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Eric Reinhart, a "public health & safety research who has spent a decade working as an ethnographer on Chicago's South and West Sides," had a very long Twitter thread about crime, punishment, and public safety. The thread generally advances the view that policing and incarceration are not effective for reducing violent crime, and, in some sense, it is myopic to focus on violent crime in the first place. Without using the term specifically, he appears to be gesturing at the idea of social murder as being a more pressing problem than, and potentially a leading cause of, literal murder. Some quotes from the thread:
(source)
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(source).
When debating things with friends of mine who have very different politics from me, one of the points that I always find myself trying to make is that the state has limited resources to bring to bear on any problem--limited fiscal and physical resources of course, but also that mere attention to/awareness of a problem is a limited resource. Thus, focusing on any one society-wide problem necessarily comes at the cost of not focusing on some other(s), and, consequently, we have a duty to focus on the largest problems first.
Now, I tend to think that violent crime is a pretty big problem. But what if my focus on violent crime is self-contradictory? After all, Eric points out that there are problems that are many times bigger than murder that I don't care too much to solve.
Ultimately, I think that Eric and I agree that we ought be trying to support happiness and well-being, but that we disagree about what constitutes well-being and therefore also about what things pose the most important threats thereto. In my mind, Eric's view is unrealistically holistic--I think he weights as evenly important to well-being things which I would claim ought be weighted very disparately. For example, if two processes (e.g. murder and air pollution) were both to reduce life expectancy by exactly x years, I think he would weight them as equally important. I think they are not equally important because I claim that life-expectancy is merely a mesa-objective for happiness and well-being, and that being or knowing someone who is a victim of murder affects happiness and well-being directly in ways unrelated to and much larger than murder's effect on life expectancy.
I'm interested to know to what extent people agree that (a) the goal of society should be to increase happiness, and that (b) for that goal, achieving a very low level of violent crime and holding it there is probably more important than tackling air pollution, even if air pollution kills many more people.
I guess one way to assess this is to ask: would you rather live in (1) a society where your life expectancy is 80, but your lifetime risk of being murdered, mugged, or raped is 90%, or (2) a society where your life expectancy is 70, but your lifetime risk of being murdered, mugged, or raped is 10%? (As one data point, a 1987 article from the Bureau of Justice Statistics entitled "Lifetime Likelihood of Victimization" reported that the average American had an 83% chance of being a victim of violent crime at some time in their life. There is some debate about the methodology but tbh I did not spend any time trying to figure it out).
P.S. I have sometimes seen top-level posters criticized for not engaging with responses. I don't get notifications and sometimes only come here every few days, so I apologize in advance if I'm unresponsive.
Of course not. How could society ever do something so personal, and complicated, or even measure it meaningfully? It would be a fool's errand, especially as short-term happiness and long-term happiness are often at odds with each other, and means different things to each individual.
The goal of society -- by which I suppose you mean government, which is how society organizes for common purposes? -- should be to protect people and their property from harm/theft from other people, and provide some sort of emergency services using a limited common fund. They can do this via a legal framework that treats people as equals. In this way, people may pursue happiness, if they so wish, or pursue some other goal that they value more.
Stephen Sondheim's musical "Assassins" actually focuses on this misunderstanding of American ideals as fundamental to the country's social dysfunction: that the right to the pursuit of happiness is not the same thing as a right to actual happiness. People who expect society to increase their happiness will end up disgruntled and may blame society for failing to make them happy.
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two of those are not like the third. Murder ends your life instantly, rape often scars people for life and mugging is just keep calm, get home safe then start making phone calls to see how much it costs to get a video of how they break the mugger fingers one by one with pliers (where I live it costs around 2000 euro)
Can you explain this part, I don't understand what you mean here.
You pay someone generous sum to find the perp and inflict some mild extrajudicial punishment to him.
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I think you also have to consider just how solvable these problems actually are no matter how much time attention and resources you throw at the problem.
Violence is at least somewhat solvable — you can arrest people and put repeat offenders in jail, increase policing, etc. you’d have a harder time with healthcare unless you can redo our entire system by fiat to be a workable system and put several thousand new doctors and nurses in new hospitals. You really cannot fix drug abuse and poverty. So given that, even if the “root cause” is poverty, it’s not a good place to start because it’s not really solved no matter what you do. There were homeless in Sumer and Babylon, and there will be homeless on the first Mars colony. Some people make bad decisions and end up poor.
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I'm just picking nits for funsies, but this is hitting near Feminist levels of over-inclusiveness of harms. Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking indeed! The three violent crimes listed are so wildly different as to be basically incomparable, the question comes down to what the percentages are for each of them. 90% chance of "victimization" that breaks down 88% chance of mugging 1% chance of rape 1% chance of murder is probably a better deal on its own than 10% chance of victimization drawn evenly 3.33% chance of murder, same for rape and mugging respectively.
