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Matthew Yglesias has a post about fare evasion. I especially love this part:
I know he's moved away from Vox/Slate towards the center, but just this year, places like Philly and Oregon no longer allow the police to pull people over for broken lights because it is racist, and here is Mr Yglesias, literally advocating for more terry stops. I actually think it's a good thing: if both neolibs and neocons are trying to re-center and narrow down the Overton window, this thread might get slow and boring.
I think it's just generally bad policy to use minor crimes like that as a pretext for finding people with active warrants. It is detrimental to society as a whole.
First, you're mostly just going to catch the stupidest criminals this way. The smarter criminals will be able to evade capture for much longer. So we're only catching people who would have eventually been caught, anyways.
Second, stupid criminals will make stupid choices. They'll make the decision to run/fight more often than not. This means cops could get injured, or some dumb criminal (and many criminals are legitimately mentally retarded) will get hurt/killed. And today that could lead to city-wide protests that cause hundreds of millions in damages (from looting, vandalism, and just lost economic opportunity from businesses being closed and consumers staying away).
Third, as a political consequence, we end up with police pulling back, and stupid policies saying not to enforce quality of life crimes, and even some non-violent crimes (primarily drug and property crimes). And that's just going to make life worse for everyone.
Here's what a better system would be. We get a bunch of lowly paid people who issue small tickets to people who violate simple laws. Traffic and parking violations, fare evasion, jay walking, littering, etc. We put these people in stupid, non-threatening uniforms. They are instructed not to chase people, not to look for warrants, not to arrest people. If something goes wrong, they run. If a citizen ever lays hands on these individuals, we send in the real police to do a summary execution. Otherwise cops aren't involved in anything to do with those stops or enforcement of those laws.
We take cops, and instead of paying them $100k+/year to hopefully catch people with warrants and guns while enforcing petty crimes and civil violations, we send them to catch people with warrants by actually looking for the people who have warrants. And they can do things like respond to burglaries, stolen property complaints, things like that.
And this way, if cops end up killing someone, it likely won't be over some petty shit. And if riots do break out over that, politicians and citizens won't be targeting the quality of life enforcers. They can still operate and continue a constant level of enforcement, so that cities don't fall to shit.
It's absurd to pay police officers to be stopping people for broken traffic lights, or for littering, or for evading fares. Because then everybody becomes guarded in their interactions with police. You'll always worry that a stop is about something more. It's unhealthy to have a populace that is constantly worried when police are around, especially if crime is high and you want police around more.
Why is this bad? Removing the dumbest and most impulsive criminals from society as fast as possible seems like a net boon. Letting them run around doing dumb, malicious things when they're readily observed being dumb and malicious just seems like a terrible plan.
Doesn't this contradict the first point? If you're going to need to arrest these imbeciles at some point, you might as well get it over with.
Wait, I thought you were just saying that arresting the low-level criminals was a problem because it's not politically tenable...
Well, not everybody. Pretty much all decent people just don't litter or jump turnstiles.
If they were actually removed. And I'd argue that we could do it faster by actually having cops go after criminals, rather than sifting through traffic stops to find them.
Completely agree. So let's shift police work towards finding and investigating criminals, rather than ignoring burglaries and property crime in favour of traffic stops and such.
I'm not saying we shouldn't arrest low-level criminals. I'm saying that we shouldn't use minor crimes and traffic violations as a pretext to finding them.
The IRS investigates tax crimes, not local police. The USPS has officers that investigate mail crime. Many cities have traffic cops that don't carry weapons, who don't arrest (many) people, who simply issue tickets for parking violations and such. Why not have the average officer focused on 'real' crime, and get parking enforcers to also deal with traffic stops, littering, fare evasion, and quality-of-life crimes?
But if some criminal scum decides to use violence against some lowly, 'underpaid', unarmed citation officer, then we use the force of the state to crush the violent individual.
Sure, but it extends to traffic stops and basically any pretext cops can use to investigate you because they have some 'gut' feeling. There's a not so insignificant amount of cops (and people in general) who think they are smarter than they are. They think they are Will Smith in MIB, shooting the 10 year old girl with an advanced physics textbook. Some cop thinks they see something suspicious in you, and they start looking for a reason to stop you. And many of those reasons are things regular people do multiple times a day.
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I dunno...for what it's worth, studies have shown even people who consider themselves as honest may commit petty crimes if they think they will not get caught or https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1509/jmkr.45.6.633
Littering is so common, I i don't think it's any signifier or moral worth or lack thereof. It's not like you are taking something from someone, but rather creating a tiny externality.
