There are thousands of rape-kits lying untested all over the US. Some of those rapists are also murderers. There is a huge correlation between violence against women and other kinds of criminal violence. (It seems every time there's a deranged shooter, it turns out that there was a wife or gf raising red flags that were ignored by police.)
The criminal justice system has shown that it's unwilling to treat rape as a crime -- it's left on the books in case a black man rapes a white woman, but otherwise it's pretty much a dead letter.
But even if cops wink at rape, they should not overlook the huge resource of leads for cold-case murders that is sitting in those rape-kits. How many serial killers have also been serial rapists? The majority, maybe the vast majority.
This seems like a wild conclusion to me. The average police officer has little to no power over whether rape kits are tested or not. Painting with a broad brush is a great way to turn people off any point your trying to make.
In my opinion, Binya often has good things to say. This isn't one of those cases. I am quite surprised that this issue is the one to opened a chasm in our usually civil discourse. I think both sides have been substantially more reactionary than usual. I have been biting my tongue and avoiding, "feeding the trolls" on both sides.
Fair enough. But not testing rape kits is *absolutely outrageous*. I honestly strike to put into words how disgusting it is. Of course the average officer does not set it. It's part of a broader cultural problem.
As to statistics. I hope you appreciate the difficulty of statistics about crimes perpetrated by the police. First... they're the ones responsible for investigating. Second, the fragmented nature of US policing makes it difficult to aggregate. Matt often complains the USDA can tell you how many eggs are laid in the US with a lag of a week or two, but the lag for reporting murders is nine months.
Having said that, this article cites estimates of domestic violence rates of 10-40%. Seems bad
I suspect nearly everyone here thinks that our failure to DNA test rape kits is a national embarrassment. I think that same group also wants to believe that most cops are trying to do the right thing. The same group almost certainly thinks domestic violence is bad.
Basically, your choice of wording has managed to raise the ire of many likely allies.
I do not accept the reflexive "most cops are trying to do the right thing" that follows every outrage perpetrated by US police. Nor do I do think "national embarrassment" is a fair description. Losing to France at basketball is a national embarrassment. Knowingly having thousands of rape kits lying around untested is a problem on a whole other level.
I don't live in America, though I have family and friends who do. I honestly think Americans are inured to the truly incredible systemic problems of their police system and justice system broadly. Thousands killed, millions imprisoned, police leaders actively participating in right wing political events. That's before you get onto the six figure salaries, abuse of the pension system. It's all completely nuts.
To be clear - I agree with REF that I find many of your comments very interesting and insightful. Your bad comments is likely much lower than mine, but we should all be called on them when we make them!
I completely agree that its not testing rape kits is outrageous. And would say that the outrage we have should be directed at lawmakers for not mandating they be tested and providing the funding to do so.
On a more broader point, I think we would both agree that people in positions of power should be to be held to higher standards not lower standards. Whether that be political, legal, police or military, if we are expected to give a level of deference to their authority they should expect to be held to higher standards of action AND reporting.
Thanks for saying what I was thinking but couldn't quite find the right words to express.
Anytime the police come up in a comment section there's a crazy amount of "othering" or tribal "us vs them (the police) thinking where people feel it's OK to stereotype and paint with the broadest of brushes. Can you imagine someone claiming that a meaningful number of teachers, or journalists, or taxi drivers, or college professors, were secretly rapists, without any evidence? The closes I can come up with is QAnon people claiming that hollywood and DC operate pedophile rings.
Matt says: 'the general principle “it is good to catch people when they commit crimes” applies very broadly'.
I have not found this to be generally held opinion either among my liberal neighbors or when I take to my local Reddit to complain about crime.
Among my neighbors, the feeling seems to be that crimes are disproportionately committed by POCs or by people with issues that disproportionately affect POCs, and therefore efforts to stop crime are discriminatory.
On Reddit, the sample includes less of my liberal, semi-affluent, boho neighbors and more of the people I took honors classes in public high-school to escape. Among this cohort, the feeling seems to be, "fuck you, narc" or "I do what I want (for my benefit or on principle)".
As a rule-follower, I am genuinely puzzled by this sentiment.
I like to believe if I were to press them, these folks would all agree that it's wrong to murder someone...maybe. Beyond that, it gets dicey. I would wager many (though not all) would argue it's wrong to take someone's things without asking. Unfortunately, it is crimes related to the "common good" that I most want to see enforced and that are also the most contentious. As a result they only seem to be enforced in the most affluent sections of my city, and the rest of us are left to have our quality of life degraded in the name of Justice and Liberty.
Take this weekend's NYT story on the injustice of traffic stops: My take away from this article is that petty crime should not be stopped and that if a person is harmed while trying to escape the police, we should just cease to try to apprehend them...
A big part of the problem is that punishments are so severe, actually punishing people is in fact ludicrously unjust in many cases. Should we punish someone for having a small amount of heroin on them? Well, probably not right now, because that could cause them life-long problems with getting jobs and getting their life on track which will just push them further down addiction. But "just ignore heroin users" isn't exactly an addiction solution either.
Obviously there's also reflexive defiance and a general sense that nothing other than oneself matters, but that's a broader cultural problem in the US that affects far more than just crime.
Incarceration is not an effective tool for preventing overdoses. In fact, it often is worse: people go in, lose their tolerance, come out, immediately get heroin and die. This is well demonstrated by the fact that the incarceration strategy wasn't working in the first place, which is why so many localities switched off of it.
I don't know when the incarceration strategy was switched off in the majority of the country, but if it was over the last 10 years then the change is correlated with a vast increase in drug overdose deaths.
There may well be a better solution than incarceration in prison for drug use. But the penalties (overdoses, health declines, anti-social behavior) for using drugs like heroin, crack and meth are also extreme.
A significant fraction, like 20-40%, of people who start using heroin will die of the use dead within a decade. That's my own estimate based on survey data I've found on how many people currently use Heroin and how many new users start over year.
I think you need strong evidence to prove that the recent increase in overdose deaths is anything other than increased fentanyl in the drug supply leading to more accidental overdose deaths because of its potency. Deaths *from heroin alone* peaked in 2016 while deaths from synthetic opioids have skyrocketed since then. Maybe some of those would have happened as heroin ODs otherwise but for me it's just a strong prior that "the reason so many more people die is because it's trivially easy to accidentally take too much" https://www.economist.com/sites/default/files/images/print-edition/20210515_USC372.png
I agree that fentanyl is surely part of the OD death increase, but more users will just as surely increase the number of deaths. Btw heroin-alone deaths are thought to be much less than even in that chart, as fentanyl makes selling pure-heroin a bad business decision for drug sellers nowadays.
For what it's worth I was disputing that the data showed incarceration has been a failure, given that the correlation with both deaths and heroin use runs the other way.
To the extent incarceration is a factor I personally believe it probably decreases deaths but I acknowledge that's hard to prove. As one data point note how sharply deaths increased following covid, when many inmates were given early release.
But I understand there are many confounding factors in 2020.
Portugal decriminalized all drugs. Deaths went down. Most deaths are from people getting product of questionable quality and purity. Then they OD. In fact note that the deaths really skyrocketed after the big crack down on opioid prescriptions. People turned to black markets and died because of it.
if your concern is fatalities, then get people off the black markets.
For the small portion of drug users that have a problem with addiction, then should be treated medically not criminally.
Decriminalizing is't the same thing as removing punishments. It's still illegal to possess illegal drugs in Portugal. If you're found to possess a small amount (under 10 day personal supply) the drugs are confiscated and you're issued a summons to appear before a "Dissuasion Committee" who can punish you with a range of powers and or incentive you to receive treatment,
It may well be a much better system. But it's hardly hands-off. Drugs are still illegal and drug-traffickers still get prison sentences.
This looks like a priorities problem. How often would a police officer investigating a murder or armed robbery case stumble across a person with a small amount of heroin?
That's part of the equation. Another part is whether open drug use should be tolerated. In some areas it is, with needle-exchange programs operating and the police turning a blind eye to people shooting up. In other areas using hard drugs openly will not be ignored by police.
To me that's "what should police do if they happen to see drug evidence" and "should police be arresting drug users in general" are two different questions.
I think you underrate the damage that can be done here. The interaction with the system may be enough to scare them straight. Being knocked out of the 6 figure job market might, on the other hand, be enough to permanently consign them to the unemployed and addicted.
So I'm just leaning heavily on the anecdotal here, so that's worth only what it it's worth. But I don't know a single person with promising career prospects that have been held back from that kind of future because of drug usage arrests. But I do know several people with promising 6 figure careers in their future who died of drug overdoses.
And you think that locking them up would have turned their lives around? Once their lives were turned around, would those 6 figure doors still be open to them?
I only know of one case where someone likely would have fallen hard(had they been incarcerated) but I am sure there are a million more out there. No way of knowing if they would have recovered. It certainly would have thrown a wrench into the works.
I mean - I don't know, but at least they'd be alive? I don't think incarceration is so causal that you automatically quit trying as soon as you get out. Some people do actually turn their life around.
Anyways - I'm not even advocating for incarceration for heroin use, although I did let that word slip in probably out of laziness. I don't quite know what the right solution is, but I think long prison sentences and "just legalize it" are both wrong solutions.
What I'm most convinced of is that there should be some form of punishment and disincentive for using drugs that do so much societal damage. Maybe it's community service programs, forced treatment programs or maybe it's fines or the removal of government benefits. Or short prison sentences for repeat offenders or people who publicly use it in front of families and school children.
Jail people so they don't do something so dumb it might kill them. Seems a waste of money to me, and we'd be better off with them dead, which is all our fates in the long run.
+1. If people with these views get their way, say goodbye to livable (by middle- and working class people) cities.
I personally find such views indefensible. I have had my house (in a fancy part of DC) broken into multiple times (including while I was home, sleeping) and valuable property, including a nice bike, stolen. Try sleeping well after that happens.
In addition, a very close friend of mine was murdered by a "troubled (white) youth." The owner of the building, where an elderly aunt of his also lived, was trying to help out the kid by giving him odd jobs etc. To thank him, the guy murdered the building owner and the aunt (after raping her). My friend had the grave misfortune to arrive home after work and was also killed. I had zero sympathy for this person, who was thankfully arrested and convicted, and was not sorry when he was executed.
Rules, criminal or otherwise, don't exist in a vacuum. Either there is a culture of enforcement, or there isn't. They are rules, or they are optional. If the left wins on quality-of-life crime issues, they will alienate many, many voters, myself included, and there will be serious social repercussions.
My takeaway from the Times story was a bit different. Many police departments, especially in smaller cities, are criminal gangs, licensed to carry weapons and trained and incentivized to harass motorists over nonsense like burned out tail lights or failing to signal a lane change to fund their own bloated salaries and benefits. They seem to pick especially on POCs who maybe are more likely to be driving a beater. It's no wonder the police in large parts of America have a horrible reputation, while majorities of Americans would actually like effective policing. There's no inconsistency in these attitudes.
1. There is a difference between a "criminal gang" and the police, namely that the police have the monopoly on state sanctioned violence, while a gang does not. Maybe you do not respect the difference? I happen to believe it is necessary to enforce the laws of the commonwealth.
