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I'm glad you're defending this line of argument. That said, it's not clear to me that decentralised enforcement of the law is going to lead to widespread violence and vigilanteism. It always amazed me that police forces were relatively rare in both the ancient and medieval worlds, and that was largely due to a combination of collective enforcement of norms and the ability of wealthy respectable private citizens to pay for investigators/private muscle.
I'm not say that's better than our present arrangement, or that it's compatible with the luxury liberalism we enjoy today, but in many cases it worked surprisingly well.
You can have decentralized legal systems, but there still has to be some sort of widespread buy-in (or what we might call meta buy-in, where different groups have their own legal system, but still with some other authority to resolve inter-group disputes, and each group still experiences buy-in from its own members). If you could get that level of buy-in, you could probably just make the city government of New York actually enforce laws, and it would be much easier, and with many fewer nasty side effects.
One example I'd flag here is the Philippines, which amazingly has a lower per capita crime rate than the US and the UK, but which is VERY reliant on private security and community justice. The middle class live in gated communities, private security guards are everywhere, and justice is swiftly and pretty brutally implemented. Here is a really funny scene from the movie La Visa Loca where a British tourist gets his bag snatched by a thief. After he's arrested by private security guards, the British tourist is invited to beat the shit out of the guy before they call the police.
Another example - back when she was a teenager one of my Pinoy wife's friends was sexually assaulted in a Manila club. The next day her brothers and cousins had established the name of the guy, and went to his family and explained they were going to teach him a lesson. The guy's family basically agreed and they fixed the terms of the beatings (e.g., nothing that would leave him permanently disabled). A few hours later a dozen 20-something men jumped the guy as he was leaving work and kicked seven shades of shit out of him. Thus was justice done, and justice was perceived to have been done, and a precedent was enforced in the wider community.
Without researching, this description makes it seem ripe for underreporting.
Family- or clan-based legal systems are viable (David Friedman's book describes at least one), but that still does involve a process. The part where the male family members went to the other family first is really really key. If they just went and did it, without giving the other family the ability to say "I don't think you're correct, this person was out of town last night" it just devolves into a cycle of retaliation.
100% agree. That's what really impressed me when I heard the story. It made it go from the kind of system that could lead to feuding to something like justice by-social-consensus.
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This also leads to things like Duarte's War on Drugs, which includes, "In speeches made after his inauguration on June 30 of 2016, Duterte urged citizens to kill suspected criminals and drug addicts. He said he would order police to adopt a shoot-to-kill policy, and would offer them a bounty for dead suspects."
Definitely sounds outrageous to a Western audience, but most Filipinos I know loved Duterte (excluding FilAms with college degrees). None of them felt personally endangered by his policy, and they reckoned it was a success. I'll be honest, despite spending a couple of months in the Philippines most years, I don't have a good grip on whether Duterte 'succeeded' in his war on drugs, because in my time in the Philippines I saw basically zero evidence of drug use except an occasional joint being passed around at a party. Certainly nothing like the zombie hordes of San Francisco or Philadelphia. But culturally, the Philippines seems to have a really low tolerance for substance abuse; I always felt like an alcoholic when I was there, whenever I ordered a third beer and everyone else stopped at two. So perhaps there was a groundswell of support for wanting to aspire to Singaporean standards and nip the problem in the bud?
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Leads to, or results from? I was under the impression the Philippines were high-crime until Duarte?
EDIT: Seems like he halved the crime rate?
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India has pretty low crime, something I would also warrant is due to our extrajudicial punishment.
Thieves often get severely beaten up before the cops get there, and the latter happily turns a blind eye.
Frankly, I trust the community at large to police violent crimes themselves, having your ass handed to you makes your bad life decisions much more poignant than a stint in prison, especially for scum with low time preference.
The last argument is one for corporal punishment over prisons, not for mob justice.
And the big issue with mob justice isn't that thieves get beaten up, it's that sometimes the person getting beat up didn't actually do anything except be an outsider and look funny. Or more generally, that the less formal the mechanisms of justice, the more they become about social standing. India does keep popping up in international news about various gangrapes and coverups thereof because the rapists are friendly with/members of the police, which is enabled by the same mechanisms that enable your beatings.
Gangrapes and coverups are far less common than petty thieves and hooligans getting a beating or two, and if the former is the cost of minimizing the latter, I'll take it.
In the vast majority of cases, the person being beaten up isn't some poor bastard in the wrong place at the wrong time, but someone caught pickpocketing, trying to snatch purses and the like. Those don't make international news, whereas sectarian strife and rapes do, so the West had a grossly skewed perspective.
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I don't know about the ancient world but the upshot of this was that in the medieval world the murder rate was ridiculously high by modern standards. I remember reading one article that estimated the murder rate for Oxford in the 14th century being well over 100 per 100,000 people while New York City at its most dystopian never cracked 30. Estimates of the overall American murder rate dropped from over 30 in 1700 to below 8 in 2020. By comparison, only the 5 most violent Mexican cities even approach the medieval Oxford murder rate, and the 1700 US rate is comparable with modern-day South Africa. The best that can be said about historical eras when law enforcement was decentralized was that it wasn't any more violent than the most violent places in the modern world, and that seems like damning with faint praise.