I would happily take a near certain chance of getting mugged in exchange for ten years of extra life expectancy. I lose my wallet and whatever mobile wealth I had on me, I probably piss myself scared about it, maybe I'm upset for a while after, no big deal. In exchange for ten years of life? Hell yes, can I get mugged three times and live to 100? High chance of murder presumably means a more variable life expectancy, bad call, the years at the end are gonna suck anyway, don't want to risk getting cut down in my prime for ten more years with a walker. Rape itself is a term we need to define, of course, violent knifepoint stranger rape would probably be a risk I nearly want to zero out, while technical-consent-violation rape is probably closer to getting mugged in the grand scheme of things.
So in answer to your question:
I would agree that the odds of dying randomly or facing violence need to be minimized for a society to function, I think the term "Violent Crime" is itself over-inclusive. I'm less concerned with muggings than I am with murders, but I am also vastly more concerned with random crimes than I am with targeted crimes. Random murders of strangers are much much worse than murders of gang members by other gang members. Muggings of citizens in broad daylight are much worse than battery charges resulting from arguments between men.
Hell, in certain cases I would say that things like mutual combat assaults might even salutary, something we need more of between men in our society; but they fall into that same category of violent crime. I think a lot of people would be better behaved if they understood that saying or doing certain things might get them a punch in the nose, but that falls under "have you ever been the victim of assault?" if asked on a survey.
To really think about the question, I need to know the risk that I personally as an unconnected white man will be mugged/shot/stabbed/assaulted while passing through a town. These crimes are becoming horrifyingly more common! And need to be addressed! But they have little to do with the murder rate, which is primarily driven by a vanishingly small population of young Black men who move in certain circles. I'm trying to track down the article, but you can basically take a population of below 100,000 young men (a tiny minority within a minority) in Chicago and they will be the victims or perpetrators of the majority of Chicago murders. That number can be as high as it wants to be, they can have a 1% annual murder rate amongst themselves, I will have only vague humanitarian interest in it. I'd sooner 1,000 murders between gang members than 3 murders of random citizens on a night out. They are not both "violent crime" from a moral or from a societal functioning perspective. They are related only inasmuch as they correlate to each other.
A few replies bring up this point. I think it is a good one. It's my fault, I misunderstood what mugging meant. I thought that "mugging" means that you always get beaten up--e.g. you come away with an orbital fracture and a broken rib--whereas "robbery" means that you give over your wallet and the assailant leaves you be.
What would your answer look like if I had instead posed the question like this:
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So I think that your point of view accurately describes how many people perceive risk, but this usually leads to a mistaken perception of how actions and policy affect "happiness and well-being." The effects of e.g. air pollution are very downstream from the air pollution itself, and often manifest as an increase in some condition that already existed, so you cannot identify any specific person as dying because of air pollution. These deaths are also often going to be slow and uninteresting, while murder is big, breaking news that you can put pictures of on the front page of the paper. It's similar to the dilemma the FDA faces, where anyone who dies from an approved drug can be pointed to as a victim of their failure to be strict enough, while no one person who dies from a heart attack while waiting for beta-blockers to be approved can be definitively chalked up to the FDA's overly-strict behavior. So the incentive is for them to be extremely cautious and conservative. However, the effects are still real, and preventing 1,000 deaths from side-effects but causing 10,000 from heart attacks will definitely cause happiness and well-being to go down.
A death from murder and a death from air pollution or a work accident are not exactly the same, sure. People feel differently about them. But to what extent is that a result of fallacious reasoning, like if the news over-reports murder compared to accidents and people take that at face value? Or because people don't know that air pollution can even cause deaths, and so automatically chalk all of those deaths up as tragic but unpreventable happenings of life?
The badeconomics subreddit has a rule:
In other words, you cannot ask about the effects of some price changing without establishing why the price changed, because the price is determined by external factors. That underlying cause will determine the effects. For example, you can't say, "if the price of gas goes down, people will buy fewer electric vehicles." Maybe the reason why gas prices went down is because someone discovered an alternative energy source that is way cheaper than gasoline, and people will rush to buy electric vehicles because they're practically free to fuel up. Or maybe they discovered a ton of oil, and electric vehicle sales will decline. You can't even say whether the equilibrium quantity of gas sold will change, for the same reasons.
I have a similar feeling here. Why, if crime plummeted, did my life expectancy drop? There must be some cause, some other cause of death that went up. Is that cause of death painful or painless? And ideally, why did that cause of death change? Is crime low because I'm living in a 1600s puritan-like regressive culture where enjoying anything means I'm probably sinning, and life expectancy is low because we don't have medical technology or expertise? Or do we live in a futuristic utopia, but a lot of people have unsafe hobbies like BASE jumping?
