safety. I myself had occasion to ride public transportation back in 2020—on the bus in Seattle. The city had made the bus free, and I noticed a fair amount of maskless scofflaws. The bus drivers weren't enforcing the rules, that's for sure. When I saw fellow riders going maskless, it angered me. But I refrained from admonishing them not because I viewed anyone as a "dumb child" but because I didn't want to get knifed. That town was on edge.
“that is, white liberals' respect for the capacity of Black men to not take shit from the likes of them”
Keep coming up with these howlers.
I have spoken to many, many people in Los Angeles that believe that the people smoking meth in the library are innocent victims of circumstance while Donald Trump should rot in jail for the rest of his life for incorrectly reporting campaign expenses.
To be fair, if people thought that was the only crime Trump had committed they probably wouldn't feel that way.
It's a bit like Capone with tax evasion. Trump is a sexual assaulter, he just can't get convicted on it. Sexual assault usually leads to serious consequences
That's probably true, their attitude was "I need to see him in cuffs, I don't care what for"
Me though, I contain multitudes. I think the campaign finance stuff was the worst kind of politically-driven BS and sets a dangerous precedent. I also think he should be hanged for Jan 6. Details matter in a system of laws!
I think you’re not paying attention at all. They don’t believe in using police violence or arrest against anyone, even if those people express transphobic opinions or whatever. They do believe in unleashing the full force of cancellation and internet criticism on people, whether murderers or subway smokers or ableists. It’s very different from Trumpists, who really do have the definition of Right People you’re talking about. It’s a de-escalation of physical violence but an inflation of the significance of verbal violence.
Not necessarily. CHAZ didn't have "cops", but they did have people with guns telling other people what to do.
“They don’t believe in using police violence or arrest against anyone, even if those people express transphobic opinions or whatever.”
Get out of town lmao
It's a perfect example of one group the law binds but does not protect (decent, tax-paying citizens) and another group the law protects but does not bind (anti-social criminals).
Oh come on this is an obvious false equivalence
Also see Starmer's precipitous drop in approval rating after how he handled anti-immigration protests in the UK.
I'm sorry, but speaking of smoking, what is Chris Hayes smoking in that thread? Not even because of the contents, but because of the date. He was still on that bullshit in February 2022? I get that half the country pretended not to know what laws are for a few weeks in June 2020, but 20 months later, really? And this was the same side of the political spectrum (idk about Hayes specifically, but his ilk) who aggressively supported COVID lockdowns. It's just absurd. "Well, I guess I never thought it all the way through but it looks like laws have to be enforced with force, and given that reality, I guess we can't have laws" in 2022 is bananas. Matt is being extremely patient here explaining "well what happens if the guy masturbating on the bus doesn't want to stop? Somebody has to do something, right?" We all know this, don't we?
Sorry, I usually try to be more substantive, but this was one of my true "what the fuck" moments of the last 4 years along with 1/6, the right suddenly sanewashing anti-vax conspiracy theories, the right suddenly supporting Putin, and the left pretending there are no differences between men and women. There's no defence of it, there's no nuance, it's just insane.
I try not to be surprised anymore when people simply reject the notion that there are tradeoffs. Socially optimal number of child murders not 0 etc.
Oh yeah, I forgot open Hamas support on the left.
Mmm, roasted red peppers, a warm toasted pita, maybe olive tapenade on the side… wait what were we talking about?
I am certainly open in my support for hummus! Makes a great dip, you can put it on sandwiches, and if you blend it with some lemon juice/vinegar, it makes pretty good salad dressing.
It’s also the onion of a rich entitled person who is completely disconnected with the average American. Tolerating minor public disorder is a lot easier when everything else in your life is pristine. When somebody’s life is unstable, it’s harder to tolerate public spaces being uncomfortable.
The internet and social media have ruined people's ability to put any brakes on their ideas once they've been stretched past their intended breaking point.
So what explains the spike in disorderly conduct on airplanes. Because I sort of feel like it’s key part of the story here. Let me explain.
I really don’t think I’m going too much out on a limb to say that there is a pretty big Venn diagram crossover between people who light up cigarettes on subways and people who shoplift; shocker, it’s likely men 16-25.
But people being unruly on airplanes? Going to guess this is NOT mostly men between 16-25 given this cohort tends not to have too much money for a variety of banal reasons. So that begs the question, what’s the tie here? Also, the other question why did incidents like this spike in America but apparently not other countries?
My hypothesis, I think we underestimate the impact of the half assed way we enforced covid restrictions. There is has been a lot of ink spilled regarding the fact that Biden and blue jurisdictions took too long to lift Covid rules (something I agree with). There has been even more ink spilled about how street protests were “allowed” but stuff like religious services.
But I don’t think there has been nearly enough ink spilled about the banal ways Covid rules were enforced on a day to day basis. And more importantly, the fact rules were enforced in an arbitrary and inconsistent manner. In theory, NY was more restrictive than Florida. RDS touted his “free state of Florida” ethos quite famously. In practice? Yeah difference was not nearly as wide. As Matt has noted, there’s only so much you can do to dictate private decisions. In Florida, restaurants may have been “open” but open table data will tell you people were still staying away. In New York, you had “rules” regarding bars and restaurants. But practically speaking it was laughable. Remember those idiotic dividers? We all knew they were a joke. There’s a reason pre vaccine death rates between blue NY and red FL weren’t that different because in reality the rules and daily life weren’t actually that different.
So what does that have to do with crime and disorder? Well internationally it explains a lot. Those of us in America I don’t think appreciate how much stricter covid rules in almost every peer country. Look how many British politicians got in trouble for what we would consider small bore violations. You can’t shoplift if you can’t even leave your house past certain times.
And in America? What it meant is that for a year we had a period where Covid rules were kind of…fugazi. Some rules were strictly enforced, others not at all. And it basically depended on not just industry (restaurants vs colleges) but even the between business themselves. Is it any wonder that in a world where for 8 months rules were sort of what you decided they were there became a brief period where that mindset took over other parts of life like behavior on airplanes?
Long post. And kind of half baked hypothesis. But I kind of think I’m on to something with this.
So, I think your timeline and cause is correct. In short I'd say we as Americans showed to Americans that the rules are not enforced. We like to blame subway smokers, and park addicts and point at the SJW for infusing a lot of race and identity into this. BUT all tiers of society saw the same thing, they saw that they could get away with things. They run a red light and nothing happens, so they do it again. Something that does feel very different is socialization, it feels to me that we all got way more selfish and entitled top to bottom. We are all fighting for space and want what's ours and we can't all have it so people got mad. I genuinely, think this is a multi-cause problem and not easily solved, social media, streaming, covid isolation, WFH, credit card debit and wealth perception. I genuinely say to myself most days (I live in NYC) remember other people exists, Fran Lebowitz was right, "pretend it's a city".