2. How do you enforce these laws? You can do it with fines or with jail time. Do you think it's reasonable to assign jail time for a busted tail light? Probably not. So you issue a fine. If that fine is used to pay the salary of police officer that enforces the law, great.
3. Maybe you think it's unnecessary to have functioning taillights? Here we have arrived at the enforcement of laws related to the "common good" I mention in my original post. I think cars that are operating on the road should have license plates, functioning lights, mechanical systems that work, windows that are transparent, and convey themselves at a decibel level that isn't corrosive. These things, while perhaps trivial when considered singularly, add up to a functioning civic space.
"So you issue a fine. If that fine is used to pay the salary of police officer that enforces the law, great."
Whoa, whoa, big step there. Some of us who are fine with fines think that it is a huge mistake to use them to pay for policing.
Once fines are used to support the police system, the officer has gone from being a civil servant to being a bounty hunter. Now, every part of the force has an incentive to increase fine revenue, by fair means or foul.
I'm generally in agreement with you in the necessity of enforcement and punishment. But supporting the police out of fines (and confiscations) instead of the general fund has been a huge catastrophe.
Treating fines as a revenue-generator is like allowing private actors to make money running prisons. Bad idea.
Ok, but what do you do with the fine revenue then? To what legitimate purpose can it be put? Hell, I'd be fine with a plan to put every dollar raised by fines on busted taillights to be spent on making sure disadvantaged people can afford working taillights. But even then you might worry that the fines were being used to fund a vast administrative apparatus...or see them as kick backs to vehicle inspection centers, or whatever.
Just put them back into the general fund, and make it clear that the budget for the police department is determined by considerations that have nothing to do with how much fine revenue they bring in to the state.
I understand that there are some small jurisdictions that would hardly have a general fund without fine revenue. In those cases, the fundamental corruption of the government funding model is even clearer. They are fining people *in order not to pay taxes.* That's absurd. If you want a safe community, then pay your taxes. That's where other public services come from. We try not to fund the fire department in a way that gives them an incentive for arson.
At the level of city government -- even relatively large-city government -- I think that saying that the fines are part of general fund revenue rather than a specific revenue program is largely semantics. They know about and count on so much money, and are incented to raise it.
There does come a point when a jurisdiction is large enough that fines aren't very relevant, but that point is pretty large.
Most of the NYFD are ambulance drivers paid for supposedly putting their lives at great risk fighting fires when they’re really driving ambulances at inflated salaries. 9/11 was a one-off tragedy with enormous loss of life, but in general police and fire departments are low-risk well paid jobs. If they’re unpleasant, and I think they often are, much of it’s due to the ‘my way or the highway’ attitude they bring ro the job, inflaming responses from the citizens they’re supposedly paid to protect.
Disagree. I'd say for most, community service is a fine you pay with time rather than money. I guess you could argue the same for jail. It's a difference of degree.
I think fines are a powerful disincentive. Fines are the reason I behaved for much of my 20s when I was long on time and anti-social sentiment, but severely short on cash.
A state monopoly on carrying a gun, shoving it in your face for a broken tail light and shooting you if you say ‘hold on officer’ is my definition of a criminal gang. I’m sure you’re much more disturbed by scofflaws not picking up their dog’s poop than I am by the heavy-handed policing in America. We each have our dream societies and yours isn’t mine.
But by your definition it's fairly rare that police operate as criminal gangs, then, since they don't typically shove a gun in your face for a broke taillight and very very rarely shoot someone for saying "hold on officer". Police make 20 million traffic stops a year but things like the latter happen so rarely that they make national news.
Here's some other examples of what it looks like when law enforcement acts as a criminal gang. I think my examples are much truer to the definition:
So I'm looking up civil asset forfeiture and I found it's allowed by law, in some form, in 46 states, and disallowed in 4 states. Are police departments criminal gangs in all 50 states or just the ones where legislatures and courts have decided that civil asset forfeiture is allowable under law?
Fining people a modest amount for driving w/o a taillight or excessive muffler noise is fine. Just don't do it with armed police officers stopping the car. It's dangerous for the person stopped and the police ought to have more important things to do.
If a cop pulls you over, then takes your car (and keeps it) without ever charging, much less convicting you of a crime, what's the difference? Aside from the paperwork being in order I suppose...
I'm living in a city where half the police force rage-quit last year (made the NYT!) and where traffic stops are down 75% year over year (whether due to a de facto strike or limited resources or both). It does not feel great. It feels like anarchy. It feels a bit like on a day to day level there is no law, except that which one makes. Perhaps for a libertarian, this is paradise, but for an unarmed liberal such as myself that relies on the enforcement of the social contract for safety, protection of property, and happiness, it feels bad. This is my lived experience every day. I would take a dose of that over-policing everyone is talking about.
It's been a long and winding forum road to get us to this point, many replies deep, but if you read my original post, it begins with the basic admission that everyone doesn't feel, like me, that fundamentally laws should be enforced.
And why aren't you celebrating this golden opportunity? I know if I were you I would be imagining all the possibilities instead of complaining about victimless crimes like reckless driving.
Just as attempted homicide is only a 'attempted homicide gone wrong', 'reckless driving' is only victimless until it isn't. Driving around with a small child in your fuel-efficient hatchback amidst a sea of 'victimless crime' isn't fun.
The city is Asheville, NC. I'm sorry to say, but I will be very surprised if our city is able to turn this into a 'golden opportunity'. Unlike forum chat-boards, it painfully hard to do anything, even small, moderate things in practice. The very title of Slow Boring alludes to this fact.
Well, I live in an city that been unanimous, single-party D rule for a score. We'll see what they can come up with beyond their lip-service 'defund' action that stripped a small fraction of the overall police budget. This, coupled with salaries <50k and a DA that actually held a member of their number accountable led mass quits, or so the story goes.
Look, I'm a fellow SB reader. I want the kind of police reform that Matt talks about frequently. At the same time, I want a functioning civic society where I live
NYT story goes deep and discovers problems in America caused by people who (shockingly!) don't own subscriptions to the NYTs! It's working class people in small cities who are the problem!
I didn’t actually read the article on traffic stops but I have formed opinions on the matter elsewhere. My guess would have been they were saying that *traffic stops* are the wrong way to try to catch people. Actual traffic laws can be enforced better through cameras and license plate readers, while other crimes are better addressed outside of vehicles.
Any reason why? I agree that the surveillance state isn't great, but I think it's less bad than the police brutality state, and if it can get rid of a lot of that, then it seems like a good move.
Lack of surveillance state doesn't mean we have to accept police brutality. I would argue that better training, along with getting rid of union rules that protect bad cops could go a long ways to eliminating police brutality.
Ending the failed war on drugs would also help. As a lot of the bad interactions is because cops are looking for drugs
I'm generally in favor of universal enforcement, but I do think that there's not actually a reason to fine someone for speeding on empty roads, or for example slowing down to 1mph instead of 0mph at stop sign with nobody at it or failing to signal a lane change when there was nobody there to see the signal. So I'm not super in favor of automated enforcement of traffic rules.
In contrast, all thefts, assaults, and murders should be run down.
"But at the end of the day, I'd prefer universal and ubiquitous enforcement over traffic stops"
Why would you ever think someone unhinged enough to run from police is going to respect camera fines, if the municipality can even find the driver to send the fines to?
On what planet do you think people would have license plates attached to their vehicles in the scenario you posit? Even here in LA now, a large number of people drive around without plates or with their plates obscured from view.
" Municipalities and state governments can put liens on these magic things called "bank accounts". The unbanked... well, you've got a bigger problem than "tracking them down" as far as getting money out of them.'
Who do you think these people running from police are? You think they're doctors trying to save their insurance rates or something?
I find this a very naive comment. The "rules" aren't set, or enforced, fairly. America features a laundry list of interest groups extracting what they can from the richest society ever with incredible ruthlessness. It isn't so surprising relatively disadvantaged people within that society don't hold themselves to the highest of standards.
To get a bit more specific:
- Many people are restricted from earning money (occupational licensing)
- Many people are restricted from spending their money on essential services (zoning)
- Laws are written almost exclusively by wealthy people, advised by other wealthy people
- The justice system barely pretends to enforce the law equally between rich and poor. You don't even have to get into race. Think OJ Simpson.
Americans seem to think it's normal that a fairly regular feature of American society is outbreaks of violence so severe that America's incredibly militarised police isn't sufficient and the national guard has to be called in. But it isn't. It's a reflection of a level of oppression that other Western societies don't experience.
"It's a reflection of a level of oppression that other Western societies don't experience."
This is an incredibly common, deep-seated problem with basically all of "left" discourse right now.
Not everything is rooted in oppression and victimization.
Sometimes, people suck, on their own, with no external force causing, facilitating, or encouraging it.
We understand *so little* about the sociology behind crime, what causes it, why it becomes more and less prevalent, and how to change policy in a way that will influence it. None of the "experts" would even contemplate a blanket statement... yet people routinely burst in to say, with entirely unwarranted confidence, that solving oppression will solve crime.
To which I say: Hogwash. Causality-reversed, ill-supported, profoundly stupid hogwash.
Solving crime, or at least reducing the problem to one that fades into the background of public consciousness, will create the basic conditions for our state to dial back the worst excesses of enforcement.
I don't think the idea that trying to stop murder is discriminatory is really very common even in liberal circles. More common among both liberals and conservatives is to just think that police aren't capable of catching muders more often. Then if you are conservative you support the death penalty and less humane prison conditions and if you are liberal you want to improve social services, reduce poverty and stuff like that.
For me the problem is the broad categories of stuff that we have criminalized. After all the average American commits three felonies a day. Yes you to. But you would never know it because it's impossible for anyone to know all the crimes. Shoot there's like 80,000 pages just in the tax code. Then think about all the environmental regulations. Most of those make you a felon too.
Moreover, I broadly oppose the puritanical portions of the criminal code. For example, drugs, prostitutions, gambling etc. Simply put those are none of the government's business.
You must have read a different article. The article I read posited that police often have incentives to pursue routine traffic stops, and when they do so, they regularly escalate otherwise benign encounters out of hysterical hypervigilance, which has led to the deaths of over 400 unarmed, nonviolent motorists over the past five years.
In most of the cases in the article, the person was fleeing the police, unarmed ( or armed only with a 2000 pound vehicle), before being shot. Matt has written some great stuff about police reform, and I agree with him. But until that reform comes, in every interaction with police you should assume they will not hesitate to kill you. So you keep your hands on the steering wheel, avoid sudden movements, etc. I know that there are some bad cops out there and sometimes this isn't enough to save you, but in the cases referenced in the article, following the instructions you are provided in the drivers' manual would have been enough to prevent these episodes.
I also found it strange that the police vigilance was called into question because the episodes of violence against them 'rare' (I believe they sited 60 episodes during the same period as the 400 civilian deaths). 60 is less than 400, but it isn't nothing. Lots of people were pulled over, and out of these many, many cases, occasionally some police were killed and some civilians were killed. It seems you either have to take both or neither seriously instead of one and not the other.