Really? I can barely think of a small act that's a more of a clear marker of a person being a low time-preference scumbag. The externality is tiny, but the benefit is even tinier. Taking trash to the trash rather than just throwing it on the ground takes so close to zero effort that it might as well just be zero effort. Living in a place that's covered with trash because people just throw it on the ground is pretty awful. Throwing trash on the ground instead of in a garbage can is an incredibly clear signal of someone that I want excluded from my community if at all possible.
One thing I've noticed is that if you hire someone to do a job (like pick up litter), many people feel more justified in littering, since they can say it keeps someone employed.
I think this, in general, leads to neighbourhoods getting worse overtime.
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I think littering is a shitty thing to do, but i don't think it makes someone a scumbag. It would mean that probably implausibly large % of society are scumbags instead of just lazy or inconsiderate.
I mean, yeah. Lots and lots of people are scumbags. That isn't implausible to me at all.
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Yeah, that shocked me to read. I consider fare-skipping and other crimes that don't cause any obvious negativity much better than littering, which makes everything shitty, just because you're a lazy shit.
I find it depressing when I visit areas with a lot of garbage around. It's like animals shitting in their own cage.
Nothing worse than walking a trail and seeing trash all along the sides. Some people drive along roads through forests and throw trash out their windows...
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this is the first time in years of posting that anyone has expressed being shocked by something I had written. This is a rationalist-adjacent sub. It cannot be worse than some of the stuff Moldbug, Yudkowsky, or Hanson has said. I think littering is bad and always go out of my way to not litter, but not on the same level as theft.
Ha! Well, I also consider theft clearly and considerably worse. But I thought it was being put in with fare-skipping and jaywalking, both of which I consider near non-issues. Maybe close to shoplifting, although that has a bit more clear victim.
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I wouldn't read too much into it. some people are weird.
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I think that for many people's moral intuitions, the severity of a crime is how much negative value it brings other people, but the "scuminess" of a crime is at least partially the ratio of this value lost to the value gained by the criminal.
By this measure littering feels worse than some forms of theft.
that is a good point . if thousands of people do it in a city, it adds up fast
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Fare skipping is just as bad. It's literally stealing from the commons and the cost must be made using the by everyone else.
Interesting. I don't consider fare skipping as bad, as there is almost not cost to be made up by everyone else. The train would still run if I weren't on it. My taxes are significantly subsidizing it. I guess there might be a small increase in crowding. Prices (in terms of zones and such where I live) also feel a bit arbitrary. There are also fairly byzantine rules about what counts as one trip (e.g. transfers and such).
I assume you don't consider it fare-skipping if I have a monthly pass, but forget it at home? Or, a classic when when I used to commute -- I got a monthly pass each month, but would sometimes miss the start of the month. Is it fare skipping if I buy a monthly pass for the month, but only Nov 2, and I ride on Nov 1st? Is it fare skipping if I buy a daily pass from someone else? Is it fare skipping if I ask strangers if I can be on their group ticket (which covers up to five people)? Basically, I agree there is some harm, but it's considerably smaller than that caused by littering.
Anyway, I tend not to do it because (1) it makes me unpleasantly nervous on the ride and (2) if everyone did it we'd have a problem. But I don't see it as having a negative effect in the same way that littering does. Similarly, I see a difference between, e.g., leaving your McDonald's garbage in the train (or on the ground at the train station) vs throwing an orange into the woods beside a trail. The latter is mostly not seen, and will disappear in the not too distant future, so has almost no cost (but if everyone did it, and there were a lot of them, would also be something of a problem).
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I have littered a nonzero number of times in my life and dodged fares even more (especially when I was a poor student). The chance that anything bad would have happened to me if I had been caught for it was basically zero, and I assume that those for whom it is not the case (i.e. the dumb and impulsive criminals you are talking about) realise this. This breeds resentment (even monkeys, I think, have been found to be sensitive to differential treatment) and presumably reduces buy-in into society from those who are at the short end of this equation.
Now, I know that people on the law-and-order spectrum like seeing criminality (especially non-white-collar criminality, i.e. the type they can't imagine themselves engaging in) in absolutes, where you are either a law-abiding citizen or a criminal who always and at all times is about as bad to the society surrounding them as they can manage to be; therefore there is no point in negotiating or doing anything other than identifying and locking them up ASAP, and in particular they would see "reduced buy-in into society" as a moot concern since they are already being antisocial criminals who don't buy in. However, I don't think this is true; most criminals probably don't engage in antisocial acts nearly as often as they could, and I'd wager they don't commit murder or even smash random windows in all situations they know they could get away with it. In fact they probably subscribe to 90% of the same society-sustaining narrative as the law-and-order crowd, with only some cutouts they have rationalised for themselves to violate it in specific ways in particular contexts. If you make criminals feel that they can't be equal members of society even on their "down-"/law-abiding time, this might just stop being the case, and life for everyone would make a turn for the worse.
