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ymeskhout  7mo ago (text post)   2430 thread views

The Bailey Podcast E034: An Unhinged Conversation on Policing

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In this episode, an authoritarian and some anarchist(s) have an unhinged conversation about policing.

Participants: Yassine, Kulak, & Hoffmeister25 [Note: the latter's voice has been modified to protect him from the progressive nanny state's enforcement agents.]

Links:

About the Daniel Penny Situation (Hoffmeister25)

Posse comitatus (Wikipedia)

Lifetime Likelihood of Going to State or Federal Prison (BJS 1997)

The Iron Rule (Anarchonomicon)

Eleven Magic Words (Yassine Meskhout)

Blackstone's ratio (Wikipedia)

Halfway To Prison Abolition (Yassine Meskhout)

Defunding My Mistake (Yassine Meskhout)

Recorded 2023-09-16 | Uploaded 2023-09-25

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I understand how distasteful a "free heroin" arrangement would be, from the standpoint that you describe. Ultimately it boils down to a variant of "do you want to be right? or do you want to win?". I don't like property crime. The cost of shoplifting gets shifted onto me the customer. Stores also respond by putting items behind locks, or just shift their inventory to less valuable things. I would like there to be less shoplifting but I don't see a feasible or practical way to get to that point given the continuing prevalence of addicting drugs. Yeah it would suck to see someone contribute nothing to society and just wait around for their regular heroin drop, but that's preferable to me if it means a significant reduction in property crime. We're already spending money on police, prosecutions, higher prices, etc. it's just a matter of how to spend it efficiently.

Those are fair objections, I think it's reasonable to be skeptical about implementation. In terms of evidence, Switzerland is the prime case study here. Heroin hit the scene in Zurich in the 1970s and the immediate response of heavy law enforcement didn't pan out. In the 1990s they changed tack and ran a number of randomized controlled trials with "heroin-assisted treatment" (HAT). Once those trials came back as successful, they've implemented HAT into law as part of a broader "four pillars" reform.

Here's a Soros-funded report with a lot more detail. The main takeaways are:

  • The number of new heroin users declined from 850 in 1990 to 150 in 2002
  • Between 1991 and 2004, drug-related deaths fell by more than 50 percent
  • The country witnessed a 90 percent reduction in property crime committed by drug users
  • The country that once led Western Europe in HIV prevalence now has among the lowest rates in the region.

I'd be curious to know if you find any of these results surprising or unintuitive.

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