They're not equivalent. I'm a member of the public. I didn't take an oath to protect police officers' lives. They took an oath to protect mine, and the lives of the 400+ unarmed, nonviolent motorists they killed. Their job includes the risk of death.
They also don't have equivalent solutions. If you want to cut down or eliminate those 60 deaths, start by getting rid of guns. If you want to cut down on motorist deaths, start by changing officer training.
So that's all true, but why don't you take that oath then? Does your current job involve a risk of death, or dealing with dangerous people on their worst days quite frequently?
Like 100% of Americans, I'm all for good police reforms. We only disagree on what good reforms that means. But what I read again and again is more demands from "them" when they quite often already have a dangerous and unpopular job.
I also read complaints about the types of laws they enforce (for example, too many speeding tickets to raise funds for the municipality). But they're only doing what they are directed to do by their local government. If you want your local police to stop enforcing speeding or stop carrying guns, vote for that or write letters to your local government. But don't blame the police for doing what they are quite literally asked to do.
The problem is that police are trained to be "warriors," and that the street is a war zone. They expect to encounter threats to their lives every time they pull someone over. Then they spend all shift pulling people over for expired tags, and treating those people like the enemy.
I want cops to be well paid civil servants, subject to prosecution and loss of employment when they commit a crime in the line of duty. I want the city to be civilly liable when their employees harm the public despite, or more often because of, the training and direction they receive.
Also, I work in a public defenders' office, so I'm rarely threatened with violence at work (although it's not unhearf of) but I often deal with people on the worst days of their lives.
My issue with this idea of "warrior" police is that there are 17,985 police departments in the USA. It seems unlikely that they all receive the exact same training or culturally have the exact same mindset. But it seems to be taken as absolutely true that they increasingly have a warrior mentality.
The concept of "warrior" mentality is a little fuzzy, but it could certainly be true enough. But with 17,985 departments I'd like to see more data and evidence of where this mindset is most prevalent and where it's not. Which departments are doing well and what training did they receive versus the opposite? And if there's not a single department doing well enough then maybe there's not really a realistic way to do less adversarial policing within our system, although I doubt that.
It's very rare that I see this evidence-based approach. What's become prevalent is NYT reporters writing up articles after doing interviews in 2 or 3 communities and exposing the very worst cases of abuses they can find in the entire nation.
"So that's all true, but why don't you take that oath then"
I did serve in the military (as a tanker). Making $800 a month (1995) With extremely strict rules on use of force.
The idea that we can't get quality police officers if we hold them accountable when they act poorly is BS. And I would argue due in large part to the unions that focus on protecting rotten cops (just like teacher unions protect rotten teachers).
If you diss me, I can shoot you would be the first class of cop school I'd cut. If we took away their guns and patrol cars too and gave them billy clubs, I bet homicides in America would drop to record lows.
Matt argues elsewhere that a lack of accountability is basically a perk we've paid in place of a raise. I'm with you: take it away. But that will demand higher salary to compensate, or like you say, you will face quits and have trouble re-hiring. Similarly I would like to have beat cops on foot around me, but I assume this would also require increasing police budgets. I'm all for it. I'm on record with my city council demanding more, more-accountable cops paid for by raising my taxes. (I might have forwarded them a Slow Boring article along with the request ;) )
Can you help me understand how police having firearms is going to cause others to murder more people?
Crips member was going to go shoot up the Bloods because they shot the Crips up last week, but since they heard that the police are giving up their guns they're going to disarm as well?
I think these attitudes are colored by perceived the perceived injustices in the criminal justice systems. If you could reword the original sentence to "it is good for fair and just criminal systems to catch people when they commit crimes", and you could convince people that "fair and just" isn't accompanied by a wink and a nudge, you'd get a lot more buy in.
In other words, the specific policies Matt is talking about need to be part of a larger project of making a better justice system and convincing people that it is a better system.
The basic take here - that milder penalties and more thorough policing are an effective way to reduce crime, and that excessive penalties result in people (witnesses, police, prosecutors) letting petty criminals get away with crimes, which drives up crime - is one that I was taught in history class in high school in the 1980s.
The introduction of Peelian policing and the gradual removal of the "bloody code" in the Victorian era saw a dramatic drop in crime rates. Until 1823, there were something like 200 crimes that could be punished with death (often reduced to transportation to the colonies in practice); by 1861, there were only five civilian offences, of which only murder was prosecuted in any significant numbers (there were a handful of executions for treason and espionage relating to the two world wars, the last piracy execution was in 1830, the only execution for arson in a royal dockyard was in 1777). "Something like" is there because there isn't a formal list; Parliament had to pass a law saying "all crimes except these five can no longer be penalised with death" because there was no complete list available.
Not only was the death penalty abolished, many crimes saw the punishment reduced to a fine or short sentence, not long terms in prison.
At the same time, professional policing - first the Metropolitan Police in London (1829) and the copycat police in, eventually, every county in the country - was introduced, which meant a huge increase in the fraction of crimes being caught and prosecuted, and a big fall in crime rates.
The other part of the story is that prisons became professionalised and much less savage; Elizabeth Fry was the person credited with this in my high school; how true that really is, I don't know.
Now, that's the "high school history" version of this bit of criminology, how true it actually is compared to reality, I don't know. But it does show that this dates back well over a century.
I think the reason Demings isn't really a "rising star" - and why she's putting it on the line in a tough-to-win race next year - is that she'll be turning 65 in March. Its now or never for her.
She's got a great bio and hopefully she's a strong campaigner as well. The obvious countertactic from the Republicans is to find some Orlando police officers who were disgruntled with her (there will inevitably be some) and create a Swift Boat-style montage ad where they all say, one after another, that she "betrayed law enforcement" for this or that reason. (If I recall correctly, in the Swift Boat ad half the guys didn't even serve under Kerry! They were just right-wingers who happened to have served somewhere in Vietnam.) So she'll have to be ready for that: her bio alone won't be enough, and she'll have to lean *hard* into pro-police messaging.
It seems like the obvious countertactic from the Republicans will be that Florida is R+5, 2022 will already skew GOP and Rubio is a (relatively) popular incumbent.
Demmings will have to hit a home run to win that race.
That is not a countertactic. Republicans are not just going to sit around and do nothing on campaign messaging just because they have a baseline partisan edge.
Sorry you're right that was glib. I just meant I'm not sure that they will bother Demmings' message that directly when they can just run a standard Republican campaign and probably win easily.
I, for one, welcome Matty's slow migration towards normie old-school conservative ideas (with a technocratic neoliberal twist). Perhaps, as in days of old with the original neocons (Irvin Kristol and crew), the saviors of the right will be liberals.
“getting better at solving crimes is also the key to ultimately reducing some of the cruelty of the American criminal justice system.”
Disagree. There simply isn’t the appetite for shortening sentences for serious crimes. In Georgia, only 12% of the prison population are serving sentences for drug crimes. Most of these people were either trafficking significant quantities or got caught dealing multiple times. Even in a high incarceration state like Georgia, significantly reducing the prison population means freeing either sex or violent offenders. No one wants to do this.
I think there is a very strong case for reducing the penalty for a rape conviction. Rape is not uncommon— about half of the women I know well claim to have been raped. Almost all of us have a rapist on our block. If you live in a mid-rise apartment, there is probably a rapist in your building. Yet only 1 to 2% of rapists go to prison, mainly because prosecutors are very reluctant to prosecute rape when the woman voluntarily entered a man’s residence.
On the other hand, men are reasonably afraid of false accusations. Most sexual relationships end acrimoniously and plenty of women want to get money from or tarnish their reputations of their ex’s. I think that most rape allegations are truthful but a significant minority are not. Accordingly, as a juror, I would be very reluctant to convict a man in a “he said/she said” case without strong corroborating evidence.
On the other hand, if I knew a man had been accused by three different, unacquainted women, I would convict. Georgia, like many states, allows the state to prove “similar transactions” in criminal trials and juries are far likelier to convict in such cases. However, similar transactions can’t be proven unless the prosecution knows about them. A booking record would be really helpful. Making a first rape conviction lower stakes would make prosecutors less embarrassed to lose such cases. It would make jurors more likely to convict when guilt less than certain. Critically, it would create booking records to identify serial rapists. And yet, no politician will touch this idea because voters don’t want to be “soft on rape” even when the median penalty for rape is currently zero days in jail.
I think the hope is that, just as criminal justice reform got more popular as crime dropped, it will also get more popular as people are catching criminals more.
If we cleared 2x as many murders, and the murder rate therefore dropped(since punishment got more certain), people might be more willing to lower the sentences(hopefully).
The tenuous consensus for criminal justice reform has never extended far beyond “victimless crimes.”. People hear about the (rare) cases where someone gets rung up for a couple grams of cocaine and want that to stop. It rarely extends to cases with a victim crying for blood.
Life in prison with the possibility of parole after 30 years seems about right for murder.
It’s second tier crimes— rape, armed robbery, aggravated child molestation, where there might be room for shorter sentences. Only 10% of Georgia prisoners are murderers, you could put a big dent in the prison population by parolling sex offenders when they hit late middle age, at which point recidivism risk is much smaller
All degrees of murder? What about extenuating circumstances? How likely is the person to do it again? If the victim was constantly stalking/harassing/verbally abusing the killer?
On the other extreme, "cold-blooded killer" situation, that sentence seems more reasonable.
Hmm, the U.K seems to give parole after... 15/30 years for murder - depending on the severity (double murders suggest 30 years, some other heinous single murders - but typical 15 years), but a "life sentence" beyond that (so that crimes after release can send you right back to prison). If people are generally happy with the U.K.'s prison terms (with their lower murder rates) then perhaps those are good targets?
Lot of mixed feelings about this topic. I just hate the idea that we would lock someone up at age 18 so that they got out of prison in 30+ years. They would miss out on the majority their productive adult life. I understand if there is no other option, but still hate needing to do it.
why not structure the prison system so that people can be productive within prison? I would have no objection to a murder getting work release after 15 years of good behavior. But they shouldn’t get to have a wife or drink or do normal fun stuff
American criminal justice has little consistency for the same reason that American K-12 education has little consistency: just a gigantic amount of very very local variation. No tech is going to change that, because the tech will be inconsistently used. Val Demings’ approach seems like a mirror to the federal approach to education, where we spent some money to try and get some say, but largely just dilute any one actor’s decision making power and so the overall impact on governance is ambiguous.
Policing and education, both, should be run by State governments rather than thousands of local governments. That seems like about the right level of government for those functions to get benefits of both regional control and variation, and greater professionalism and economies of scale for shared resources and technology.
It seems to me there is enough heterogeneity in populations that municipal/county governance of schools and policing is ideal. The problem is funding which is also heterogeneous, sometimes in exactly the wrong ways.
Agreed - Local governance with better "best practices"
States can vary wildly in size - Rhode Island might be able to run policing at the state level, but Texas & California are an entirely different scale.