Social isolation makes people more selfish. It’s a psychological effect (which I am just quoting a researcher so I don’t know the quality of the underlying evidence.)
As Chris Rock said in another context, "a man is only as faithful as his options".
The "I'm a sucker if I follow these bullshit rules no one really cares about anyway" effect.
I remember learning that almost half of all car registrations were expired in Oregon earlier this year and it was absolutely a wtf moment. Like am I the idiot in this instance for renewing my registration??
The Ferguson effect, followed by the George Floyd action seem to be a more likely explanation than the vagaries of COVID-era rules enforcement. Though they likely both had an effect.
https://www.city-journal.org/article/new-evidence-for-the-ferguson-effect
So the article in question doesn't mention disorder on airplanes. Which is sort of my point. In fact I have real real questions if a research cited "Ferguson Effect" for disorder on airplanes. There's a small rise from 2015 onwards, than huge spike in 2021. So that would mean a 6 year lag from "Ferguson" to real world effects? Not really sure about that. Also, there is a small rise from 2015 so you can maybe say there's something there. Here's the problem, who's dealing with disorderly passengers; flight attendants not cops. But also again, think of the cohort of people where Ferguson effect would have had most impact on criminal behavior and then think of the people most likely to cause problems on an airplane. There's just a lot not lining up here for me.
Regarding "Floyd effect". I think this sort of the point of my post; this is much too narrow a lens. Rules regarding all sorts of behavior became completely out of whack and much more arbitrary. We focus a lot on how much various members of the scientific community undermined their own authority by supporting protests but turning around and saying other activities are too dangerous. I'm saying it's much much bigger than that. All sorts of officials undermined the rules we were supposedly trying to follow. Trump number 1, but yes people like Cuomo as well with the arbitrary way certain activities only had to be loosely regulated (like going to restaurants) and other activities strictly regulated.
I think the airplane situation is about acting out one’s frustrations about COVID restrictions. An airplane is a place where flight attendants enforce norms and rules but they aren’t police. Airplanes are also “purple” spaces so the acting out is inflicted on “blue” people while getting some Sympathy from “red’ people.it’s the perfect stage.
I think Trump and the Republican party have legitimized being an asshole and people now feel more free to let their freak flag fly. Mostly on the right, but I think people on the left feel more liberated too.
I mean, look at Pete Hegseth whose apparent sole qualification to be Secretary of Defense (!!!) is "I'm an asshole."
I hope the GOP Senators have just enough spine to send Mr. Deus Vult the way of that creep Gaetz. It's not a very realistic hope, but one can dream.
Something to this. I find it personally harder to avoid speeding, given the increasing salience that people just don’t get pulled over for it much anymore (and traffic is faster because a lot of other people have noticed). I tcould be a general “the rules are a paper tiger” effect.
Speeding is a bit more complicated in that I think it's safer to speed _at the same speed as other people_ if they're speeding a bit, rather than going more slowly. Anecdotally, I don't think I've noticed _this_ any higher than pre-pandemic.
The people who are going speeding and weaving around other cars are a separate issue, and don't encourage me to speed.
Which is the type you're noticing more?
Safer for who? Outside of a highway (and most speeding tickets are not on highways), drivers and passengers in modern cars with proper crumple zones and airbags are very unlikely to die or even be seriously injured. On a highway, where the speeds are much higher and you're much more likely to get a pile-up (because people don't drive far enough apart)*, speed does affect the likelihood of being injured or killed in a collision.
Speed on non-highways is primarily about safety for pedestrians, cyclists and other unprotected road users. Hit someone at 40 mph, and they're almost certainly dead; at 20 mph, and there's a 95% chance they live. If speed limits are posted for safety reasons, then the problem with the whole road layout / design speed argument is that it's about preventing collisions between vehicles - which nearly always only do property damage, not damage to the people. Posting limits for safety reasons should be about how likely a pedestrian or cyclist is to be trying to use the road, and that's not something that can be determined by the road layout features like width and straightness of lanes that drivers use to identify safety/danger.
* In ideal driving conditions, ie good quality light, dry, good quality surface, and a fully alert driver, there needs to be two seconds between cars to prevent a pile-up; add a second for each of night, a wet road, and a poor surface, e.g. potholes. Add more for ice or fog.
Safer to me to not be going a different speed than everyone else.
If the speed limit is 65 and they're going 68, it's safer for me to go 68 and have fewer people attempt to pass me/lane change.
I'm thinking of freeways/highways where there aren't pedestrians.
I do _not_ apply this logic on surface streets with traffic lights/intersections. For one thing, you're going to lane change and stop so often anyway that there's little safety benefit to you from following everyone else, and as you say lots of risks to everyone else.
Fair! I’d agree on highways (also, as an aside, I always find it weird that a country with such a strong driving culture as the US has such low speed limits. The UK’s 70 mph is low by European standards, so 65 seems really od low; 120-130 km/h, ie 75-80 mph is more usual in Europe - the other odd thing about US speed limits is that you have limits ending in 5 rather than 0).
I just think there are too many people who apply it to stroads and those are a very different story.
I think the lower speed limits have to do with the lack of transit in much of the country, making it impossible for folks without a driver’s license to get around. This keeps our driver training requirements laughably low, and I think that’s a factor in our low limits.
FWIW, the US repealed its national speed limit in 1995. Montana got rid of its numerical limit, replacing it with “reasonable and prudent,” which of course is impossible to define, and Montana went to 75 (I think) several years later.
I-10 in West Texas does get to 80 mph - extremely rural, nothing directly on the interstate, have to take off-ramp down to things. (When it was 70 I used to speed on it up to around 76, now that it's 80 I never ever speed on it)
Isn't Europe mostly using KPH? 5 mph is about 8 kph, so if you go up by 10s, it makes some sense for us go to up by 5s. (EDIT: 8kph, not 9kph, it's 1.6 multiplier not a 1.8)
You're mostly correct, but too cavalier about the effects of non-fatal car crashes. It's not like "well, nobody got killed so what's the big deal?" It's still very worthwhile to prevent nonfatal car crashes. Even with air bags and crumple zones, people can get badly hurt, cars are the second most expensive thing most people own (after houses) so having your car totaled is a big freaking deal unless you're rich, and even if you're not injured and your car isn't totaled, it's a pain in the ass to have your car towed to a shop and have to spend potentially hundreds of dollars to repair it.
