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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 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.
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.
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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