The other thing that distinguishes fatal and nonfatal shootings is the victims ability to affect the case. Nonfatal should be easier because you have a living witness guaranteed, but bc of how people feel about the police and the threat of retaliation, that could actually deter people giving evidence. Fatal shootings don’t have that witness, but may have family/friends of the victim who are willing to talk because they care less about retaliation in the face of their loss.
I wonder how often the perpetrator of a non-fatal shooting is someone with a complicated relationship to the victim, just as the perpetrators of sexual offenses are often people with a complicated relationship to the victim, so that the victim actively doesn’t want them punished.
It’s much more likely that the shooting is in response to some other activity. Bad guys get shot more than good guys. A large portion of murder victims are a result of ongoing conflicts between criminal groups.
So you run into a scenario where Victim A has to say nothing or say… it was revenge because I shot him last week.
Two points on the shoplifting. The researchers you quote don’t say don’t use FR technology, they say there’s a non-crime values trade-off involved, so legislators should make that call. If the value weren’t privacy (which you personally aren’t very interested in), you’d normally agree with that. Second, as various people have pointed out over on Twitter, as things stand in our criminal justice system, mere contact (much less a conviction) has significant repercussions regardless of the notional penalty; it’s not clear that we can “make the punishment [adequately] lighter.”
And point one exactly. I was surprised MY seems to have misread their point. The point is that the severity of the crime needs to be balanced with the the intrusiveness of the surveillance. Not that FR technology shouldn't be used for fear of punishing minor offenses.
Point two exactly. And the fragmentation of criminal justice institutions means that “just make the consequences lighter” is not a lever anyone has available to them; Matt’s policy preference here might make sense in the UK but from a purely harms reduction standpoint almost certainly doesn’t make sense in the US.
I do think it’s possible with traffic laws - I think in that case, the same body can both institute traffic cameras and reduce the fines charged for violations. They haven’t tended to, but they could. It’s harder with criminal offenses.
One of my first jobs out of college I was an analyst and junior product manager. As analysts, one of my tasks was predicting our revenue. As product manager, my job was to figure out problems and fix them.
The first problem I found was that our users accounts were getting hacked. As a solution, I implemented a bunch of authentication measures (some early two factor authentication, etc). Problem solved - the measures worked well enough that would be hackers went off to some other soft target. Hacked accounts went to 0.
Unfortunately, in my other job I realized that at the same time we started missing revenue projections. The new authentication measures materially reduced signups, etc so the net effect of the changes I made as product manager was negative.
The conclusion to me was that when something seems to you like a maximization or minimization problem, you're probably just missing a dimension of the problem. The optimum number of hacked accounts isn't in fact 0. Pissing off people with security measures does in fact have a cost. With a given level of technology, there's an optimum security level.
It seems really hard for people to see both sides of the problem. You increase policing, without improving the technology, you piss innocent people off. The police seem to have really no idea that this is a thing. There just isn't a "revenue" function there at all. Police defunders would like to stop policing entirely, which would reduce the insult rate... but at the cost of increased crime, a cost function they mostly ignore.
For the most part, to be honest we need to acknowledge both sides of this. Either say - there's too much crime now, so I think we need more policing, and I'm ok with a bit more bullshit harassment of "suspicious looking" people. Or - there's too much bullshit harassment, and I'm ok with more crime. If you're going so say you need to improve both - there needs to be a technological improvement. I think we need to give up some privacy/use facial recognition/dna databases/surveillance so that there can be both improved policing and less harassment.
CSI notwithstanding, police mostly solve crimes by talking to people. That requires the police and the criminal justice system generally to have credibility as a legitimate source of justice, in the community that knows about the murder. Non fatal shooting victims know exactly who shot them. They’re just not about to tell the fucking pigs about it.
"the old paradigm where you forget about crime and just focus on reform is dead."
That's good. No such paradigm should ever have existed if it did
Capturing more criminals IS policing reform. [It's not ALL of policing reform, of course: we also want to reduce shooting and other abuse of authority.] My guess s that police already put a reasonable maybe even unreasonable amount of resources in investigating and clearing (and thereby deter) crimes against high-income people. [My part of Washington DC probably IS a lot safer that were some of my cowering, gun toting FB friends who worry about home invasions live.] Where the MPD fails is in protecting life and property in low income neighborhood where more racial and ethnic minorities live. Where is the justice in that?
My assumption is that police in DC are just responding to incentives like any other group of people. If they're clearing less crime in low income neighborhoods, how would you restructure incentives to reverse that?
At the end of the day the police chief is appointed by the mayor of DC and the police are enforcing local laws passed by the representatives who were elected by the voters (although I'm pretty unclear of what the equivalent of state laws are in DC). So there's not really any Republicans to blame in that situation. And the police are hired from the local area, probably as often from the low income neighborhoods as from the high income ones.
It may be more difficult to clear such crimes and also involve more risk for the department
I'm not blaming Republicans or anyone else. I do not know HOW to restructure the incentives. That's the chief of Police's job. And the Mayor and Council to provide the resources.
Fwiw I didn't mean to imply you were personally blaming Republicans. It's just a common complaint in the national conversation so it felt worthwhile to reference. Sorry if it seemed that's what I meant. I don't know how to restructure the incentives either. But what I seem to read most of the time (again, not from you in your comment) is that the people to blame are simply "whoever it is the person writing the comment doesn't like, which is usually the police". It's a sad state of affairs and I wish I was more optimistic.
Your contrarian view isn't that murder is wrong and murders should be caught. Your contrarian view is that it is possible to both increase funding for police and make our criminal justice system more humane. Most people think there is just a tradeoff between lower crime vs being less harsh to criminals.
Agree that harsh penalties and unpredictable, arbitrary enforcement is bad for crimes like shoplifting, for the reasons stated. It's also bad for regulatory crimes for another reason - many regulations are drafted ambiguously, which can only be clarified from litigation in the course of a prosecution. But draconian penalties create such an in terrorem effect that defendants who have a good faith argument they didn't violate the law often prefer to settle than press for a clarifying judgement.
“After all, the underlying differences between a shooting that the victim survives and one in which the victim dies don’t really seem all that relevant from an investigative perspective.”
In the former scenario, you can ask the guy who shot him!!!
Like Bill P. said, MY stated that. But moreover, I'm not sure that asking the guy who got shot is always as useful as you might think. Yes, sometimes the shootings are just "criminal shoots random innocent person" (e.g. burglary gone wrong) --- in which case having an eyewitness is quite useful, but a lot of the time it's "criminal shoots criminal", in which case they guy who got shot may not be that communicative with police.
I know someone who does crime-prevention work in a poor area with a sky-high murder rate, and the situations I hear about sound so bizarre to me. E.g. who-shot-who is common knowledge, but the culprits are rarely convicted in part because the eyewitnesses are generally also criminals, so they don't provide information to the police. Non-criminals get the knowledge second- or third-hand, but "I heard thru the grapevine that so-and-so shot so-and-so" doesn't play well in court. Sometimes it helps the police get the lead they need to get solid evidence, but often it doesn't.
I just checked in on Chicago. Homicide clearance rate was 45% in 2020. The shooting clearance rate was 13%. The mass shooting clearance rate YTD is just 1 out of 39 mass shootings; going back four years it's just 10%. I assume >90% of these are gang related. Many might know which gang is retaliating but I doubt they know the name of the shooter(s).
I've always been interested in organized crime of all kinds, and I used to live in Los Angeles. So over time I've watched several hundred videos from this guy's channel where he interviews gang members in Los Angeles:
My impression is they know the shooter much more often than not. Even when the victim didn't actually see who shot him he usually hears who it was, in part because the shooter often wants it known because he was retaliating for something else anyway.
Anyways, I know that's not data or science, but just my personal impression, FWIW, after watching several hundred hours of interviews. And it's kind of astounding to me that liberals only want to blame the police for this culture of silence. Gang members aren't exactly the best example of the sympathetic downtrodden. Besides their obvious criminal activities they often have extremely sexist, racist or conspiracy-minded (anti-vax) for example, views. Perhaps they should be blamed just a bit for not being willing to talk to police?
A lot of high crime areas have a culture of not talking to police. Not much of an advantage in having a witness if the witness doesn't want to cooperate.
I wonder if the statistic is gathered in a way such that the total number of non-fatal shootings is inflated (but thus makes it harder to list as solved) except... the police generally have incentives not to overreport crimes like that so that seems unlikely.
So you'd think they'd be easier to solve but the shooting might be a robbery of a stranger gone bad, a gang related shooting where the victim just knows the assailant as a member of a group, the victim was attacked from behind, etc.
To bang a drum that I have banged here before:
There are thousands of rape-kits lying untested all over the US. Some of those rapists are also murderers. There is a huge correlation between violence against women and other kinds of criminal violence. (It seems every time there's a deranged shooter, it turns out that there was a wife or gf raising red flags that were ignored by police.)
The criminal justice system has shown that it's unwilling to treat rape as a crime -- it's left on the books in case a black man rapes a white woman, but otherwise it's pretty much a dead letter.
But even if cops wink at rape, they should not overlook the huge resource of leads for cold-case murders that is sitting in those rape-kits. How many serial killers have also been serial rapists? The majority, maybe the vast majority.
Something something Carceral Feminism.
yep, but they make sure to go after those drug dealers. That's a serious crime, not like rape /sarcasm
It's almost as a large minority of American police officers are themselves guilty of violence against women and don't want it looked at too closely
This seems like a wild conclusion to me. The average police officer has little to no power over whether rape kits are tested or not. Painting with a broad brush is a great way to turn people off any point your trying to make.
In my opinion, Binya often has good things to say. This isn't one of those cases. I am quite surprised that this issue is the one to opened a chasm in our usually civil discourse. I think both sides have been substantially more reactionary than usual. I have been biting my tongue and avoiding, "feeding the trolls" on both sides.
Fair enough. But not testing rape kits is *absolutely outrageous*. I honestly strike to put into words how disgusting it is. Of course the average officer does not set it. It's part of a broader cultural problem.
As to statistics. I hope you appreciate the difficulty of statistics about crimes perpetrated by the police. First... they're the ones responsible for investigating. Second, the fragmented nature of US policing makes it difficult to aggregate. Matt often complains the USDA can tell you how many eggs are laid in the US with a lag of a week or two, but the lag for reporting murders is nine months.
Having said that, this article cites estimates of domestic violence rates of 10-40%. Seems bad
https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/09/police-officers-who-hit-their-wives-or-girlfriends/380329/
I suspect nearly everyone here thinks that our failure to DNA test rape kits is a national embarrassment. I think that same group also wants to believe that most cops are trying to do the right thing. The same group almost certainly thinks domestic violence is bad.
Basically, your choice of wording has managed to raise the ire of many likely allies.
I do not accept the reflexive "most cops are trying to do the right thing" that follows every outrage perpetrated by US police. Nor do I do think "national embarrassment" is a fair description. Losing to France at basketball is a national embarrassment. Knowingly having thousands of rape kits lying around untested is a problem on a whole other level.
I don't live in America, though I have family and friends who do. I honestly think Americans are inured to the truly incredible systemic problems of their police system and justice system broadly. Thousands killed, millions imprisoned, police leaders actively participating in right wing political events. That's before you get onto the six figure salaries, abuse of the pension system. It's all completely nuts.