(Arguably the US is already halfway there in places with certain minorities being actively fed the narrative that society is not for them, but I assume that the set of criminals that would be caught by "turnstile enforcement anarcho-tyranny" - because this is what it would read to someone whose self-narrative is "productive member of society who sometimes has to stray off the good path for very valid reasons" - is not just a subset of those minorities.)
Removing serious criminals from the streets is good, regardless of how black people feel about it. And arresting people who commit minor crimes is a very valid way to do that.
I'm honestly a little irritated that none of the responses seem to really want to engage with my actual question, which is whether this particular type of crackdown could result in a net loss to society because criminals and criminal-adjacent people will start behaving worse.
Yes, I get that you don't like criminals, and think that removing them is good, and that arresting people who commit minor crimes is a "valid" (what exactly does that mean here?) way to do that. Taken at its most likely interpretation, this is a boring, mainstream position with no nuance and no utilitarian receipts shown. Why do you believe those things? If it's just axiomatic, then talking about it is not really appropriate for the venue, since the only way in which a moral axiom can be persuasive is by showing off a +1 to adherent numbers and hoping for conformism.
No, arresting people who commit minor crimes is not a valid way to get serious criminals off the street. Arresting serious criminals who have outstanding warrants for serious crimes when they happen to get caught committing a minor one is. These are not the same thing.
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I don't like being attacked or having my stuff stolen. Criminals can't do those things if they're in prison. So it's a good idea to put them in prison.
Well, I don't like people disagreeing with me on the internet, and I would assume you don't get a lot of opportunity to post from prison either...
(Quips aside, "I don't like it" really doesn't amount to much as an argument to remove "it" entirely in the general case. Have you thought through all the different contexts in which the same argument would lead to clearly nonsensical conclusions?)
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I think they're much less opposed to it than white progs, frankly.
Saw a recent poll, 82 percent of black dem voters consider crime to be a high priority to them. For white Dems, the number is 31 percent. They live in wildly different spheres, totally disconnected in terms of exposure to the ass end of these high minded but out of touch policies.
Not disputing that. But even inside the frame of reference, the decision to prioritize the feelings of black people over real world crime control is, well, a choice, and not an obvious one either, and needs to be called out as such.
The fact that the choice happens not to be grounded in any particular real world data about the feelings of black people is irrelevant to that point- crime control is more important than the feelings of any one group.
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If you had been caught, you would have been fined.
If a dumb and impulsive criminal is caught littering or fare jumping, they will be fined as well. If they have outstanding warrants, they will be arrested -- because they have just been caught for something other than littering or fare jumping as well.
it depends i guess. I fare jumped in the US many times because I saw that the tickets were never checked. Eventually they did check and my punishment was being asked to get off the train and I had to walk the rest of the way, which was not that big of a deal but felt like an idiot. Would not recommend. This was 12 years ago
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I'm aware. (Not sure about littering, where I lived.) It was a calculated risk I could take.
The bottom line still is that they couldn't take what for me is a calculated and very bounded risk. Fast food can give me gastric distress, but sometimes still is the best option; fare dodging can give me a 40 euro fine, but sometimes likewise is the best option. If criminals were reliably arrested on sight in gastronomic establishments, would they think of it as "shucks, guess it was my bad for doing crime once" or as "fuck this society that has made it clear I can't live in it normally"?
Getting caught having outstanding warrants is doing crime at least three times.
The first crime for which the warrant is issued, the second crime of dodging the warrant, and the third crime that you got caught perpetrating.
Why shouldn't we arrest triple criminals exactly?
Littering and fare-dodging are hardly what one typically thinks of as a "crime" (or, well, as I said above, I'm an unrepentant multiple-time criminal along with approximately everyone I know).
Responding also to @Jiro above, this is in fact the essence of the question I'm asking - is it actually for the better to arrest criminals no matter what? No human has ever lived in a society anywhere close to a 100% capture rate for law-breakers, and I for my part am not only not ready to tear down that fence but also feeling iffy about it constantly getting pushed around and climbed over. It seems likely to me that plenty of criminals with outstanding warrants continue living a mostly positive-sum life in society; some of them may have passed by my window without breaking it, passed me by in a dark alley without mugging me, and sold me food at a convenience store. I don't think it's obvious that it's worthwhile to reduce incentives for them to do so, just so you can capture some greater percentage of them. I assume the "what's the punishment for being late?" story is pretty widely known around here, too.