I think everyone is driving faster. I find myself more tempted to get into the passing lane so I can go 15 or 20 over rather than crushing at 5 over on the right or in the middle. I don’t think it used to be as fast because people felt you were asking for a ticket once you got close to 10 over.
Wow that has not been my experience, seems crazy to me.
I think you're on to something. For me a cause of the disorder boom is that we relied on service workers like bus drivers, restaurant hosts/hostesses, cashiers to enforce the new rules around Covid protocols. The thing about masking is that it's obvious if you're obeying the rules or not, so once people saw what they could get away not masking they realized how little power or interest most service workers had enforcing other rules like "don't shoplift" or "you're not allowed to smoke here". IMO it led to this gradual weakening of the idea that there are consequences for petty crimes or public disorder, which was then exacerbated by the fact that cops were actually pulling back.
I like the disorderly conduct on airplanes numbers too because people have the idea that flight attendants are waiters/waitresses of the sky when really they have a strict mandate to enforce rules, so people continue push the envelope of acceptable behavior on an airplane (vaping, getting belligerently drunk, yelling at other passengers) without realizing that they're going incur real consequences.
There’s definitely something significant to this. But I also would want to be careful about reading too much into the numbers here. Reporting standards have surely changed for unruly in-flight behavior, and it wouldn’t surprise me if the higher number now actually reflects the same behavior that existed in 2018-2019, just with flight attendants more willing to report after the couple years when things were really elevated.
Is it possible that this is just explained by the rise of social media documenting it more, plus a bit of the "streaker effect" (the more we highlight it, the more people want to do it). Do we have any hard data that airplanes have actually become more unruly?
Yeah it's in Matt's post. Huge spike in 2020 and still ~50% above pre-pandemic baseline. Continues on past mask mandates so it's not people still arguing about that either.
It's also worth reflecting that the increase won't be equally distributed in absolute terms (and it's possible, though I'd be less confident of this, that it isn't even equally distributed in *relative* terms). So a shop that already faced elevated rates of shoplifting may now have a quite serious and persistent threat that its managers need to react to. But this also means that safe, low crime neighborhoods may not feel much different at all.
I think from the numbers- and I’m having trouble tracking down the source- that disorder is massively disproportionately on budget airlines going to and from Miami Ft. Lauderdale. Huge spike from the permanent spring break crowd of degenerates. It’s not hard to get on a $50 spirit flight and raise hell, and I suspect those people might be a subset of the paper tag smoke on the subway ride an ATV in the city crowd.
One issue really that stood out was speed and other traffic enforcement cameras. The idea being that they were completely impartial. Every car that didn’t stop for a red light or was speeding would get a ticket. But…certain marginalized groups received a disproportionate number of tickets. Because they were disproportionately speeding and running red lights. So we need to stop the program.
The key issue seems to be the idea that certain groups do engage in antisocial behavior at higher rates than other groups.
The truly enlightened solution to this is simply to say “Too bad. There is one set of rules. It applies equally to everybody. If you break X law, you pay Y penalty. It doesn’t matter who you are.”
This is the liberal approach. Progressives cannot tolerate it.
The jury is in on which approach is better and which is worse.
Men are convicted of crime at higher rates than women. The reason? Institutional misandry. The criminal justice system is systemically biased against men.
I will. not. rest. until women are convicted of murder at the same rate as men.
I’m not sure what if anything you’re trying to imply by making a comparison with an undoubtedly biological driver of crime, but you may wish to be careful.
Bruh, why do you want to oppress Altima drivers?
It’s not their fault they have fake VA tags flapping in the wind, smoke coming from the engine compartment, and a permanent spare tire….
Related, I recall my own Washington State mulling over ending vehicle emissions tests, as it is primarily marginalized community members who have old cars which emit a lot of fumes.
(Did this ever turn into new law? As a white guy with an above average income & a hybrid, idk!)
That’s exactly what voters see. The law abiding median voter gets a check engine light and can’t get their car legal until they pay $2200 for a repair. And the left says that’s totally OK because of pollution concerns. But then they also don’t want to stop poor people from driving so…. It comes across like rules are for median voters and not for marginalized communities.
Wilhoit's Law: "There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect."
The poor person simply pays an unscrupulous vehicle inspector $100 to pass the inspection, a thing that actually was once suggested that I do when I went to have repair work done to get it to pass inspection.
If you’re not bribing the inspector you’re a sucker
I mean, cars that won’t pass an emissions inspection also tend to be unreliable for the user.
Appliance cars, sure.
Bet you $100 progressives would then complain about how it’s racist and classist that poor and marginalized people have to live in neighborhoods with high levels of particulate pollution. /facepalm
VA is mulling the same with the annual vehicle safety inspection requirement. Maybe they’ve already dropped it, not sure.
This is where I read about this issue, and the pushback from the left:
https://www.propublica.org/article/chicagos-race-neutral-traffic-cameras-ticket-black-and-latino-drivers-the-most
All the desperation to explain away the fact that they are just doing it more often.
Thanks for the link. This actually radicalized me perhaps the opposite direction intended; before I supported gradually increasing penalties based on income level, but if a fixed fee is incurred more often by poorer residents it sounds like that wouldn't work.
Why? The point of speeding tickets is to stop people from speeding. Graduated penalties are intended to ensure tickets are sufficient deterrents for rich people.
Why is it a problem at all if poor people get more tickets because they're speeding more? Presumably, over time, getting ticketed would change this.
What I took from the article was that the city had to set up a reduced fee program for the lowest income bracket because people were speeding enough to immiserate themselves. So for that group penalties were set too high, and it still didn't change their behavior. That's a design failure.
The most obvious missed assumption, to me, is that contrary to microecon different people value a dollar different amounts, not necessarily corollated to income. I have a friend, makes tons of money but tips 15% - you know the type. Whenever he sees a cop he launches into a complaint about an $80 speeding ticket he got when we were 18. But hey, he never speeds because he cherished that $80. On the flip side I have plenty of "money comes, money goes" type friends with bad credit card debt who would take a "shit happens" approach to a much bigger ticket.
A deeper problem is also whenever you add more rules to a system, you're making it not just more complicated but more opaque. So even in a perfect microecon environment people can't weigh the risk vs. reward of speeding, because if your income jumped last year, maybe you're expecting a $300 ticket and you get a $3,000 ticket.
