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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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?
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!!!
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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?
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!!!