A huge confounder now is omnipresent surveillance. With cameras on every doorstep, every vehicle dash, every corner store, etc., it's bloody difficult to physically move to a place to murder someone without a camera catching you, your car, something. It's not always enough, but it is absolutely an incredible deterrent, at least to people who have other "regular life" equities that are a least a little bit important to them in comparison to the prospect of going to prison for most of the rest of their life.
I also wonder if the rise in surveillance is actually contributory to the rise in mass shootings. This is a completely fresh thought for me, so I'm just sort of throwing it out there. (Also, it's a small percentage of the overall issue, so the whole rest of this is pretty much just an aside.) The initial thought is just that omnipresent surveillance probably makes it vastly more difficult to be the type of serial killer we had decades ago (and presumably long in the past, too). You just can't bank on being undetectable by, like, picking up random victims at highway rest areas or whatever. Those rest areas have cameras now. The highways have automated license plate recognition, and they can correlate plates that were on the road near multiple incidents. Cell phones are constantly telling the telcos where you are, and that will also correlate you near multiple incidents. You can probably start trying to scheme your way through each one, but there are more and more and more. Many pieces of data, and you'd have to be incredibly meticulous to work your way through each problem in order to rack up a big body count over an extended period of time.
So, if you're a wannabe serial killer, but it's just too darn exhausting to think through how you can pull off more than a few before getting caught by the panopticon, maybe you just get funneled toward not doing it over an extended period of time. You don't do them individually, carefully, one-by-one, always hoping to not get caught on the next iteration. Instead, you give up on observability and simply try to get all your desired killing in as quickly as possible in one big streak.
In any event, I'm not sure we've experienced a combination of panopticon with decentralized law enforcement. Would probably result in some weird incentives.
CSI (and its later offshoots) unambiguously communicated to everyone alive at that time (everyone watched it or knew someone that did) that every police department had Sherlock Holmes capabilities.
Yeah, "zoom and enhance" was bullshit at the time, but people were largely ignorant of computer capabilities at the time (being that this was also pre-cellphone) and that was only a small part of the claimed capabilities of forensic science. And now those capabilities are increasingly the reality, so you get things like 1980s serial killers getting found out by DNA data they never even submitted.
As a bonus for the new "parallel killers", you're guaranteed to be on every newspaper (TIME magazine made the Columbine killers a household name), your manifesto (or supposed manifesto) will be paraded around, and everyone in the nation will freak the fuck out.
We haven't quite figured out how to deal with that yet, since renting a truck and driving into a bunch of people is even easier and deadlier than guns are (the recent events in Texas should show that pretty clearly), and the fact that these acts are also fundamentally suicides complicates things even further.
Personally, I think we already hit upon the solution in the 70s and 80s with movie plots portraying 21st-century blood sports. It'd be a radical solution, of course, but if we can offer someone a guaranteed 15 minutes of fame and (the chance) to kill people for shits and giggles while at the same time crowding out the media attention current parallel killers receive I think it'd probably depress their numbers. Might lead to some really weird incentives, though.
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Absolutely fair, but obviously hard to disentangle cause and effect here; the medieval era was desperately poor and ideologically fanatical by modern standards with an incredibly poorly educated population. I guess my main point was not that private justice systems are necessarily desirable from a niceness and human civilisation point of view, but merely that there are indeed stable equilibria involving them that don't immediately turn into the war of all against all. Also note Scott's discussion in his NRx explainer post about the bizarrely low crime rates in Victorian England that existed alongside high poverty and very low per-capita policing.
His first source is moldbug quoting some text where a guy just says something like 'We are secure, without crime! You can go out at night without anything bad happening', without much attempt to back that up! Elsewhere on his blog, moldbug has cited some other old texts that say similar things, but never any data, and ... firsthand reports of the vibe of a place like this are often wrong.* Scott then goes on to cite English crime data, and he just doesn't pick a graph that goes back far enough, even back in 2013 there were studies saying pre-1900s english crime rates were high.
*This is one thing I worry about with him, especially in the areas I agree with. He's reading a bunch of old books, coming to rather unusual conclusions, and then synthesizing that across hundreds of (area, period) combinations. It's really easy to make mistakes while doing that, as ... almost every failed grand narrative historical synthesis ever attests to. And I haven't seen many attempts at criticizing his ""historical scholarship"" either - which, if many existed but were bad, would make the claims more plausible.
To your main point - it's def correct that such equilibria exist, but even in your example, the process didn't seem to discriminate too much between 'the accused did something wrong' and 'the accused did nothing wrong but we have social power and want to beat him up'.
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Yes, but as well know from British period dramas like Bridgerton the black share of the population was much higher back then and that it explains crime rates /s
Low effort + sarcasm isn't a productive way to join the conversation.
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