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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32060 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 31, 2022

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Matthew Yglesias has a post about fare evasion. I especially love this part:

In theory, if you’re out on bail but you skipped your court date, you ought to be extra-cautious in your day-to-day behavior. In practice, a lot of people who commit crimes don’t make that decision. The police walking around the street aren’t clairvoyant; they don’t know which passersby have outstanding warrants. But if they catch someone jumping the turnstile, that’s a perfectly valid reason to run them through the system. Police can catch bail skippers or people who are already wanted for some other reason — they can also catch people carrying illegal guns.

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.

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.

I think expediting the capture of criminals is a good thing (except perhaps for petty drug crimes, but certainly for violent crimes).

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).

I think the benefit of getting them off the streets negates such possible secondary effects . It's worth keeping in mind how uncommon events like the Floyd or Michael Brown protests are. If the police did their jobs , events like 2020 would have not happened at all (probably blame the media, lawyers, and politicians for that).

If the police did their jobs , events like 2020 would have not happened at all (probably blame the media, lawyers, and politicians for that).

Over 200 black people are killed by police each year in the US. (Though they seem to have stopped recording race recently.) It follows that George Floyd-style protests aren't actually caused by cops killing black people. There would be several riots per week.

The media are much more of a causative factor here. They're the ones who decide when and onto what to focus attention.

It also follows that better policing won't solve it. Police will always remain human. The number will never be zero. Even the number of dumb mistakes like grabbing a gun thinking it's a taser will never be zero. And even one is enough in principle.

You could cut police violence across the board by 7/8ths (imagine that), and there'd still be room for two George Floyds a month, whenever the media should desire another. There isn't the desire for that many, so cutting the police violence by 7/8ths would probably not change the frequency of large scale protests/riots at all.

The idea that "the media" manufactured the George Floyd protests is putting the cart before the horse. Protests were already kicking off in the twin cities by the time major media coverage started - that is what drew media coverage in the first place. They might've been able to discourage the spread of protests from the twin cities by refusing to cover it (but then, maybe not - virality is a powerful force), but they're not able to conjure conflict from nothing.

The crucial factors in the George Floyd protests were:

  1. Poor police-community relations. In places where there's high levels of trust between the police and the community, the police get given the benefit of the doubt when they fuck up (even when they probably shouldn't). I'm not from Minneapolis, so I'm forced to rely on the opinions of acquaintances who are, and they're pretty much uniformly negative on the police department and especially the police union. See also: the Ferguson and Baltimore protests in 2014/15, where community relations were also terrible. It isn't just that one guy got killed, it's that the local police had a pattern of harassing and abusing people to the point where malice was simply assumed.

  2. An (apparently) egregious incident. At lot of people who get killed by police either clearly deserve or at least there's enough ambiguity that people aren't going to get up in arms and the media will describe it as an 'officer involved shooting'. The absolute best you could say about Derek Chauvin is that he did nothing while a man in his custody died, and there was widely viewed footage of him doing it. It didn't help that during subsequent protests the police kept vindicating their critics.

  3. Covid - you had a bunch of stressed out people and a larger than usual share of people not working. Without this there probably would have been protests, but nowhere near the magnitude that we actually had.

It also follows that better policing won't solve it. Police will always remain human. The number will never be zero. Even the number of dumb mistakes like grabbing a gun thinking it's a taser will never be zero. And even one is enough in principle.

Better policing will raise trust in police, which will a) make people more willing to cooperate with the police b) make them more willing to extend the benefit of the doubt when something happens. (To a large degree this already happens - the vast majority of instances of the police misconduct pass without evoking protests and many pass without comment beyond a sanitized blurb in the local news).

They stopped recording this? I haven't heard that. Do you have a source? That's awful, I hope it isn't true/there's still a way to know moving forward

You could cut police violence across the board by 7/8ths (imagine that), and there'd still be room for two George Floyds a month, whenever the media should desire another.

You'd mostly have more Ricardo Munoz or Makhia Bryant (see if youtube will show you the bodycam footage) type killings.

It also follows that better policing won't solve it. Police will always remain human. The number will never be zero. Even the number of dumb mistakes like grabbing a gun thinking it's a taser will never be zero. And even one is enough in principle.

I think police on average do a good job but the handful of incidents get inordinate media coverage , yet the media hardly makes a fuss when other people do their jobs poorly . But the use of lethal force is something which needs careful consideration .

The idea that protests/riots are correlated with the police violence rate any more than very tenuously is, imo, obviously untrue. Protests/riots are a result of media coverage, not policing.

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