CrispyFriedBarnacles
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User ID: 2417
CrispyFriedBarnacles
15d ago
I don't have the time to write this up at length right now, but I feel like this aligns with a much deeper pattern. Basically, I think there's an older kind of wisdom that says it can be socially optimal for authority to make credible, even hard, threats that different groups take seriously, because if people take those threats seriously, they'll often behave in socially desired ways and then the threats don't even have to be exercised for the most part. BUT doing that does require authority figures to look, publicly, like mean assholes, and it might require implementing nasty punishments a couple of times in especially public ways. You could say this goes all the back, at the level of theory, to at least Machiavelli, with his observation that, if a ruler has to choose between being feared or loved, it's generally more stable to be feared.
Internalizing this requires understanding second order effects on some deep level, and understanding that authority might need to be dickish in the correct ways for the greater good. And it absolutely seems like an understanding of the world that is apparently abhorrent to a lot of well-educated progressives I know. Interestingly, those same progressives seem to have exactly the same difficultly when it comes to parenting and holding the line on their own kids, a difficulty that often produces nasty consequences, so I don't think this is about hypocrisy. I think it's just an actual deep moral revulsion at "being mean", even if it's trivially necessary and for the greater good.
I feel like the politics around crime statistics and race are at once both fascinating and exhausting / dispiriting.
On the one hand, I've come across angry black activists and civilians (in public discourse) insisting that cops are racists, white people are committing exactly the same crimes that black people do, and cops don't care because those white people are white. And, I mean, I do kind of get it, to a point. I absolutely do know white suburban people who, say, sold some weed to their friends in high school and there wasn't a police dragnet around trying to catch those people. There likely is a certain amount of that. The more that cops are around, the more that they're likely to notice you doing stuff and getting the state involved.
But on the other hand, whenever I've tried to look into the topic of mass incarceration (I'm thinking especially here of Jill Leovy's great book "Ghettoside"), one thing that comes up constantly when talking about the kind of Hatfield-McCoy retaliatory violence in many black communities is that, historically, black communities have been massively underpoliced. Like, after the collapse of slavery and during Reconstruction, lots and lots of white people looked at the truly insane amount crime and violence in black communities, shrugged, said "that's just how black people are, it will never change, they are literally outlaws by nature, and it is not the role of the police or the state to do anything about that". And so in that sense, the police really were mostly there to try to preserve decent, civilized white communities (and thus also notably disregarded poor, dysfunctional white communities too). But the consequence of that fact was, as a practical matter, crime rates in black communities were actually much, much, much higher than whatever ended up getting reported by police statistics. And the argument in her book (covering LA around 2000, I think) is that actual black people in those communities certainly did recognize the massive amount of criminality occurring in their communities, they knew the police wouldn't help (or couldn't be trusted to be useful if they showed up anyway), and so frequently vigilante behavior seemed like a sensible response.
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