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I hope this isn't too shallow for a top-level comment, but I wanted to share a personal observation about shifts in political views. Specifically, in the last couple of years, I've become a LOT more authoritarian on crime. Part of this is probably me getting older (damn kids, stop cycling on the sidewalk!), but I'd single out two main factors.
(1) A big part of it has been related to noticing shifting views on the issue among city-dwelling liberals (that's my in-group, whether I like it or not). I regularly visit a bunch of US cities for work, and I subscribe to their relevant subreddits, and there's been an incredible shift from "defund-the-police is a solid principle albeit the details need to be worked out" to "lock up the bums now". And similarly, several real life liberal friends who were traditionally pretty anti-police have become much more authoritarian of late, complaining about how e.g. the NYC subway used to be incredibly safe but has now become a creepy unpleasant space to inhabit, and something needs to be done.
(2) I've also had a lot more professional dealings with academic criminologists lately, and damn, it's been a wake-up call. It seems to be one of the most activist domains of academia I've ever encountered (and I deal with sociologists and social psychologists on a regular basis!). Over a few different conferences and dinners, I've chatted with criminologists who were pretty explicit about how they saw their role, namely speaking up for oppressed criminals; empirics or the rights of the wider populace barely came into the conversation. On top of this, there have been some spectacular scandals in academic criminology that have helped confirm my impression of the field. Suddenly, all those papers I happily cited about how prison doesn't work etc. seemed incredibly fragile.
I'm going to add two quick personal longstanding reasons why I'm inclined to be quite authoritarian on crime -
(i) Despite my fallouts with The Left, I'm still broadly a social democrat; I think that an effective state is one that provides good free services to all its citizens, including things like high quality education, healthcare, and public transit. But in order to be democratically sustainable, this requires a certain amount of imposed authority: if public schools become known as a magnet for drugs and gang violence, then middle-class parents will pull their kids out and send them to private schools, and won't give their votes or (more importantly) their organising energy to maintaining school quality. If subways become excessively creepy and weird and violent, the middle classes will get Ubers, and vote for candidates who defund public transit. In short, if the middle classes (who have options) decide not to make use of public options, then public options will die their democratic death. Speaking as someone who likes public options, I think it's essential that fairly strong state authority is exerted in public utilities to ensure that they are seen as viable by the middle class.
(ii) I have a weird sympathy towards Retributivism as a theory of justice and crime. More specifically, I have a lot of negative animus towards what I see as excessively utilitarian approaches to criminal justice, that regard criminals as just another type of citizen to be managed. As soon as we stop regarding criminals as people, but just factors of (dis)production, then I think we do them and our society a disservice; it's treating them as cattle. Instead, I'm sympathetic towards a more contractualist approach that mandates we treat all citizens as autonomous individuals who enter into an implicit social contract by virtue of enjoying the benefits of society, such that we would be doing them a disservice of sorts if we didn't punish them for their crimes. Let me try to put that in a maxim: you're an adult, you're a citizen; you fucked up, now you pay the price. If we didn't make you pay the price, we'd be treating you like a child or an animal.
Obviously lots more to be said here, but I'll save my follow-ups for the comments. Curious what others think.
And this is the problem. You won't update; nobody ever does. No matter how many times it turns out the obvious problems those on the right claimed would occur actually did occur, no one who has bought into the leftist view will reject the premises which said they wouldn't. It's a trapdoor epistemology.
Why would you update on any non-crime/policing issue on the basis of policing issue question?
Logic. If premise X implies things about policy A, policy A is implemented and those things are shown false, then premise X is also false. Now when premise X is used to claim things about policy B, one should not believe premise X actually provides evidence for those things.
Except eventually one would have to reject ideas like "all people are equal" in order to update, and that's a fundamental problem as it is the anchor of the overton window in western societies.
Not to beat a dead horse again but for that and just that belief alone (sufficient, not necessary), western society deserves to be replaced.
Equality does not square well with the human condition, no different to how communism does not square well with it.
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The more people that reject such ideas and update, the more the Overton window shifts.
Hence the forever War on Noticing things like racial IQ gaps or crime statistics—spaces like Reddit banning wrong-think, chatbots getting hate facts reinforcement learning’d out of them, the UK policing supposed online hate crime, the FBI focusing on racial or involuntary celibate extremist terms like “based,” “red pilled,” “Chad,” “Stacy,” or “looksmaxxing”.
Only the overton window of elite discourse and opinion matters with regard to changing policies. Voters just don't matter and pretending, or even giving lip service or respect to the absurb and empty pretence that they do, requires mastering such cognitive dissonance that I just can't do it anymore. Sorry.
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Nobody except a few extreme ivory-tower types acts like they believe "all people are equal". The idea is absurd and should be rejected. (note rejecting it doesn't require HBD; you can believe that all people are born exactly equal -- also absurd -- and still not believe "all people are equal")
Some do believe it, and for the others it may be a signal, a, not the, pilot light to enable distributed identification of friend/foe and spontaneous cooperation.
In a similar way to how noone really believes in speed limits. If it says 50, I know my car car physically exceed that and even a few mph over it won't necessarily result in a fine or stop, even if directly measured. It does, however, act as signal to enable spontaneous cooperation of a certain type and in a certain direction, in tbis analogies case to not go too much faster than 50 mph (perhaps even a 10% tolerance for measurement error, depending on country and jurisdiction).
Professing all.people to be equal is, I think, similar to this. Both a havels greengrocer flag in the window, and an anchor of the overton window, and it's ideological internal counterpart, to enable apontnaous cooperation of a certain type, to drive actions in a certain direction likely to give results with, use methods accepted or liked by, etc to those who might profess the, known false, belief in equality.
You are also correct about equality not necessarily requiring HBD or invalidating. One could can add "epicycles" galore and still have a self consistent model, contact with reality notwithstanding.
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Policing is entangled with other issues. If you favor more policing in situations like this, you need to give up disparate impact, for instance, and that's used by the left in a lot of contexts outside policing.
I'm curious what you think "disparate impact" means in this context.
That policing is bad, because the criminals caught are disproportionately black.
I meant re the nonpolicing issues you mentioned.
That other things are bad because they disproportionately include or exclude black people. Surely you're aware of the idea as applied to schools, jobs, or even national parks.
That's where your argument breaks down. I know many people who are left of center who are skeptical of hiring processes that disproportionately affect black people for, arguably, no good reason (eg: jobs that require a college degree for no apparent reason) or spending on state parks in the wilderness instead of local parks, etc, but who have little problem with enforcing criminal law, because there is good reason. (And of course there is a distinction between enforcing criminal law and particular practices of the criminal justice, some of which might have disparate impact [possible example: the crack versus powder cocaine sentencing disparity]).
So, yes, it is perfectly possible to update re criminal enforcement without updating re schools, jobs, parks, etc.
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The world had social democrats before anyone had dreamt up disparate impact, and it will have social democrats once people forget about such a concept too.
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