To be clear - I agree with REF that I find many of your comments very interesting and insightful. Your bad comments is likely much lower than mine, but we should all be called on them when we make them!
I completely agree that its not testing rape kits is outrageous. And would say that the outrage we have should be directed at lawmakers for not mandating they be tested and providing the funding to do so.
On a more broader point, I think we would both agree that people in positions of power should be to be held to higher standards not lower standards. Whether that be political, legal, police or military, if we are expected to give a level of deference to their authority they should expect to be held to higher standards of action AND reporting.
The corollary of which is "higher compensation".
Sorry, defunders.
Thanks for saying what I was thinking but couldn't quite find the right words to express.
Anytime the police come up in a comment section there's a crazy amount of "othering" or tribal "us vs them (the police) thinking where people feel it's OK to stereotype and paint with the broadest of brushes. Can you imagine someone claiming that a meaningful number of teachers, or journalists, or taxi drivers, or college professors, were secretly rapists, without any evidence? The closes I can come up with is QAnon people claiming that hollywood and DC operate pedophile rings.
Matt says: 'the general principle “it is good to catch people when they commit crimes” applies very broadly'.
I have not found this to be generally held opinion either among my liberal neighbors or when I take to my local Reddit to complain about crime.
Among my neighbors, the feeling seems to be that crimes are disproportionately committed by POCs or by people with issues that disproportionately affect POCs, and therefore efforts to stop crime are discriminatory.
On Reddit, the sample includes less of my liberal, semi-affluent, boho neighbors and more of the people I took honors classes in public high-school to escape. Among this cohort, the feeling seems to be, "fuck you, narc" or "I do what I want (for my benefit or on principle)".
As a rule-follower, I am genuinely puzzled by this sentiment.
I like to believe if I were to press them, these folks would all agree that it's wrong to murder someone...maybe. Beyond that, it gets dicey. I would wager many (though not all) would argue it's wrong to take someone's things without asking. Unfortunately, it is crimes related to the "common good" that I most want to see enforced and that are also the most contentious. As a result they only seem to be enforced in the most affluent sections of my city, and the rest of us are left to have our quality of life degraded in the name of Justice and Liberty.
Take this weekend's NYT story on the injustice of traffic stops: My take away from this article is that petty crime should not be stopped and that if a person is harmed while trying to escape the police, we should just cease to try to apprehend them...
A big part of the problem is that punishments are so severe, actually punishing people is in fact ludicrously unjust in many cases. Should we punish someone for having a small amount of heroin on them? Well, probably not right now, because that could cause them life-long problems with getting jobs and getting their life on track which will just push them further down addiction. But "just ignore heroin users" isn't exactly an addiction solution either.
Obviously there's also reflexive defiance and a general sense that nothing other than oneself matters, but that's a broader cultural problem in the US that affects far more than just crime.
"Should we punish someone for having a small amount of heroin on them?"
Yes? 100,000 people died of overdoses last year. Incarceration may effect their job prospects. But so will heroin use, especially if it kills them.
Incarceration is not an effective tool for preventing overdoses. In fact, it often is worse: people go in, lose their tolerance, come out, immediately get heroin and die. This is well demonstrated by the fact that the incarceration strategy wasn't working in the first place, which is why so many localities switched off of it.
I don't know when the incarceration strategy was switched off in the majority of the country, but if it was over the last 10 years then the change is correlated with a vast increase in drug overdose deaths.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/drug-overdose-data.htm
There may well be a better solution than incarceration in prison for drug use. But the penalties (overdoses, health declines, anti-social behavior) for using drugs like heroin, crack and meth are also extreme.
A significant fraction, like 20-40%, of people who start using heroin will die of the use dead within a decade. That's my own estimate based on survey data I've found on how many people currently use Heroin and how many new users start over year.
I think you need strong evidence to prove that the recent increase in overdose deaths is anything other than increased fentanyl in the drug supply leading to more accidental overdose deaths because of its potency. Deaths *from heroin alone* peaked in 2016 while deaths from synthetic opioids have skyrocketed since then. Maybe some of those would have happened as heroin ODs otherwise but for me it's just a strong prior that "the reason so many more people die is because it's trivially easy to accidentally take too much" https://www.economist.com/sites/default/files/images/print-edition/20210515_USC372.png
Both regular users and first time users of heroin have been increasing steadily over the last 20 years, especially in younger age groups:
https://www.drugabuse.gov/publications/research-reports/heroin/scope-heroin-use-in-united-states
I agree that fentanyl is surely part of the OD death increase, but more users will just as surely increase the number of deaths. Btw heroin-alone deaths are thought to be much less than even in that chart, as fentanyl makes selling pure-heroin a bad business decision for drug sellers nowadays.
For what it's worth I was disputing that the data showed incarceration has been a failure, given that the correlation with both deaths and heroin use runs the other way.
To the extent incarceration is a factor I personally believe it probably decreases deaths but I acknowledge that's hard to prove. As one data point note how sharply deaths increased following covid, when many inmates were given early release.
But I understand there are many confounding factors in 2020.
Portugal decriminalized all drugs. Deaths went down. Most deaths are from people getting product of questionable quality and purity. Then they OD. In fact note that the deaths really skyrocketed after the big crack down on opioid prescriptions. People turned to black markets and died because of it.
if your concern is fatalities, then get people off the black markets.
For the small portion of drug users that have a problem with addiction, then should be treated medically not criminally.
Leave the rest of us alone
Decriminalizing is't the same thing as removing punishments. It's still illegal to possess illegal drugs in Portugal. If you're found to possess a small amount (under 10 day personal supply) the drugs are confiscated and you're issued a summons to appear before a "Dissuasion Committee" who can punish you with a range of powers and or incentive you to receive treatment,
It may well be a much better system. But it's hardly hands-off. Drugs are still illegal and drug-traffickers still get prison sentences.
"Decriminalizing is't the same thing as removing punishments"
Agreed. Decriminalizing still leaves the black market in place with all the assorted violence that the black market causes.
Decriminalization is better than the status quo. But we need outright legalization
This looks like a priorities problem. How often would a police officer investigating a murder or armed robbery case stumble across a person with a small amount of heroin?
That's part of the equation. Another part is whether open drug use should be tolerated. In some areas it is, with needle-exchange programs operating and the police turning a blind eye to people shooting up. In other areas using hard drugs openly will not be ignored by police.
To me that's "what should police do if they happen to see drug evidence" and "should police be arresting drug users in general" are two different questions.
I think you underrate the damage that can be done here. The interaction with the system may be enough to scare them straight. Being knocked out of the 6 figure job market might, on the other hand, be enough to permanently consign them to the unemployed and addicted.
So I'm just leaning heavily on the anecdotal here, so that's worth only what it it's worth. But I don't know a single person with promising career prospects that have been held back from that kind of future because of drug usage arrests. But I do know several people with promising 6 figure careers in their future who died of drug overdoses.
And you think that locking them up would have turned their lives around? Once their lives were turned around, would those 6 figure doors still be open to them?
I only know of one case where someone likely would have fallen hard(had they been incarcerated) but I am sure there are a million more out there. No way of knowing if they would have recovered. It certainly would have thrown a wrench into the works.
I mean - I don't know, but at least they'd be alive? I don't think incarceration is so causal that you automatically quit trying as soon as you get out. Some people do actually turn their life around.
Anyways - I'm not even advocating for incarceration for heroin use, although I did let that word slip in probably out of laziness. I don't quite know what the right solution is, but I think long prison sentences and "just legalize it" are both wrong solutions.
What I'm most convinced of is that there should be some form of punishment and disincentive for using drugs that do so much societal damage. Maybe it's community service programs, forced treatment programs or maybe it's fines or the removal of government benefits. Or short prison sentences for repeat offenders or people who publicly use it in front of families and school children.
Btw here's the obit for a fried of mine who died from heroin. https://static1.squarespace.com/static/51d72b41e4b0f798b53a3cae/t/5283f75ee4b0d5038ab3f2f4/1384380254468/OB20130402LEG.pdf
He had a PhD in physics from UT-Austin. Here's some links to his physics research:
https://www.researchgate.net/scientific-contributions/S-Travis-Bannerman-35401963
He probably would have done alright even with a criminal record.
Jail people so they don't do something so dumb it might kill them. Seems a waste of money to me, and we'd be better off with them dead, which is all our fates in the long run.
Well that escalated quickly
What happens when a cop pulls you over and shoves a gun in your face.
How is that relevant to your “it’d be better if drug addicts just died” statement
+1. If people with these views get their way, say goodbye to livable (by middle- and working class people) cities.
I personally find such views indefensible. I have had my house (in a fancy part of DC) broken into multiple times (including while I was home, sleeping) and valuable property, including a nice bike, stolen. Try sleeping well after that happens.
In addition, a very close friend of mine was murdered by a "troubled (white) youth." The owner of the building, where an elderly aunt of his also lived, was trying to help out the kid by giving him odd jobs etc. To thank him, the guy murdered the building owner and the aunt (after raping her). My friend had the grave misfortune to arrive home after work and was also killed. I had zero sympathy for this person, who was thankfully arrested and convicted, and was not sorry when he was executed.
Rules, criminal or otherwise, don't exist in a vacuum. Either there is a culture of enforcement, or there isn't. They are rules, or they are optional. If the left wins on quality-of-life crime issues, they will alienate many, many voters, myself included, and there will be serious social repercussions.
My takeaway from the Times story was a bit different. Many police departments, especially in smaller cities, are criminal gangs, licensed to carry weapons and trained and incentivized to harass motorists over nonsense like burned out tail lights or failing to signal a lane change to fund their own bloated salaries and benefits. They seem to pick especially on POCs who maybe are more likely to be driving a beater. It's no wonder the police in large parts of America have a horrible reputation, while majorities of Americans would actually like effective policing. There's no inconsistency in these attitudes.
1. There is a difference between a "criminal gang" and the police, namely that the police have the monopoly on state sanctioned violence, while a gang does not. Maybe you do not respect the difference? I happen to believe it is necessary to enforce the laws of the commonwealth.
2. How do you enforce these laws? You can do it with fines or with jail time. Do you think it's reasonable to assign jail time for a busted tail light? Probably not. So you issue a fine. If that fine is used to pay the salary of police officer that enforces the law, great.
3. Maybe you think it's unnecessary to have functioning taillights? Here we have arrived at the enforcement of laws related to the "common good" I mention in my original post. I think cars that are operating on the road should have license plates, functioning lights, mechanical systems that work, windows that are transparent, and convey themselves at a decibel level that isn't corrosive. These things, while perhaps trivial when considered singularly, add up to a functioning civic space.
"So you issue a fine. If that fine is used to pay the salary of police officer that enforces the law, great."
Whoa, whoa, big step there. Some of us who are fine with fines think that it is a huge mistake to use them to pay for policing.
Once fines are used to support the police system, the officer has gone from being a civil servant to being a bounty hunter. Now, every part of the force has an incentive to increase fine revenue, by fair means or foul.