If you were going about this honestly, you could say "it's good that speeding tickets are causing people to get their cars repossessed, they don't deserve to be on the street if they can't follow the rules." Maybe people are saying that but I didn't see it mentioned in the article. Or you could say "we, the City of Chicago, need to come up with an extra $10 million this year so we're going to soak the rich who speed" which at least follows the usual way the government generates revenue.
It’s not a design failure of a punishment system that some people break the rules and end up worse off for it. This is inevitable. It’s only a design failure if the overall rates of rule breaking don’t decline.
It could be a bad tradeoff to, say, “immiserate” x people to reduce speeding by y to save z lives, but that’s a very different argument.
I do think there are pros and cons of graduated fees - I don’t have a strong opinion there. But that’s a different question than the merits of speeding cameras and fines generally.
If the defund-the-police crowd had supported these cameras it would have helped, but they have too much opposition from normies, who really don’t like people catching them speeding.
The speed limits should be higher.
(Actually, the big problem with traffic and specifically speeding enforcement is that it's wildly overenforced on highways and horribly underenforced in residential areas.)
Traffic cameras are one of those things where I suspect people would actually make better decisions if given hyperlocal control. I suspect that "do you want a speed camera on the street in front of your home" polls better than "do you want speed cameras statewide."
Certain towns and localities will become known as speed traps time ten though.
Maybe, but I think the quintessential "speed trap masquerading as a small Texas town" thing relies on the idea that the local cops just don't (zealously) enforce the speed limit on the small number of locals.
If you could say, "You can have speed cameras, but we will audit to make sure that enforcement is universal," then you can probably align incentives to make the limit on the cameras reasonable.
They could easily handle it the way it's done in Europe, where you're given ample warning that a camera is coming up
That's the situation we have now, which I expect will continue if cameras are more widespread.
This skepticism towards impartial laws isn't 100% unwarranted: think of the ironic quote "The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.". But in practice this skepticism often gets taken way too far.
But that's an issue with the law, not how it is enforced, no? I struggle to think of a marginalized group that must fight their marginalization by going 55 in a 30... In this case I think the law generally is correct, whereas in the example from the aphorism, maybe not so much.
True. In this case, though, the city put traffic cams in areas where the most people had been injured by traffic.
Assuming there’s no bias in the distribution of the cameras.
They just complain and say that the cameras are placed in a racist manner with respect to neighborhood (regardless of whether they're placed there due to traffic accident/death rates).
It's obvious now that an order-based message early in the Biden administration would have both cut off the "Democrats favor disorder" line of attack but would also could have helped people remember that crime and disorder surged under Trump. If Biden had been banging that drum from the start he could have more easily taken credit for the reductions in violent crime and disorder that occurred under his administration.
Oh well.
I agree that Biden should’ve talked a much tougher game about public disorder, but I’m not sure people could ever be convinced to blame the increase in disorder on Trump unless disorder got back down to pre-pandemic levels under Biden.
The increase in both disorder and “crime” (captured in the data by homicides mainly) happened right after the Blue Team waved a big flag indicating that they were becoming much more sympathetic to such conduct and less sympathetic to enforcement. Then we went to a higher-crime equilibrium. It’s not like Trump changed some policy to be softer on crime.
Later on, when there were still obvious problems, Blue Team tried to fool people by saying “what are you talking about, crime is down!” This is just taking advantage of the fact that people say “crime” when they mean “disorder.” No Upper West Side mom cares about how many gang bangers are murdered in East St. Louis. They just don’t want to be accosted on the subway.
Obviously, the data presented here on disorder is what people were talking about! And we’re still not at normal levels.
The second part parallels the inflation problem. Despite our self image as being fact driven, our first reaction to any problem when we are in power is to downplay it.
Yeah, we’re facts-driven in the same way that prosecutors are facts-driven. Present evidence to advance a conclusion subject to the constraint that you shouldn’t flat-out lie.
What's really amazing to me is how often I got these "your anecdote is not statistics" kinds of responses when talking about crime even in comments here. It does genuinely seem better now, but so many cars and car parts were getting stolen in my neighborhood 2 years ago, and literally anyone I talked to in person in California was appalled by the visible shoplifting we've seen since the pandemic. But people would come back and say "but the violent crime stats are down" as if non-violent theft isn't real crime.
I think that people do respond to a decrease in aggregate crime statistics, but probably with a two year or so lag.
Biden’s entire approach to governing AND to bully pulpit messaging was always to try to carve out a perfectly-engineered path designed to upset the fewest possible members of his fragile coalition.
He didn’t really govern or lead from any set of fixed principles. He never, as far as I can recall, took a brave stand and said “this isn’t going to be popular, but it’s the principled and wise choice, so I’m going to take the hit politically and just do the right thing here.”
The closest I think he ever came to that was refusing, albeit in a kind of tepid and meager way, to be dragged into the de-fund the police hysteria. And that refusal, as lukewarm as it was, probably turned out be his single greatest political asset.
Afghanistan was where he bravely took a political hit.
Says a lot about a politician the things he is willing to take a political hit for. Biden always cared more about doing the right thing with foreign policy, rather than the right thing in domestic policy.
“Biden *always* cared more about doing the right thing with foreign policy”
Citation needed
Right thing in his mind at least. I'm not saying the best policy overall.
Ok, I can appreciate the distinction, but I still have my doubts that it’s true.
I think his Israel policy was very much driven by coalition management concerns rather than by any fixed principle (I expect some disagreement with that, of course).
I can’t actually make sense of his Ukraine policy under any framework that I have been able to imagine.
This is a great example, I agree. Thank you!
That particular stand did seem to be a net loser for him, politically.
But I do believe that if his basic governing approach was this (stand on principle, explain his reasoning to the public, do the right thing) in general, rather than the more instrumental coalition management approach, his political fortunes overall would have been significantly better.
Afghanistan withdrawal was extremely popular though when he was trying to make it happen. It was supposed to be an easy political W for Biden. Trump would've done it too if he won reelection for the same reason.
I doubt that Biden ever thought the Afghanistan withdrawal was going to be an easy political W.
All polling pointed to Afghanistan withdrawal being popular.
Plus, he explicitly wanted them out by the 9/11 20th anniversary. There's no doubt he was planning a big victory lap to celebrate the accomplishment. There's zero reason to set the at deadline if he thought withdrawal might not be popular.
