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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've got a theory, entirely without data, mind, that the 'smarter criminals' are by and large not committing any sort of easily-detectable property crimes or violent crimes and thus aren't really contributing to the scary 'crime rate' in any significant way.

Because in the economic environment of the past 5+ years it with such low unemployment it becomes absurdly easy to get a legitimate job that pays decently, and there are all sorts of remote jobs, gigs, and other weird new ways to make money without being at risk of violence, a 'smart' person has less reason to do petty or violent crime.

Why would someone who is smart enough to evade LEO detection for years on end bother with a criminal enterprise at all unless it was extremely lucrative and, perhaps, didn't carry a massive jail sentence on the other end? Why put themselves into a position where exposure to extreme violence is a daily risk?

With the slight caveat:

The particularly bright minds that still have an knack for criminality will probably turn towards stuff like hacking/identity theft, ransomware, or just running crypto scams. So there's still a definite impact from these types of crimes, and these won't be detected by Terry stops.

TL;DR: the ability to detect stupid criminals is still useful if stupid criminals are the most likely to do violent crimes with visible social impact.

There are probably fewer 'smart' criminals in absolute terms because there are just so many avenues for smart people to make money with less risk right now. They're probably engaging in white-collar criminality if anything.

Why would someone who is smart enough to evade LEO detection for years on end bother with a criminal enterprise at all unless it was extremely lucrative and, perhaps, didn't carry a massive jail sentence on the other end

Some people are smart but dumb in some specific ways, some people just like committing crime, idk, it clearly happens. The smartest violent-crime-adjacent criminals are probably doing things like international drug trade logistics as opposed to smashing windows, and there's tens of thousands of smart people who are 'criminals' in that they're running scams or doing white collar crime, which often pays better for less risk.

I think this usually comes down to having poor impulse control.

I can absolutely think of many 'book-smart' types who have hard time holding their life together because they have difficulty restraining themselves from impulsive financial, romantic, or indeed crime-related actions.

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