Thanks for this reply. I started to compose a response that basically argued that "ackshually, feels > reals". Basically, I was going to say that governments need cater to people's fallacy-addled appraisals of their life circumstances instead of the objective reality of those circumstances, because the way that people feel is what actually determines how they act (although, to be fair, any policy that affects one is very likely also to affect the other, so even by optimizing for "feels", "reals" would sometimes incidentally improve). Thus I was going to say that things like murders--being very potent insults to people's felt reality--are more important than things like air pollution. I was going to argue that despite vast improvements in material conditions, people are today either no happier or perhaps much less happy than they were 70 years ago, so it seems like as a society we've been optimizing for the wrong things.
But I realized that that response is garbage for at least one major reason, and possibly many others. The one major reason is that such a reply is a full-throated, shouting endorsement of a lot of "woke" claims that I strongly deny. As such it represents a very deep contradiction that encroaches into my foundational beliefs, so I'll need to do some thinking on that.
I appreciate your open-minded and transparent response!
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This depends on what I would view as a critical question:
Do you view 'violent crime' as a potentially rampant problem which can spread nearly unchecked unless we are constantly expending resources to reign it in?
Or do you think that violent crime is somewhat of a 'constant' in society which we can somewhat decrease by spending money on policing, but that the marginal dollar spent on policing very quickly becomes less and less effective, and even if we didn't spend any money things wouldn't collapse.
Take the example of the Netherland's famous dike system. We can argue "flooding causes hardly any damage on a yearly basis, why don't we focus on more important issues?" But if the system we have in place preventing the flooding were to fail (lack of maintenance, perhaps) then UNTOLD amounts of damage would result. So money spent on dike maintenance is good, actually. Even if currently the stats show that flooding is among the smallest risks we face, we'd still not want to cut funding there to increase it elsewhere.
Taking the absurd version of this, what is we cut off absolutely all the resources we currently spend policing violent crime and spent it all on mitigating air pollution instead? What would happen to the crime rate? Would is barely budge? Double? 10x?
Depending on the answer, I'd guess if you asked the average person "would you rather double your risk of being stabbed or shot in any given year, or would you rather add on three years to your lifespan? They'd probably think that being stabbed/shot and possibly killed before they get old is worse than dying of old age a few years sooner.
So the priority that people would express might not completely align with the 'objectively correct' answer that policymakers would adopt from a broad view.
This is, incidentally, why EAs try to use QALYs in evaluating their impact rather than just mere 'lives saved.'
Society would fragment into smaller units that would have their own ways of addressing crime. Probably with something like the Taliban demanding tribute, adjudicating disputes, and lynching wrongdoers. For violent conflicts between these units, society would reinvent a slavery/genocide choice for the conquered such as you saw in the classical world. There'd be very little violent crime as we think of it, but a whole lot of war.
More likely, the government would fall to a coup and start policing violent crime again.
Asking what would happen to the crime rate in a state with no police is like asking what would happen to interest rates in an economy that abolished money. A state with no police is not enforcing a monopoly on violence, and so is not a state.
Yes yes but I zeroed in on violent crime for a reason.
Assume that people are still being cited for speeding, property thefts are still investigated, and police still exist as an entity, and the state thus does exist and is capable of engaging in police action.
But police are no longer tasked with intervening in or capturing violent offenders who might fight back.
Would we expect to see some massive and sustained increase? If so, this would reveal that money spent on policing IS in fact valuable for saving lives, since it holds back the 'wave' of violence that would otherwise surge forth and thus a lot more lives hang in the balance than a naive review might assume. So being overly concerned about policing violence is in fact 'rational.'
I find it an interesting question in large part because there are clearly pockets of the country that have virtually ZERO violent crime already, and I expect that they don't need policing to keep it that way. But others would see massive surges if there weren't some countervailing force reigning in the violence. Not sure how this would ultimately interact in a world where police didn't stop violent crime.
the low crime areas would arm themselves, build fences and hire security guards to keep the high crime people out.
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The crime rate as a whole would go way down, because prisons aren't great at solving recidivism, whereas a vigilante's answer to "I can't afford to run a prison personally so what should I do with the criminal I caught instead?" is much more final, and in a world where nobody is afraid of cops or DAs or judges, the concept of law doesn't disappear, it just ends up in the hands of vigilantes.
The murder rate specifically might go up on net, though. Vigilante justice is not renowned for its high accuracy or respect for innocent-until-proven-guilty ethics.
Quoted for truth. You can't even calculate QALYs lost to murder by just summing up victims' remaining life expectancies, either. Everyone afraid to walk down a street at night because it might be dangerous is losing QALYs. Every transit line that gets voted down because people are afraid to make it easier for criminals to reach their suburb is an ongoing cost in QALYs. Every child stuck playing inside after their parents saw a news story of a free-range kid murdered on the other side of the country is losing QALYs. Air pollution deaths are calculated in a "well, we can't directly trace this lung cancer to that coal plant, but we can poke some statistics really hard with a stick" fashion; if you don't do the same with murder then it's not an apples-to-apples comparison.