I'm generally in agreement with you in the necessity of enforcement and punishment. But supporting the police out of fines (and confiscations) instead of the general fund has been a huge catastrophe.
Treating fines as a revenue-generator is like allowing private actors to make money running prisons. Bad idea.
Ok, but what do you do with the fine revenue then? To what legitimate purpose can it be put? Hell, I'd be fine with a plan to put every dollar raised by fines on busted taillights to be spent on making sure disadvantaged people can afford working taillights. But even then you might worry that the fines were being used to fund a vast administrative apparatus...or see them as kick backs to vehicle inspection centers, or whatever.
Just put them back into the general fund, and make it clear that the budget for the police department is determined by considerations that have nothing to do with how much fine revenue they bring in to the state.
I understand that there are some small jurisdictions that would hardly have a general fund without fine revenue. In those cases, the fundamental corruption of the government funding model is even clearer. They are fining people *in order not to pay taxes.* That's absurd. If you want a safe community, then pay your taxes. That's where other public services come from. We try not to fund the fire department in a way that gives them an incentive for arson.
Money is fungible.
At the level of city government -- even relatively large-city government -- I think that saying that the fines are part of general fund revenue rather than a specific revenue program is largely semantics. They know about and count on so much money, and are incented to raise it.
There does come a point when a jurisdiction is large enough that fines aren't very relevant, but that point is pretty large.
Most of the NYFD are ambulance drivers paid for supposedly putting their lives at great risk fighting fires when they’re really driving ambulances at inflated salaries. 9/11 was a one-off tragedy with enormous loss of life, but in general police and fire departments are low-risk well paid jobs. If they’re unpleasant, and I think they often are, much of it’s due to the ‘my way or the highway’ attitude they bring ro the job, inflaming responses from the citizens they’re supposedly paid to protect.
Disagree. I'd say for most, community service is a fine you pay with time rather than money. I guess you could argue the same for jail. It's a difference of degree.
I think fines are a powerful disincentive. Fines are the reason I behaved for much of my 20s when I was long on time and anti-social sentiment, but severely short on cash.
Good correction. Thanks.
A state monopoly on carrying a gun, shoving it in your face for a broken tail light and shooting you if you say ‘hold on officer’ is my definition of a criminal gang. I’m sure you’re much more disturbed by scofflaws not picking up their dog’s poop than I am by the heavy-handed policing in America. We each have our dream societies and yours isn’t mine.
But by your definition it's fairly rare that police operate as criminal gangs, then, since they don't typically shove a gun in your face for a broke taillight and very very rarely shoot someone for saying "hold on officer". Police make 20 million traffic stops a year but things like the latter happen so rarely that they make national news.
Here's some other examples of what it looks like when law enforcement acts as a criminal gang. I think my examples are much truer to the definition:
http://www.borderlandbeat.com/2021/09/the-deadly-betrayals-of-sinaloa-cartels.html
http://www.borderlandbeat.com/2021/04/municipal-police-officer-arrested-was.html
http://www.borderlandbeat.com/2021/10/caf-el-lobo-leaves-narcomanta-claiming.html
"But by your definition it's fairly rare that police operate as criminal gangs,"
No it's not. For example, civil asset forfeiture use has been wide spread for quite a while.
Note, I consider any seizure of assets without a criminal conviction to be theft.
So I'm looking up civil asset forfeiture and I found it's allowed by law, in some form, in 46 states, and disallowed in 4 states. Are police departments criminal gangs in all 50 states or just the ones where legislatures and courts have decided that civil asset forfeiture is allowable under law?
Fining people a modest amount for driving w/o a taillight or excessive muffler noise is fine. Just don't do it with armed police officers stopping the car. It's dangerous for the person stopped and the police ought to have more important things to do.
Bad cost-benefit analysis in law enforcement can have deadly results!
In the kind of situation you describe. Would the suspect have shot a traffic control officer who would not even be checking for a parole violation?
If a cop pulls you over, then takes your car (and keeps it) without ever charging, much less convicting you of a crime, what's the difference? Aside from the paperwork being in order I suppose...
I'm living in a city where half the police force rage-quit last year (made the NYT!) and where traffic stops are down 75% year over year (whether due to a de facto strike or limited resources or both). It does not feel great. It feels like anarchy. It feels a bit like on a day to day level there is no law, except that which one makes. Perhaps for a libertarian, this is paradise, but for an unarmed liberal such as myself that relies on the enforcement of the social contract for safety, protection of property, and happiness, it feels bad. This is my lived experience every day. I would take a dose of that over-policing everyone is talking about.
If the traffic situation is bad, hire some traffic control officers. If people feel like you, they should be willing to pay them.
It's been a long and winding forum road to get us to this point, many replies deep, but if you read my original post, it begins with the basic admission that everyone doesn't feel, like me, that fundamentally laws should be enforced.
What city is that if you don't mind me asking?
And why aren't you celebrating this golden opportunity? I know if I were you I would be imagining all the possibilities instead of complaining about victimless crimes like reckless driving.
Just as attempted homicide is only a 'attempted homicide gone wrong', 'reckless driving' is only victimless until it isn't. Driving around with a small child in your fuel-efficient hatchback amidst a sea of 'victimless crime' isn't fun.
The city is Asheville, NC. I'm sorry to say, but I will be very surprised if our city is able to turn this into a 'golden opportunity'. Unlike forum chat-boards, it painfully hard to do anything, even small, moderate things in practice. The very title of Slow Boring alludes to this fact.
Don't I wish?!
Well, I live in an city that been unanimous, single-party D rule for a score. We'll see what they can come up with beyond their lip-service 'defund' action that stripped a small fraction of the overall police budget. This, coupled with salaries <50k and a DA that actually held a member of their number accountable led mass quits, or so the story goes.
Look, I'm a fellow SB reader. I want the kind of police reform that Matt talks about frequently. At the same time, I want a functioning civic society where I live
NYT story goes deep and discovers problems in America caused by people who (shockingly!) don't own subscriptions to the NYTs! It's working class people in small cities who are the problem!
The NY Times really is world class at finding deeply disturbing problems everywhere but its own back yard.
I didn’t actually read the article on traffic stops but I have formed opinions on the matter elsewhere. My guess would have been they were saying that *traffic stops* are the wrong way to try to catch people. Actual traffic laws can be enforced better through cameras and license plate readers, while other crimes are better addressed outside of vehicles.
"Actual traffic laws can be enforced better through cameras and license plate readers"
I oppose both cameras and license plate readers (facial recognition as well). I don't want any automated law enforcement.
That's a big no to the surveillance state for me
Any reason why? I agree that the surveillance state isn't great, but I think it's less bad than the police brutality state, and if it can get rid of a lot of that, then it seems like a good move.
It's not an either or position.
Lack of surveillance state doesn't mean we have to accept police brutality. I would argue that better training, along with getting rid of union rules that protect bad cops could go a long ways to eliminating police brutality.
Ending the failed war on drugs would also help. As a lot of the bad interactions is because cops are looking for drugs
I'm generally in favor of universal enforcement, but I do think that there's not actually a reason to fine someone for speeding on empty roads, or for example slowing down to 1mph instead of 0mph at stop sign with nobody at it or failing to signal a lane change when there was nobody there to see the signal. So I'm not super in favor of automated enforcement of traffic rules.
In contrast, all thefts, assaults, and murders should be run down.
"But at the end of the day, I'd prefer universal and ubiquitous enforcement over traffic stops"
Why would you ever think someone unhinged enough to run from police is going to respect camera fines, if the municipality can even find the driver to send the fines to?
On what planet do you think people would have license plates attached to their vehicles in the scenario you posit? Even here in LA now, a large number of people drive around without plates or with their plates obscured from view.
" Municipalities and state governments can put liens on these magic things called "bank accounts". The unbanked... well, you've got a bigger problem than "tracking them down" as far as getting money out of them.'
Who do you think these people running from police are? You think they're doctors trying to save their insurance rates or something?
I find this a very naive comment. The "rules" aren't set, or enforced, fairly. America features a laundry list of interest groups extracting what they can from the richest society ever with incredible ruthlessness. It isn't so surprising relatively disadvantaged people within that society don't hold themselves to the highest of standards.
To get a bit more specific:
- Many people are restricted from earning money (occupational licensing)
- Many people are restricted from spending their money on essential services (zoning)
- Laws are written almost exclusively by wealthy people, advised by other wealthy people
- The justice system barely pretends to enforce the law equally between rich and poor. You don't even have to get into race. Think OJ Simpson.
Americans seem to think it's normal that a fairly regular feature of American society is outbreaks of violence so severe that America's incredibly militarised police isn't sufficient and the national guard has to be called in. But it isn't. It's a reflection of a level of oppression that other Western societies don't experience.
I dislike when someone opens a reply with "you are naive". Couldn't we talk about this without name calling?
I dislike when someone misquotes someone else, then complains about what that person didn't write.
I find this to be a very pedantic comment.
Given you wrote you took honours classes to get away from people, I'm honestly very surprised by your reaction to my comment.
"It's a reflection of a level of oppression that other Western societies don't experience."
This is an incredibly common, deep-seated problem with basically all of "left" discourse right now.
Not everything is rooted in oppression and victimization.
Sometimes, people suck, on their own, with no external force causing, facilitating, or encouraging it.
We understand *so little* about the sociology behind crime, what causes it, why it becomes more and less prevalent, and how to change policy in a way that will influence it. None of the "experts" would even contemplate a blanket statement... yet people routinely burst in to say, with entirely unwarranted confidence, that solving oppression will solve crime.
To which I say: Hogwash. Causality-reversed, ill-supported, profoundly stupid hogwash.
Solving crime, or at least reducing the problem to one that fades into the background of public consciousness, will create the basic conditions for our state to dial back the worst excesses of enforcement.
"It's a reflection of a level of oppression that other Western societies don't experience."
Which of course is why America is the number one destination for immigrants?
I don't think the idea that trying to stop murder is discriminatory is really very common even in liberal circles. More common among both liberals and conservatives is to just think that police aren't capable of catching muders more often. Then if you are conservative you support the death penalty and less humane prison conditions and if you are liberal you want to improve social services, reduce poverty and stuff like that.
"My take away from this article is that petty crime should not be stopped...."
By "my take away" do you mean,
"the conclusion that I have come to,"
or,
"the message that this article was advancing"?
From the rest of your post, I think you mean the second, but the phrase itself suggests the first, which would be quite different.
"I take the implicit, but unstated, conclusion of the the article to the be following..."
Thanks, yeah.
Typically, the phrase "my takeaway" introduces a conclusion that the speaker endorses.
(Or an order of chana masala with 3 pakoras. Oh man...where can I get some Indian takeaway?)
For me the problem is the broad categories of stuff that we have criminalized. After all the average American commits three felonies a day. Yes you to. But you would never know it because it's impossible for anyone to know all the crimes. Shoot there's like 80,000 pages just in the tax code. Then think about all the environmental regulations. Most of those make you a felon too.
Moreover, I broadly oppose the puritanical portions of the criminal code. For example, drugs, prostitutions, gambling etc. Simply put those are none of the government's business.
