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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.
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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