The Sept. 11 thing was weird and I was very confused about that at the time. He dropped that soon after and set the deadline for, I recall, Aug. 31.
I would argue his efforts around student loan forgiveness and reducing enforcement along the southern border are examples where he took a principled stand and took the political hits. We may not agree with those principles, but I think those examples fit your definition.
I see what you’re saying, but I don’t think it fits in quite the way you are saying. Both of those are great examples of policies that were incredibly unpopular overall (indeed, both are arguably determinative in Trump’s win).
But, from a coalition management perspective, these were both things that pandered (and that is the right word) to certain elements of his perceived coalition.
That’s why I would still view both of these as bad policies that he nonetheless pursued for reasons of coalition management rather than principle.
It’s an interesting point though. I can see some merit on both sides.
Your assumption is that his coalition management is only about placating the left, rather than those on the right edge of the coalition.
He *was* the right edge of the coalition, that's why he had such a relentless focus on placating the left. Ultimately, the bargain the party made was to placate the left and the staffer class, in the hopes that Biden could "return [everything] to normal".
This theory, of course, failed. It COULD have worked, but it didn't, and I don't think there's any particular execution problems that we can point to as having definitively doomed it, but just that the entire theory didn't hold -- and the precise way that it failed, was indeed the way it had been predicted to fail, it just wasn't guaranteed that it WOULD fail, because hey sometimes you just can't know until you try something.
It does make me wonder if we'd have been better off going with the Bernie bankshot in 2020. Trump wouldn't have had 4 years out of official power to single-mindedly focus on retaining control of his party; instead, he'd have presided over the post-pandemic mess and caught all the blame for wrecking the economy. ALSO, his allies wouldn't have had time to regroup and plan a Project 2025; they'd have just continued all the usual infighting and backbiting that was endemic to his administration.
Ed: Also, on the off chance that Bernie won, the country would have seen that as opting for a completely different kind of experiment. Young men probably would have been on board with it. I'm not sure Trumpism would have consolidated as much power over the GOP through them as it ended up having done IRL.
"caught all the blame for wrecking the economy."
Assuming the exact same economic outcomes, I don't see the Republicans blaming Trump for inflation. They are remarkably forgiving when it comes to Republican presidents.
I don’t know if I’m assuming that, but I do think that he probably overestimated the benefits of those policies with leftier elements of the coalition, and underestimated the costs with the more centrists elements (and with swing voters and persuadable independents). Maybe that amounts to the same thing?
The student loan forgiveness program always struck me much more as coalition management than as a principled stand. Blue collar Biden understood that most people don't go to college and many of the beneficiaries were much better off than non-college people. He was just the subject of a huge amount of intra-coalition pressure.
The argument against this is that the courts provided Biden with a *lot* of ready-made offramps to abandon the initiative as a good-faith effort that ran into insurmountable judicial hurdles, but he didn't take the out.
Given that it was and remains an extremely inflationary policy that's kind of a slap in the face to non-recipients who either paid off their loans or didn't incur them, the insistence on dogged pursuit of the issue throughout his administration increasingly seemed like something Biden actually believed in (maybe at a minimum because it was a campaign promise, even IMO a somewhat foolish one) rather than just a sop to his coalition.
The argument against what?
It was a bad policy politically and he didn't need the courts to provide him an off-ramp. He should have done that on his own. But he made a different political calculation and in my opinion a bad one.
The argument against the notion that this was an act of coalition management rather than reflecting some kind of personal conviction on Biden's part. If it *wasn't* an act of personal conviction we need to account for the failure to take the various graceful outs offered by the courts as a way to jettison a bad policy.
Ed: The optics were substantially worse without the courts because while it was a bad policy either way, it was also a campaign promise and thus the appearance of a good-faith effort seems within the scope of things that might be expected out of principle.
I would expand this to the entire modern party apparatus, actually.
Up until 2016, both parties basically operated like this. They were getting really good at "the politics of the perfectly-engineered-path". The GOP was already on a long slide away from this: from Nixon through Reagan and Gingrich on to Fox News, the Tea Party, and McConnell, employing strategic norm-breaking to gain a slight edge over the Democrats' increasingly more professionally-well-engineered machine politics. And then, as the saying about bankruptcy goes, Trump turned this slow break into an all-at-once, breaking the party's ability to engineer anything, and converting to an "all-id" approach: fight on everything, beat strategic retreats when necessary, break any norms in your way, but in such a way that the anti-antis on your side will always defend you.
I think what most of us on the Yglesias-Klein-et-al side of the Democratic coalition ultimately want here is for our own party to ALSO abandon the politics of the perfectly-engineered path, and chart a bold abundance agenda while leaving behind as many of our engineered-path-era liabilities as possible. Arguably, if we'd done it much sooner, maybe we'd have been able to avoid the present disaster.
As we now know, Biden wasn’t in charge of anything
Great point. I think Dems could have leveraged Donald Trump’s personal lawlessness and indecency as a way to blame him for the increase in antisocial behavior that started under his watch. Had this rhetoric been paired with an attempt to actually _do something_ about public disorder it could have been all wrapped up nicely for them to blame him for the spike and profit from the fall, but their unwillingness to even say they had a problem with what was going on obviously doomed that approach.
I disagree with this. Liberals have to accept that their personal revulsion to President Elect Trump's conduct is a political loser. Normie voters don't care (just like they didn't care about Clinton banging interns). There wasn't some magical way to use that better. We needed to stop talking about it and address voter concerns instead.
Fair point but I agree with Matt that Trump is not actually an amazing candidate and that a generic Republican that espoused the same issue positioning as he did would have won by a much bigger margin. If that’s the case, then it’s not true that Donald Trump’s lawlessness is a niche concern, it’s just that voters had bigger concerns, not that it was some kind of major tactical error to talk about the fact that Trump is a bad guy, or that this fact couldn’t have been used to greater effect.
It was a major tactical error. The voters who thought Trump was a bad man already were voting for Harris. Hell, Liz and Dick Cheney voted for Harris!
The problem was this is at the core of what liberals already voting for Harris wanted to say about Trump, but swing voters who were open to voting for Trump didn't want to hear it.
You could be right but I don’t think the available evidence justifies the certainty that you seem to have on this point.
"A major tactical error" does not mean "I am certain it cost them the election". It just means, it was clearly the wrong message to reach swing voters. Whatever the right message was, or if there even was a right message, is a different issue.
