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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:
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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.
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.'
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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