Very impactful paragraph, thank you.
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It would spike for a few weeks and then go down drastically for several years.
Plus measuring the crime rate is currently part of the amount of money spent on managing crime, we would probably not get very good measures of it after that.
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This author seems to have the (very common) failure mode of believing that to solve one problem a society must solve all problems.
Presumably the author wants a raft of leftist government interventions to solve these problems. But what government interventions in the last 20 years have had a positive effect? Nearly all major cities and half the states are run by the political left. And there have been no shortage of laws passed addressing these problems. Yet the problems if anything grow worse. In fact, places with the most interventions (SF, Chicago, LA) tend to have seen larger reductions in quality of life.
Meanwhile, interventions against crime are extremely effective when used. We used to have a very effective way of preventing violent crime by prosecuting and jailing the offenders, thus keeping them off the streets. Keep in mind that most crimes are committed by serial offenders. The rise in violent crime is a direct consequence of the failure to arrest, prosecute, and imprison serial offenders.
In short, violent crime is a problem that we can fix, but healthcare, overdose, hopelessness, etc... are not fixable problems - at least with the interventions that have so far been tried.
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Reinhart is starting from the moral proposition that we ought to weight the lives and happiness of the criminal underclass and the pathologically uncivilized the same way that we weight the lives and happiness of the (much more numerous) productive and pro-social members of society. In this telling, if there is a policy approach which would massively decrease the quality of life of the criminal class - i.e. mass incarceration, three-strikes laws, public execution, forcible institutionalization of chronic hard-drug abusers, etc. - we ought to look very negatively at that approach, even if its effects would substantially and demonstrably improve the quality of life of the vast majority of non-criminal citizens, since the drop in utility among the targeted class proportionally outweighs the gain in utility among the beneficiary class. The easy way to route completely around Reinhart’s utility calculus is simply to say, “I assign close to zero value to the lives and interests of the criminal element, and their loss is pretty directly my gain. The amount of decrease in their utility which I would happily sacrifice to even marginally increase my own utility is nearly-infinite.”
Comparing murder to air pollution is an embarrassingly obvious red herring; air pollution is a distributed phenomenon, culpability for which is incredibly difficult to attribute to clearly-identifiable actors, and is a byproduct of economic processes which are on the whole beneficial to society. Nobody is polluting the air because they just want to kill birds and make people sick. Violent crime, on the other hand, is a purely negative phenomenon, not resulting from any process that’s otherwise positive, and its perpetrators are, generally, almost cartoonishly easy to identify and apprehend if the state is given the proper resources and has the will to utilize those resources effectively.
why would you need to do this if you do the other things? unless you are only talking about violent drug users when you mention abusers, this would end up punishing innocent people too.
Its good for the people gaining money and status from succeeding in it. They perceive themselves as more successful or better off than if they were working some minimum wage job which is the best they can do in the legal labor market.
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From a twin study on crime:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25936380/
Heritability of crime is high. The main benefit of locking people up is that it prevents people with outlier poor mental traits from reproducing. Criminals tend to be psychopathic, lack impulse control, and be low in intelligence. Keeping men with outlier levels of those traits far away from women between 18-and 45 makes sense. The studies he cites are too short term, they don't take multigeneration effects into account.
As for air pollution, reducing crime is an effective way to combat it. Public transit, walkable cities and bicycle commuting become more attractive the fewer criminals are on the streets. If people don't have to live way outside the city to be in an area with low crime, fewer people will drive. Fewer people walk and bicycle and more people will be fat. Crime is a cause of many of the other problems because it creates a low trust society in which people atomize. Cartel-controlled parts of Mexico are not going to have fantastic universities, infrastructure or other institutions since some much energy gets soaked into cartel-wars and their fallout. A well functioning society requires trust, it requires people to feel a sense of common good and to cooperate. Crime and corruption undermine that. A cop taking a bribe is far more damaging than the direct damage caused by the cop not doing his job.
Indeed. The claim that crime is in large part or even entirely socially determined has always struck me as very insulting to the many working class people who are not criminals. It almost seems to imply that the only difference between them and a bank robber is a lost job, which seems profoundly dismissive of their values and scruples. Acknowledging a degree of essentialism is more respectful in my mind.
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Reinhart's take on violence is just the standard "bleeding heart" line. I think it's just plain wrong; violence in the modern era is nearly entirely not caused by "poverty, unaffordable housing, unemployment, police violence, barriers to health access, etc." and can be greatly ameliorated without focusing on any of those issues.
The rest is pretty much distractions -- "Look at my issue instead of crime".
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