You must have read a different article. The article I read posited that police often have incentives to pursue routine traffic stops, and when they do so, they regularly escalate otherwise benign encounters out of hysterical hypervigilance, which has led to the deaths of over 400 unarmed, nonviolent motorists over the past five years.
In most of the cases in the article, the person was fleeing the police, unarmed ( or armed only with a 2000 pound vehicle), before being shot. Matt has written some great stuff about police reform, and I agree with him. But until that reform comes, in every interaction with police you should assume they will not hesitate to kill you. So you keep your hands on the steering wheel, avoid sudden movements, etc. I know that there are some bad cops out there and sometimes this isn't enough to save you, but in the cases referenced in the article, following the instructions you are provided in the drivers' manual would have been enough to prevent these episodes.
I also found it strange that the police vigilance was called into question because the episodes of violence against them 'rare' (I believe they sited 60 episodes during the same period as the 400 civilian deaths). 60 is less than 400, but it isn't nothing. Lots of people were pulled over, and out of these many, many cases, occasionally some police were killed and some civilians were killed. It seems you either have to take both or neither seriously instead of one and not the other.
They won't hesitate to kill you is wise personal advice and a terrible way to run a supposedly democratic republic.
They're not equivalent. I'm a member of the public. I didn't take an oath to protect police officers' lives. They took an oath to protect mine, and the lives of the 400+ unarmed, nonviolent motorists they killed. Their job includes the risk of death.
They also don't have equivalent solutions. If you want to cut down or eliminate those 60 deaths, start by getting rid of guns. If you want to cut down on motorist deaths, start by changing officer training.
When a drunk driver kills someone with a vehicle, do we call them 'unarmed'?
Yes.
Was the person who ran his car into a group of people at a vigil against police brutality and killed a person and injured three others armed?
So that's all true, but why don't you take that oath then? Does your current job involve a risk of death, or dealing with dangerous people on their worst days quite frequently?
Like 100% of Americans, I'm all for good police reforms. We only disagree on what good reforms that means. But what I read again and again is more demands from "them" when they quite often already have a dangerous and unpopular job.
I also read complaints about the types of laws they enforce (for example, too many speeding tickets to raise funds for the municipality). But they're only doing what they are directed to do by their local government. If you want your local police to stop enforcing speeding or stop carrying guns, vote for that or write letters to your local government. But don't blame the police for doing what they are quite literally asked to do.
The problem is that police are trained to be "warriors," and that the street is a war zone. They expect to encounter threats to their lives every time they pull someone over. Then they spend all shift pulling people over for expired tags, and treating those people like the enemy.
I want cops to be well paid civil servants, subject to prosecution and loss of employment when they commit a crime in the line of duty. I want the city to be civilly liable when their employees harm the public despite, or more often because of, the training and direction they receive.
Also, I work in a public defenders' office, so I'm rarely threatened with violence at work (although it's not unhearf of) but I often deal with people on the worst days of their lives.
My issue with this idea of "warrior" police is that there are 17,985 police departments in the USA. It seems unlikely that they all receive the exact same training or culturally have the exact same mindset. But it seems to be taken as absolutely true that they increasingly have a warrior mentality.
The concept of "warrior" mentality is a little fuzzy, but it could certainly be true enough. But with 17,985 departments I'd like to see more data and evidence of where this mindset is most prevalent and where it's not. Which departments are doing well and what training did they receive versus the opposite? And if there's not a single department doing well enough then maybe there's not really a realistic way to do less adversarial policing within our system, although I doubt that.
It's very rare that I see this evidence-based approach. What's become prevalent is NYT reporters writing up articles after doing interviews in 2 or 3 communities and exposing the very worst cases of abuses they can find in the entire nation.
"So that's all true, but why don't you take that oath then"
I did serve in the military (as a tanker). Making $800 a month (1995) With extremely strict rules on use of force.
The idea that we can't get quality police officers if we hold them accountable when they act poorly is BS. And I would argue due in large part to the unions that focus on protecting rotten cops (just like teacher unions protect rotten teachers).
If you diss me, I can shoot you would be the first class of cop school I'd cut. If we took away their guns and patrol cars too and gave them billy clubs, I bet homicides in America would drop to record lows.
Matt argues elsewhere that a lack of accountability is basically a perk we've paid in place of a raise. I'm with you: take it away. But that will demand higher salary to compensate, or like you say, you will face quits and have trouble re-hiring. Similarly I would like to have beat cops on foot around me, but I assume this would also require increasing police budgets. I'm all for it. I'm on record with my city council demanding more, more-accountable cops paid for by raising my taxes. (I might have forwarded them a Slow Boring article along with the request ;) )
That what "defund the police" means to sensible people, but it is a terrible wording for a slogan.
Can you help me understand how police having firearms is going to cause others to murder more people?
Crips member was going to go shoot up the Bloods because they shot the Crips up last week, but since they heard that the police are giving up their guns they're going to disarm as well?
What's the arrow of causality here?
"If we took away their guns and patrol cars too and gave them billy clubs, I bet homicides in America would drop to record lows."
Wait, if we took away cops guns, then gangs would stop shooting each other over drug turf???
no
I think these attitudes are colored by perceived the perceived injustices in the criminal justice systems. If you could reword the original sentence to "it is good for fair and just criminal systems to catch people when they commit crimes", and you could convince people that "fair and just" isn't accompanied by a wink and a nudge, you'd get a lot more buy in.
In other words, the specific policies Matt is talking about need to be part of a larger project of making a better justice system and convincing people that it is a better system.
I live in one of these areas and I want everyone to have the kind of protection I do.
The basic take here - that milder penalties and more thorough policing are an effective way to reduce crime, and that excessive penalties result in people (witnesses, police, prosecutors) letting petty criminals get away with crimes, which drives up crime - is one that I was taught in history class in high school in the 1980s.
The introduction of Peelian policing and the gradual removal of the "bloody code" in the Victorian era saw a dramatic drop in crime rates. Until 1823, there were something like 200 crimes that could be punished with death (often reduced to transportation to the colonies in practice); by 1861, there were only five civilian offences, of which only murder was prosecuted in any significant numbers (there were a handful of executions for treason and espionage relating to the two world wars, the last piracy execution was in 1830, the only execution for arson in a royal dockyard was in 1777). "Something like" is there because there isn't a formal list; Parliament had to pass a law saying "all crimes except these five can no longer be penalised with death" because there was no complete list available.
Not only was the death penalty abolished, many crimes saw the punishment reduced to a fine or short sentence, not long terms in prison.
At the same time, professional policing - first the Metropolitan Police in London (1829) and the copycat police in, eventually, every county in the country - was introduced, which meant a huge increase in the fraction of crimes being caught and prosecuted, and a big fall in crime rates.
The other part of the story is that prisons became professionalised and much less savage; Elizabeth Fry was the person credited with this in my high school; how true that really is, I don't know.
Now, that's the "high school history" version of this bit of criminology, how true it actually is compared to reality, I don't know. But it does show that this dates back well over a century.
I think the reason Demings isn't really a "rising star" - and why she's putting it on the line in a tough-to-win race next year - is that she'll be turning 65 in March. Its now or never for her.
She's got a great bio and hopefully she's a strong campaigner as well. The obvious countertactic from the Republicans is to find some Orlando police officers who were disgruntled with her (there will inevitably be some) and create a Swift Boat-style montage ad where they all say, one after another, that she "betrayed law enforcement" for this or that reason. (If I recall correctly, in the Swift Boat ad half the guys didn't even serve under Kerry! They were just right-wingers who happened to have served somewhere in Vietnam.) So she'll have to be ready for that: her bio alone won't be enough, and she'll have to lean *hard* into pro-police messaging.
It seems like the obvious countertactic from the Republicans will be that Florida is R+5, 2022 will already skew GOP and Rubio is a (relatively) popular incumbent.
Demmings will have to hit a home run to win that race.
That is not a countertactic. Republicans are not just going to sit around and do nothing on campaign messaging just because they have a baseline partisan edge.
Sorry you're right that was glib. I just meant I'm not sure that they will bother Demmings' message that directly when they can just run a standard Republican campaign and probably win easily.
I, for one, welcome Matty's slow migration towards normie old-school conservative ideas (with a technocratic neoliberal twist). Perhaps, as in days of old with the original neocons (Irvin Kristol and crew), the saviors of the right will be liberals.
Matt writes: “Biden vetted her for the Vice Presidential nomination but decided to go in a different, safer direction.”
Maybe it felt that way at the time, but I would much rather have Val Demings as my next Democratic presidential candidate than Kamala Harris.
“getting better at solving crimes is also the key to ultimately reducing some of the cruelty of the American criminal justice system.”
Disagree. There simply isn’t the appetite for shortening sentences for serious crimes. In Georgia, only 12% of the prison population are serving sentences for drug crimes. Most of these people were either trafficking significant quantities or got caught dealing multiple times. Even in a high incarceration state like Georgia, significantly reducing the prison population means freeing either sex or violent offenders. No one wants to do this.
I think there is a very strong case for reducing the penalty for a rape conviction. Rape is not uncommon— about half of the women I know well claim to have been raped. Almost all of us have a rapist on our block. If you live in a mid-rise apartment, there is probably a rapist in your building. Yet only 1 to 2% of rapists go to prison, mainly because prosecutors are very reluctant to prosecute rape when the woman voluntarily entered a man’s residence.
On the other hand, men are reasonably afraid of false accusations. Most sexual relationships end acrimoniously and plenty of women want to get money from or tarnish their reputations of their ex’s. I think that most rape allegations are truthful but a significant minority are not. Accordingly, as a juror, I would be very reluctant to convict a man in a “he said/she said” case without strong corroborating evidence.
On the other hand, if I knew a man had been accused by three different, unacquainted women, I would convict. Georgia, like many states, allows the state to prove “similar transactions” in criminal trials and juries are far likelier to convict in such cases. However, similar transactions can’t be proven unless the prosecution knows about them. A booking record would be really helpful. Making a first rape conviction lower stakes would make prosecutors less embarrassed to lose such cases. It would make jurors more likely to convict when guilt less than certain. Critically, it would create booking records to identify serial rapists. And yet, no politician will touch this idea because voters don’t want to be “soft on rape” even when the median penalty for rape is currently zero days in jail.
I think the hope is that, just as criminal justice reform got more popular as crime dropped, it will also get more popular as people are catching criminals more.
If we cleared 2x as many murders, and the murder rate therefore dropped(since punishment got more certain), people might be more willing to lower the sentences(hopefully).
The tenuous consensus for criminal justice reform has never extended far beyond “victimless crimes.”. People hear about the (rare) cases where someone gets rung up for a couple grams of cocaine and want that to stop. It rarely extends to cases with a victim crying for blood.
Life in prison with the possibility of parole after 30 years seems about right for murder.
It’s second tier crimes— rape, armed robbery, aggravated child molestation, where there might be room for shorter sentences. Only 10% of Georgia prisoners are murderers, you could put a big dent in the prison population by parolling sex offenders when they hit late middle age, at which point recidivism risk is much smaller
All degrees of murder? What about extenuating circumstances? How likely is the person to do it again? If the victim was constantly stalking/harassing/verbally abusing the killer?
