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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   32510 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 12, 2023

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If Western Europe had America's demographics , crime there would go through the roof.

And if my grandmother had wheels she'd be a bicycle. What does this even mean? "If the UK was more like America, it would be more like America." Like - yeah?

this is response to the common argument that America locks away too many people for too long. this can be explained by America having worse demographics or other factors unique to America.

Without endorsing the theory, one could consider a country's crime rate as a multiple of the country's capacity for law-enforcement/general socialization and the innate criminal tendency of the population. The claim then would be that Europe's relatively lower crime rates are almost entirely a consequence of the tendencies of their population, and in fact their law-enforcement/socialization are relatively worse, not better; if they had the USA's demographics, their crime problem would be worse than that of the USA.

yeah, I thought it was easily inferred that is what I meant .

US probably has better law enforcers, but as a whole, Europe has better law enforcement. This is because they have more cops than US, but less crime. Because of this, when American cops must heavily prioritize their efforts, European cops are under much less pressure, and can afford to spend their time on investigating and prosecuting much more trivial offenses. The result of this is that all crime is at risk of being prosecuted; shoplifters know that if they get caught, they face jail, and so do people who do drugs (yes, simple possession is illegal and heavily enforced in huge swaths of Europe). This makes people respect law much more, which feeds the virtuous cycle of less crime -> more time to enforce the law -> more respect for law -> less crime.

On the other hand, the gypsies seem to violate the law with significantly more impunity than underclass Americans and that's despite there being 1/3 more cops.

America and the EU spend similar shares of GDP on law enforcement we just spend a much larger share on prisons than the EU does.

Gross spending aside, the US has 2.4 cops per 1,000 citizens while the EU averages 3.3. So they have about a third more cops per person than the US does.

about a third more cops per person

The EU is also roughly half the size of the US; this means that there are significantly more cops per square mile, and cops are far more effective when they don't need to travel an hour one way to respond to a call.

I really doubt that has much to do with it, since crime tends to concentrate in high-population areas.

For one obvious counter example, Canada's population density is 90% lower than the US, and they have 30% fewer cops than the US, yet crime rates are significantly lower. There are other factors involved too, obviously, but I don't think there is much evidence for the thesis that the need for police officers scales by area rather than population.

The US white homicide rate is still much higher than the euro average.

Proximity of higher crime demographics makes crime to increase also in lower crime demographics.

Only for certain subpopulations. Others, for example New England whites, are comparable to Europeans in this regard.

No, even New Englanders don’t have better W. Euro level crime rates when you correctly adjust for demographics in both places in the comparison. What people do is compare, say, Vermont to all of France or England, which is disingenuous.

...lack of access to weapons

The combination of demographics and access to weapons seem to combine to drive murder rates, in my view. As I mentioned in another post, the murder rate among whites in Minnesota and Wisconsin is incredibly low, almost non-existent, and yet there are tons of weapons in the rural areas. The people are just not really the shooty types so much. As @rudig points out, Oslo has some populations that are fairly violent; I would guess that their capacity for large numbers of murder is moderated by their access to firearms. Where the two intersect, Milwaukee and Minneapolis have high murder rates among their black populations - violent subcultures, predicted by demographics, combined with easy access to firearms gives predictably bad outcomes.

Minnesota features Minneapolis, a large city of 430k or so which is about 18% black. Norway has Oslo, a larger city but one without such a population.

Oslos immigrant population is 33%, granted some of the biggest immigrant groups are western European. But if you add up non-euro immigrants (the biggest of which is pakistani and somali) the number is still over 20%.

Why are you talking about immigrants?

Sorry, didnt specify, but immigrant in Norwegian statistic is someone who immigrated themselves or have 2 parents who have immigrated. Norway does not really have a big non-white population outside of this group

And even the rates of stuff like homicide via feet and fists, if I recall correctly, stuff that can't be chalked up to differences in available weapons.

Well, yeah. A country which doesn't need a well-armed militarized police force (because crime is low) is making a sensible choice by not investing in one and investing limited resources elsewhere. "You say your medical system is good, but you're totally unprepared for the hypothetical influx of sickle cell anemia cases that you'd be faced with if you imported millions of Africans into your country" is not a serious or effective criticism of Norway's health service.

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