My working theory is that Trump's biggest strength is/was his ability to circumvent the traditional GOP donor channels, due both to name rec and ability to attract small-dollar donations, which meant he didn't have to kowtow to the politically unpopular parts of the agenda that the Kochs/Adelson want any GOP candidate to do.
I don't think we could've used his personal lawlessness and indecency, but they certainly could've built something around Trump's utterly incompetent and disorderly response to the pandemic as the root of a lot of problems.
The problem is that a lot of people, maybe even a majority, think Trump's response to the pandemic was better than Democrats'.
You even see Matt and many of the commenters here reaming Dems' pandemic response *in 2024.* It's absurd.
Sure. That's a different issue.
Put differently, address voters' top concerns until they're no longer top concerns. Rinse and repeat. Then maybe eventually the thing you do want to talk about (like Trump) does become a top concern.
Oh that’s such a great point. What a perfect role for the 2009 version of “Kamala the Cop” to play as well!
Maybe. I feel like the GOP gets a pass when disorder happens in cities (even if they're in the White House) just as Dems get a pass if a racially motivated police shooting happens in a blue jurisdiction.
How do Democrats "get a pass if a racially motivated police shooting happens in a blue jurisdiction"? Seems to me like there's been a lot of negative reporting about police use of force in NYC and other "blue" cities.
Nobody blames the Democratic Party.
Maybe because in one example democratically aligned populations cause the problem while in the other example it’s Republican aligned populations….
But then the Wokies would have pulled up the 90s crime bill and started whining with activist bullhorns, and the post 2016 strategy was to appease activist elements of the Democratic coalition.
They had the dream team for it too - just like how Trump can say something totally out of bounds and JD Vance can sane-wash it you could have had Kamala saying things like "Joe Biden's 'superpredator' comments were an exaggeration for effect, but as a prosecutor I know that the criminal justice system works better for everyone when repeat criminals stay off the streets".
Unfortunately no going back from the 2020 primary.
Agreed, but given the zeitgeist at the time an order-based message early in the Biden administration was about as likely as an invasion of Canada.
I really love Matt Bruenig's concept of dropping a subscript:
https://mattbruenig.com/2023/07/22/dropping-a-subscript/
His example is "support the troops" during the awful pro-Iraq War phase of the early 2000s. But it applies to things like saying, "This library is for everyone." You need to differentiate everyone:
everyone_1 = people who feel comfortable using heroin in libraries (to use a silly and extreme example)
everyone_2 = grandmas and toddlers who do not feel safe in a library where people use heroin.
It helps to clarify which "everyone" you're talking about. Same with compassion, or really any phrase or broad population definition that seems to be universal but really isn't.
This is a great point.
Every single accommodation/dispensation for antisocial and lawbreaking behavior is a restriction on the prosocial and law-abiding members of the community.
You can’t be universally tolerant of everyone. You are implicitly prioritizing one group over the other. We may as well be explicit about the choices we are making, and ensure that our public policies really do reflect the choices we actually prefer to make as a society.
We aren’t currently doing a very good job of this. We are instead simply governing by comforting self-delusions.
There is an awful lot of this, not just in the United States, but throughout the entire liberal/democratic west.
"We aren’t currently doing a very good job of this."
I think we are, it's just that our leadership's choice of who the winners and losers should be is ludicrous, so we don't like the results. Not the same thing as not doing a good job of making those explicit choices.
The “public” defines the community. People who are shooting drugs up in public have alienated themselves from the community unless the expectations of the broad public is that their behavior is acceptable.
The problem is that activist types pretend to represent the “public” when they usually represent a fringe.
it is always journalists and celebrities who contend that living with public disorder, squalor and chaos is just part of "living in a city." but these people are often insulated from it.
I've heard that line from people of all kinds in cities. It also isn't aspirational, the implication behind complaining that something has been a part of life for so long is that you want it to change.
yeah, well PMCs in high rise condos can be chill. tho ngl i haven't done a deep dive on my own home city!
Self-selected for tolerance of disorder
"But people don’t smoke on the subway because they don’t have a job. No one commits sexual assault because they didn’t learn algebra."
This reminds me of an old "Weeds" episode where you made this point and it seems like your co-hosts might of disagreed or might have felt that police reform advocates disagreed.(I believe it was "Is gun violence fixable?") It was after a mass shooting that killed several Asian American women.
Sometimes there is a sort of sense that people think we need to destroy capitalism before we can enforce laws.
My favorite Weeds moment like this was during a discussion of the Brock Turner rape case and Sarah Kliff wondered aloud about how we can make sentencing harsher for white dudes but more lenient for marginalized groups to prevent mass incarceration (Dara Lind, who clearly agreed, had to point out that this would be clearly unconstitutional).
In fact we have empirical evidence that shows that shows that sentencing got harsher after the Persky recall, which mainly fell on men of color. The whole combination of criminal justice reform AND carceral feminism at the same time was always incoherent.
As someone that does support criminal justice reform and creating far more humane prisons, ect., certain segments of the left during this era were depressing. They didn't really want any of that. They just wanted different people to suffer.
That seems really unfair and seems not to focus on the rights of victims for justice. They just assert that some criminals are less culpable (which I can understand, if you are raised well then you are taught that what you are doing is wrong which is a greater social violation than someone who was raised to believe that doing wrong is normal conduct.)
Don't criminologists pretty well agree that harshness of sentencing is less important than swiftness and certainty anyway?
There's a really good post here on why that's difficult to do in America vs. Europe, because of the prohibition on Terry stops and stricter standards for evidence gathering.
https://grahamfactor.substack.com/p/earl-warrens-greatest-mistake
Right, it's one of the reasons we end up with harsh sentences. "we probably won't bust you, but if we do we will come down hard!"
You'd think that anyone who's ever trained a dog would understand that!
How many people have ever successfully trained a dog?
Not as many as dogs that have successfully trained a human.
Or with cats, in which the ratio is "all of them to zero."
A good question. But you’d think there are a lot of people who’ve managed at least to house-train one!
Amazingly how little we hear from criminologists on their most robust findings. We should hear from them more.
Becker’s rational crime theory is pretty much wrong because criminals have poor impulse control and are myopic.
I think everyone pretty much knows that murder is wrong, rape it wrong, robbery is wrong etc
In certain circles, this is more than just a sense; you will encounter the assertion that law enforcement *as such* is solely devoted to propping up the capitalist order. And interestingly, you can find different flavors of this - more orthodox Marxist base/superstructure-type arguments, (neo-)Gramscian cultural hegemoncy arguments, and critical race theory-type arguments that transmorgify the Marxist class analysis into race analysis.