On the other extreme, "cold-blooded killer" situation, that sentence seems more reasonable.
Hmm, the U.K seems to give parole after... 15/30 years for murder - depending on the severity (double murders suggest 30 years, some other heinous single murders - but typical 15 years), but a "life sentence" beyond that (so that crimes after release can send you right back to prison). If people are generally happy with the U.K.'s prison terms (with their lower murder rates) then perhaps those are good targets?
otoh, if someone goes down for 15 years at 18, yet get out at 33 and still have a lot of testosterone left
Lot of mixed feelings about this topic. I just hate the idea that we would lock someone up at age 18 so that they got out of prison in 30+ years. They would miss out on the majority their productive adult life. I understand if there is no other option, but still hate needing to do it.
That is sad but if they murdered someone they've taken away quite a bit more than 30 years from the victim.
why not structure the prison system so that people can be productive within prison? I would have no objection to a murder getting work release after 15 years of good behavior. But they shouldn’t get to have a wife or drink or do normal fun stuff
American criminal justice has little consistency for the same reason that American K-12 education has little consistency: just a gigantic amount of very very local variation. No tech is going to change that, because the tech will be inconsistently used. Val Demings’ approach seems like a mirror to the federal approach to education, where we spent some money to try and get some say, but largely just dilute any one actor’s decision making power and so the overall impact on governance is ambiguous.
Policing and education, both, should be run by State governments rather than thousands of local governments. That seems like about the right level of government for those functions to get benefits of both regional control and variation, and greater professionalism and economies of scale for shared resources and technology.
Depends on the size of the state but even the small ones are surely better than the county or municipal level governance we’ve got
It seems to me there is enough heterogeneity in populations that municipal/county governance of schools and policing is ideal. The problem is funding which is also heterogeneous, sometimes in exactly the wrong ways.
Agreed - Local governance with better "best practices"
States can vary wildly in size - Rhode Island might be able to run policing at the state level, but Texas & California are an entirely different scale.
The other thing that distinguishes fatal and nonfatal shootings is the victims ability to affect the case. Nonfatal should be easier because you have a living witness guaranteed, but bc of how people feel about the police and the threat of retaliation, that could actually deter people giving evidence. Fatal shootings don’t have that witness, but may have family/friends of the victim who are willing to talk because they care less about retaliation in the face of their loss.
I wonder how often the perpetrator of a non-fatal shooting is someone with a complicated relationship to the victim, just as the perpetrators of sexual offenses are often people with a complicated relationship to the victim, so that the victim actively doesn’t want them punished.
It’s much more likely that the shooting is in response to some other activity. Bad guys get shot more than good guys. A large portion of murder victims are a result of ongoing conflicts between criminal groups.
So you run into a scenario where Victim A has to say nothing or say… it was revenge because I shot him last week.
Two points on the shoplifting. The researchers you quote don’t say don’t use FR technology, they say there’s a non-crime values trade-off involved, so legislators should make that call. If the value weren’t privacy (which you personally aren’t very interested in), you’d normally agree with that. Second, as various people have pointed out over on Twitter, as things stand in our criminal justice system, mere contact (much less a conviction) has significant repercussions regardless of the notional penalty; it’s not clear that we can “make the punishment [adequately] lighter.”
And point one exactly. I was surprised MY seems to have misread their point. The point is that the severity of the crime needs to be balanced with the the intrusiveness of the surveillance. Not that FR technology shouldn't be used for fear of punishing minor offenses.
I don't think FR should be used even murder. FR is too intrusive. I'll take traditional detective work over the surveillance state.
Point two exactly. And the fragmentation of criminal justice institutions means that “just make the consequences lighter” is not a lever anyone has available to them; Matt’s policy preference here might make sense in the UK but from a purely harms reduction standpoint almost certainly doesn’t make sense in the US.
I do think it’s possible with traffic laws - I think in that case, the same body can both institute traffic cameras and reduce the fines charged for violations. They haven’t tended to, but they could. It’s harder with criminal offenses.
Completely unrelated. This book you recommended is awesome. All Systems Red
One of my first jobs out of college I was an analyst and junior product manager. As analysts, one of my tasks was predicting our revenue. As product manager, my job was to figure out problems and fix them.
The first problem I found was that our users accounts were getting hacked. As a solution, I implemented a bunch of authentication measures (some early two factor authentication, etc). Problem solved - the measures worked well enough that would be hackers went off to some other soft target. Hacked accounts went to 0.
Unfortunately, in my other job I realized that at the same time we started missing revenue projections. The new authentication measures materially reduced signups, etc so the net effect of the changes I made as product manager was negative.
The conclusion to me was that when something seems to you like a maximization or minimization problem, you're probably just missing a dimension of the problem. The optimum number of hacked accounts isn't in fact 0. Pissing off people with security measures does in fact have a cost. With a given level of technology, there's an optimum security level.
It seems really hard for people to see both sides of the problem. You increase policing, without improving the technology, you piss innocent people off. The police seem to have really no idea that this is a thing. There just isn't a "revenue" function there at all. Police defunders would like to stop policing entirely, which would reduce the insult rate... but at the cost of increased crime, a cost function they mostly ignore.
For the most part, to be honest we need to acknowledge both sides of this. Either say - there's too much crime now, so I think we need more policing, and I'm ok with a bit more bullshit harassment of "suspicious looking" people. Or - there's too much bullshit harassment, and I'm ok with more crime. If you're going so say you need to improve both - there needs to be a technological improvement. I think we need to give up some privacy/use facial recognition/dna databases/surveillance so that there can be both improved policing and less harassment.
CSI notwithstanding, police mostly solve crimes by talking to people. That requires the police and the criminal justice system generally to have credibility as a legitimate source of justice, in the community that knows about the murder. Non fatal shooting victims know exactly who shot them. They’re just not about to tell the fucking pigs about it.
"the old paradigm where you forget about crime and just focus on reform is dead."
That's good. No such paradigm should ever have existed if it did
Capturing more criminals IS policing reform. [It's not ALL of policing reform, of course: we also want to reduce shooting and other abuse of authority.] My guess s that police already put a reasonable maybe even unreasonable amount of resources in investigating and clearing (and thereby deter) crimes against high-income people. [My part of Washington DC probably IS a lot safer that were some of my cowering, gun toting FB friends who worry about home invasions live.] Where the MPD fails is in protecting life and property in low income neighborhood where more racial and ethnic minorities live. Where is the justice in that?
My assumption is that police in DC are just responding to incentives like any other group of people. If they're clearing less crime in low income neighborhoods, how would you restructure incentives to reverse that?
At the end of the day the police chief is appointed by the mayor of DC and the police are enforcing local laws passed by the representatives who were elected by the voters (although I'm pretty unclear of what the equivalent of state laws are in DC). So there's not really any Republicans to blame in that situation. And the police are hired from the local area, probably as often from the low income neighborhoods as from the high income ones.
It may be more difficult to clear such crimes and also involve more risk for the department
I'm not blaming Republicans or anyone else. I do not know HOW to restructure the incentives. That's the chief of Police's job. And the Mayor and Council to provide the resources.
Fwiw I didn't mean to imply you were personally blaming Republicans. It's just a common complaint in the national conversation so it felt worthwhile to reference. Sorry if it seemed that's what I meant. I don't know how to restructure the incentives either. But what I seem to read most of the time (again, not from you in your comment) is that the people to blame are simply "whoever it is the person writing the comment doesn't like, which is usually the police". It's a sad state of affairs and I wish I was more optimistic.
Your contrarian view isn't that murder is wrong and murders should be caught. Your contrarian view is that it is possible to both increase funding for police and make our criminal justice system more humane. Most people think there is just a tradeoff between lower crime vs being less harsh to criminals.
Agree that harsh penalties and unpredictable, arbitrary enforcement is bad for crimes like shoplifting, for the reasons stated. It's also bad for regulatory crimes for another reason - many regulations are drafted ambiguously, which can only be clarified from litigation in the course of a prosecution. But draconian penalties create such an in terrorem effect that defendants who have a good faith argument they didn't violate the law often prefer to settle than press for a clarifying judgement.
Am I just the densest person on earth?
Matt has quoted this multiple times:
“After all, the underlying differences between a shooting that the victim survives and one in which the victim dies don’t really seem all that relevant from an investigative perspective.”
In the former scenario, you can ask the guy who shot him!!!
He actually said that in the next sentence.
Like Bill P. said, MY stated that. But moreover, I'm not sure that asking the guy who got shot is always as useful as you might think. Yes, sometimes the shootings are just "criminal shoots random innocent person" (e.g. burglary gone wrong) --- in which case having an eyewitness is quite useful, but a lot of the time it's "criminal shoots criminal", in which case they guy who got shot may not be that communicative with police.
I know someone who does crime-prevention work in a poor area with a sky-high murder rate, and the situations I hear about sound so bizarre to me. E.g. who-shot-who is common knowledge, but the culprits are rarely convicted in part because the eyewitnesses are generally also criminals, so they don't provide information to the police. Non-criminals get the knowledge second- or third-hand, but "I heard thru the grapevine that so-and-so shot so-and-so" doesn't play well in court. Sometimes it helps the police get the lead they need to get solid evidence, but often it doesn't.
I just checked in on Chicago. Homicide clearance rate was 45% in 2020. The shooting clearance rate was 13%. The mass shooting clearance rate YTD is just 1 out of 39 mass shootings; going back four years it's just 10%. I assume >90% of these are gang related. Many might know which gang is retaliating but I doubt they know the name of the shooter(s).
I've always been interested in organized crime of all kinds, and I used to live in Los Angeles. So over time I've watched several hundred videos from this guy's channel where he interviews gang members in Los Angeles:
https://www.youtube.com/user/streetgangs
My impression is they know the shooter much more often than not. Even when the victim didn't actually see who shot him he usually hears who it was, in part because the shooter often wants it known because he was retaliating for something else anyway.
Anyways, I know that's not data or science, but just my personal impression, FWIW, after watching several hundred hours of interviews. And it's kind of astounding to me that liberals only want to blame the police for this culture of silence. Gang members aren't exactly the best example of the sympathetic downtrodden. Besides their obvious criminal activities they often have extremely sexist, racist or conspiracy-minded (anti-vax) for example, views. Perhaps they should be blamed just a bit for not being willing to talk to police?
Omerta
Right - but it's the homicide that get solved more frequently, despite the presence of fewer witnesses (the victim or victims)
What I’m saying is I’m at the point where I almost don’t believe this data. It seems like having a live witness would be such an extreme advantage.
A lot of high crime areas have a culture of not talking to police. Not much of an advantage in having a witness if the witness doesn't want to cooperate.
I wonder if the statistic is gathered in a way such that the total number of non-fatal shootings is inflated (but thus makes it harder to list as solved) except... the police generally have incentives not to overreport crimes like that so that seems unlikely.
So you'd think they'd be easier to solve but the shooting might be a robbery of a stranger gone bad, a gang related shooting where the victim just knows the assailant as a member of a group, the victim was attacked from behind, etc.