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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.
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.)
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.
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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