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.
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.
I agree with all of this till we touched on facial recognition technology.
I oppose pretty much all use of facial recognition technology by governments. (and really for businesses as well) It allows, and I would argue encourages the surveillance state.
I refuse to trade liberty for safety. We don't need the government monitoring us all the time. If they want to monitor us they should require probable cause and a warrant. All other broad based tracking schemes (including license plate readers ) are IMHO unconstitutional. And at the very least unethical.
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.
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.
I agree with all of this till we touched on facial recognition technology.
I oppose pretty much all use of facial recognition technology by governments. (and really for businesses as well) It allows, and I would argue encourages the surveillance state.
I refuse to trade liberty for safety. We don't need the government monitoring us all the time. If they want to monitor us they should require probable cause and a warrant. All other broad based tracking schemes (including license plate readers ) are IMHO unconstitutional. And at the very least unethical.