Yes, stealing from and polluting the commons is bad actually.
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It's not "doing crime once". It's "having an outstanding warrant because I missed a court appearance for another crime I committed". People with outstanding warrants aren't supposed to be able to live in society normally; they're supposed to be arrested.
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The fact that criminals can't jump turnstiles without going to jail is irrelevant because they should be going to jail anyway. They're not supposed to be able to live in society normally because they are supposed to be taken out of society.
If criminals were arrested on sight in restaurants, it would be fine that criminals can't go to a restaurant, because they're supposed to be in jail where they can't go to a restaurant anyway.
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Before COVID, the NYC MTA transit police had a little scheme. They ignore scruffy fare-jumpers during rush hour; those people are going to be a pain and not pay fines anyway. But late at night, people with unlimited metrocards would come and the turnstiles wouldn't accept their card (because MTA maintenance ain't the best). The stations are unstaffed so there would be nobody to help. So sometimes they'd then just jump the broken turnstile. BAM! Out of a hidden room, two cops would appear to fine them and throw them out. Of course the cops knew the score; they'd been watching the whole thing on camera. But it's an easy ticket. The proposal here just formalizes that system -- harsh control for the decent people, freedom for scum.
I am going to have to ask for actual evidence for this. First of all, I have been in plenty of NYC subway stations, and while there are some with doors and rooms off the platforms, there is generally no room for such things in the area in view of the turnstiles. Second, there is no such thing as an unstaffed subway station in NY; although not every entrance is staffed, every station has at least one manned booth. In addition, data on fare evasion tickets is available here. The spreadsheets list tickets by station, and note that, eg, in the 4th Quarter of 2019, there were very few tickets issued at individual stations other than major ones such as 14th St or Times Sq, which are very much manned 24 hrs.
Third, each station has several turnstiles; if one has a glitch, the one next to it won't.
Also, since it is ** fare evasion** , not turnstile jumping, which is illegal, I rather doubt that I have committed a crime if I jump the turnstile while in possession of an unlimited metrocard.
Finally, the station with the highest number of tickets in 4Q 2019 was Times Sq, with 517. That is fewer than 6 per day. There are only three stations with more that 360 tickets (i.e., 4 per day). There is no way that the MTA was spending time running the operation you describe, given the paltry returns.
I know people this has happened to. (Not me, I don't have an unlimited)
Yes, that's why they have a camera.
On paper, anyway. Even if it's actually true, going back out, maybe crossing the avenue and walking a few blocks to check all the other entrances means you're missing the next train at best.
I suspect what happens in these cases is the first broken turnstile activates the 18-minute wait for the pass to be used again, but fails to allow entry. This prevents use of the pass at any turnstile in that station.
First, it's usually a civil ticket rather than a criminal offense. Second, the transit judges (who work for the MTA, naturally) have heard that argument and dismiss it.
I am sure that there are people who have been accosted by police after jumping a broken turnstile. But that was not your claim; your claim was that the police were running a very specific operation aimed at those people.
Again, evidence for that? Is that what your friends said? That the turnstile gave the "sorry, you can't reuse this pass yet" message? Or the "please swipe again" message?
That is probably not true; it is probably a criminal infraction. Regardless, that is irrelevant; if I did not violate the law in question, it does not matter whether it is denominated a civil penalty or a criminal infraction
Again, evidence?
It's been years, if they mentioned what the turnstile said I don't remember.
Here is the MTA itself telling you it's a civil ticket. They're rather more reliable than a random lawyer's site. I believe it is also possible for the police to write it up as criminal (in which case you'd get a desk appearance ticket instead of a notice of violation), but they usually don't.
What, you think I have access to the records of arguments in Transit Adjudication Bureau cases?
OK, so you don't have evidence for your supposition that the gate erroneously recorded an entry without opening the gate.
Maybe so, but as noted, it is irrelevant. If I did not violate the law in question, it does not matter whether it is denominated a civil penalty or a criminal infraction
I wouldn't think so. But, if you don't have access to evidence, why did you claim to know how the judges rule?
Honestly, it seems that you are making stuff up, from your initial post onward.
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"A person who shall be upon a rail transit vehicle and who shall lack proof of payment of the required fare shall be presumed to be in violation of this section."
How are you going to have proof of payment if you jump the turnstile?
(Presumably if you use the card, the proof of payment is recorded in the system.)
Is the card itself not proof of payment? It's not like it would be hard to validate that it's a real unlimited pass, rather than a forgery.
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The claim was specifically re an unlimited metrocard, eg a monthly or weekly pass. That is per se proof of payment.
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Because you're holding a valid unlimited metrocard.
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