It’s a weird go to considering Marxist regimes always seem to be police states.
But they're the *People's* police! (And I'm not even being ironic -- that was basically the explanation given by various communist apologists for decades if you pointed out that communist countries also had police who enforced laws.)
Exactly, everyone is police. Your kids, neighbors, friends! The people!
Building off of srynerson below, the critique is that the *wrong* people are being policed. This is the kind of contradiction you can easily pull out when you ask people who support abolition “what should happen to people who e.g. disobey pandemic lockdown orders?”
And Western Europe - which has a police who do operate more like how some liberals would want (ie they enforce laws, even when they personally don't agree with them, and do so relatively neutrally as to the suspect, and the victim) did have rigorous enforcement of pandemic lockdowns and has rigorous enforcement of homeless nuisance laws. It's weird how the policy of enforcing all the laws results in all the laws being enforced. Of course, that means building a very different sort of police force.
I don't know if this is still true, but I also note that in the 90s, Western European police sure spent a lot of time patrolling train stations with assault rifles in hand.
Still true. And you will get to know those guys if you don’t pay your fare on an Italian train.
The thing I don't get is the inherent inconsistency in the idea that enforcing laws is ONLY done to prop up capitalist's interests. The anti-capitalists tend to be highly educated and must have had some coursework covering rates of psychopathy, sociopathy, other anti-social personality disorders, and substance abuse disorder in the general population.
How do they square their theory with the fact that 5-10% of people in any population are struggling with these disorders and will likely act out eventually, especially if there aren't at least some deterrents in place?
Not to be flippant, but I think they literally do not know what the f*** they are talking about. They have not been around actual criminals. I grew up poor - some kids I knew in HS became criminals, and I have a relative serving time. Knowing actual criminals makes you LESS sympathetic to them, I think. But these sheltered kids just imagine criminals are people like them who took a slight wrong turn somehow. Nope.
I think it really is that simple. Too much of this stuff comes from academic theorizing by academic people that never have to prove anything.
The harsh truth is that most of these theories are just wrong about the world and in a lot of cases hopelessly naive.
It’s because most criminals are assholes.
Well the reason those people have personality disorders is because capitalism makes it so they can't get treatment!
(That seems to be the go-to response for these people in my experience)
Personality disorders can’t be treated. There are some coping strategies that can be taught and with tremendous effort they can sometimes work. But it’s a very tough nut to crack.
This is a pretty black and white take. I might agree if you said personality disorders can't be cured, in most cases.
Sort of like obesity. If we consider it an illness, then those who struggle with it are never really cured; they (hopefully) just manage it, with varying degrees of success. "Healthy" is just an asymptote you can get arbitrarily close to, but never actually transcend into permanently. And maybe a lot of maladies are better thought of this way, essentially incurable but not unmanageable.
Some robust data on empirical interventions to reduce smoking and drinking during pregnancy, poverty and other social determinants of crime would be helpful.
The assertion of truth without any reasoning or evidence is so annoying.
Usually I just ask “how so?”
Oh gosh, I totally forgot about the Weeds podcast. I read this and was thinking, "Who is David referring to? Who here was on that TV series, Weeds? Thanks for the morning laugh.
"The question of to what extent shoplifting has actually increased in sharply contested"
This is not a question. If you think it's a question then you have no idea what you're talking about. Theft or inventory "shrink" is reported in a public company's financials. If a CEO or CFO states publicly that theft is problem and historically at an all time high -- then that's a factual statement which has been vetted by their legal teams for accuracy. Walmart is currently running at 1.8% net margin. If "shrink" goes from 1% to 2% or - god forbid - hit 3% like it did for Walgreens -- this is going to compress net margins on the order of 50%.
When an idiot Progressive "questions" these factual statement what they're really saying is ... I don't care about theft because they don't think anyone can own anything because they're a Marxist.
https://www.supermarketnews.com/independents-regional-grocers/walmart-ceo-soaring-theft-could-lead-to-higher-prices-store-closures
https://www.supermarketnews.com/foodservice-retail/target-sees-a-q3-that-s-not-what-anyone-would-wish-for-
I'm curious if you know how much Facebook Marketplace facilitated or encouraged the rise of shoplifting? Do you know if that had anything to do with it, causally, or is it just the grey market of choice?
I don't but my sense is the explosion in shoplifting is coming from large, sophisticated rings and I'd imagine most are flowing the inventory back through non-traditional but actual retail locations (e.g., corner stores).
I remember when I lived in a let’s say very downscale part of Houston a local corner store would sell just a completely random assortment of crap and some of it was store-brand stuff from grocery stores, which seemed odd but they were likely getting fenced goods.
I know that a lot of people like to blame Facebook Marketplace (including Matt), but I've never seen it explained as to why Facebook Marketplace would facilitate fencing shoplifted goods any more than, e.g., Craigslist.
People are just using Facebook marketplace as a catch all term - like where everyone says Zoom to mean everything from Teams to Webex to google meet.
Genuinely unsure how much hard data exists on that angle - all I know is that it's usually included in press releases from the CA DA and other top LE brass when they bust a large organized theft ring. Goods are always claimed to be fenced through FB Marketplace, Amazon, or locally in informal street vending. I don't shop any of those venues, but certainly there's an...interestingly diverse...variety of goods on sale if one wanders down certain streets in SF. It's easy enough to remove the brand labels from certain well-known and highly-traded goods.
Sometimes the hawkers are pretty bold - we occasionally get phone calls from bulk resellers who ask our store management if it's cool if they pick up 100 packs of tortillas or whatever. And we're like, well, are you a restaurant or a charity or something? And they're like, no, this is how I get inventory for my favela. Which, lol, no, we're not taking that order...
I think a lot of it also gets resold on Amazon
That is precisely the thing though. Shrink is decreasing and the previous increase wasn't out of line with pre pandemic fluctuations
https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/13/business/theft-retail-shrink-stores/index.html
The claims that it was increasing primarily came from a lobbyist using numbers that were bullshit.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/08/business/organized-shoplifting-retail-crime-theft-retraction.html
My view has been for a while that the progressive approach to local governance, especially as pertains to criminal justice, has been thoroughly discredited. It is basically nihilism, and it simply doesn’t work. It’s been *proven* not to work.
For a while, the stakes on this were relatively low. Formerly great cities (San Francisco, Chicago, etc.) were in various stages of decline and, depending on who you asked, were anywhere from “still wonderful” to “utter shithole.”
But it was all a local problem. If the voters of <city x> wanted to live their lives sidestepping urban war zones and avoiding public spaces and watching all their downtown businesses slowly close and move out, then who am I to tell them otherwise?
But we seem to have crossed an important threshold. Now the local dysfunction of nihilistic and denialistic progressive leaders appears to be a liability for democratic politics at the national level. And in the world where the Republican Party is now a nakedly authoritarian one, the stakes could not be higher.
It’s past time for state and local democratic leaders to pull their heads out of their asses, dispense with the weird fiction that enforcing rules and laws and providing public order is somehow equivalent to oppression, and start focusing on delivering sane and positive results for their communities.
Stop governing around and for the lowest common denominator. Govern for the regular people who just want to live a normal, law-abiding life and maybe raise a few kids in peace.
Ultimately this comes down to voters, obviously.
If we can normalize a message that “you can vote for a local politician who wants to send rapists and murderers to prison, and you’ll still be a good person,” then the weird “all crime should be legal” type progressives will naturally be replaced by normies.
In general I hate Soros conspiracy theories, but the number of "progressive" prosecutors funded by Soros and their track record once in office is one place where people really should pay attention to who they're voting for.
You forget that voters in those cities can vote too. So in a closely divided state if the margins in the cities move R+10 then that can easily swing the state.
Shoot New Jersey came a lot closer than expected too.
> “You forget that voters in those cities can vote too.”
I don’t think I forgot this.
But if 10% of voters who had previously elected this type of government in their own city had suddenly decided to register their displeasure by voting against national democrats rather than voting differently in municipal elections, then that’s not very different, as far as I can tell, from the “important threshold” I mentioned above.
Virtually all major cities in the US are run by more or less corrupt ethnic political machines embedded in state and local Democratic Party organizations. They are single-party regimes in which officeholders are mostly appointed rather than elected. Their governing philosophy is purely extractive and they do a terrible job, delivering poor-quality services at high cost. You’d think that the Republicans would put in some money and effort to compete for these millions of votes, if nothing else to make things difficult for Democrats. I, personally, would accept a lot of Republican flaws to get back some choice and accountability. Doesn’t seem worth their while though.
Some laws and norms are enforced by well meaning ordinary citizens telling the violator what they're doing is wrong and pestering them until the violation stops. Minor offenses like smoking in restaurants, playing loud music on mass transit, and littering relied on this level of common enforcement.
Calling these people "Karens", frequently accusing them of racism, and high profile incidents of one-sided narratives destroying their lives weakened this guard rail. Ordinary folks rightly blame the progressive 2020 mania for this.
The Karen thing, which is actually a sociological phenomenon with VERY deep roots (hostility of a lot of Black women towards white women has a lot of historical antecedents), was clearly a mistake politically, theoretically, and substantively.
The problem is that there is a real phenomenon of customers going into a store and making life hell for service workers, demanding unreasonable things, that the “Karen” term was supposed to pick out.
I think it was both overinclusive and underinclusive for that purpose.
Yeah the original archetype that “Karen” referred to is the kind of person who says, “I want to speak to your manager.” Hence the joke, “What do you call a group of Karens? A homeowners association.”
People slam "Karen" on any video involving a woman arguing with someone else for the youtube algorithms these days so it's kinda lost any meaning.
I feel like the proliferation of disparate impact thinking has a lot to do with increased tolerance for public disorder.
I think one underrated thing that happened in the shift around this is that for a lot of people who were less engaged with this issue through, say, 2020 (me, I'm talking about me) there was a developing sense that the police weren't really concerned with maintaining public order as evidenced by the fact that one of their core interests appeared to be demanding that they themselves not be held to any standard of order or discipline. I live in NYC and there are three events that I remember that basically led me, as someone who is innately a rule follower and is interested in seeing rules enforced to, more or less, write off the police. I never wanted to abolish them, but I still have very little sympathy for law enforcement that acts like this.
First, in 2015, there was an event where at a funeral (and possibly later at a police academy graduation) where thousands of police turned their back on the mayor when he was speaking. I mean this legitimately: I did not understand at the time, and still do not understand, why they were not all immediately fired. My mental model for this is if a bunch of enlisted soldiers did something similar to a general or the president. I think we would all rightly understand that such an act would show profound breakdown in the chain of command and unit discipline, things that are extremely important when you give people guns and have them walk around deploying violence on behalf of the state. If that happened at West Point we would dishonorably discharge everyone involved. But when its the police we just let them do it. It was absurd.
Second, Eric Garner. For New Yorkers I still think this was a bigger deal than people realize. Not so much the actual incident, which was bad, but the fact that the full police force backed the officer that *everyone agreed did not follow department rules* and demanded that he face no sanction. Again, the reason people don't want the police to arrest the guy smoking on the subway platform is because it has been conclusively established that the police themselves will not act with discipline when engaging in enforcement, and if people can't trust that the police will police themselves then a lot of them are going to end up where Chris Hayes found himself in those tweets.
Third, this "police simply believe themselves to be above the law" vibe is reinforced daily by the way that they do a million little things in the city right down to the fact that they park their cars on the sidewalks around police stations despite the fact that (1) everyone agrees its against the rules and (2) people complain about it all the time. Again, there can be no trust when the police themselves thumb their noses at the very notion that they should try to earn the trust of the people they serve (or maybe they don't really conceive of themselves as public servants at all, which is a big part of the problem). Residents of NYC didn't wake up one day and decide that we didn't like cops, we have been living for decades with cops who very clearly don't like us and don't think they should be subject to any restraint or accountability. At some point that frays the public trust to the point where it's simply broken and we have to understand that this is a two way street if that trust is ever going to be restored.
This is still where I'm at roughly with the police. I supported the idea of defunding the police, mostly because I think the "brand" of the police is so tarnished that it would be easier to start a new department of "safety rangers" with completely different uniforms, recruiting priorities, and more modern practices (why is it that a guy with a gun has to come by to take my statement when my car was stolen many hours ago?). But with crime, people are so fixated on the current model of cops and long sentences that they have trouble even imagining anything else.
If you want to do that in SF or Minneapolis or wherever you are, go ahead. If it works out I hope it's copied and spreads. But most Americans are happy with their local police force. The police in my township aren't broken, so I just ask that you please don't try to fix them with untested methods.
I’m sympathetic, but you might consider that New York City has an especially awful police union. I don’t know that this is true, but I suspect that it is, partly because the incident that you mentioned are so egregious that they don’t generalize easily to other cities.