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ymeskhout  7mo ago (text post)   2430 thread views

The Bailey Podcast E034: An Unhinged Conversation on Policing

Listen on iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Podcasts, Podcast Addict, and RSS.

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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Does it help if you consider that the idea is to stop people from becoming the guy who pisses on your house, by improving their lives before they reach that point?

Because, like, I get that there's a transitional period between every old system and every new system where thing are turbulent and a lot of annoying things happen. But I think we should be considering what the long-term steady state of that system looks like, not getting hung up on annoying implementation details in the first month.

I appreciate that what you actually want is for someone to fix the situation you're already in. That's a totally reasonable way to feel when in bad circumstances, and I don't judge you or feel uncomfortable with you and would genuinely like your life to be better.

What I'm saying is that the situation in your neighborhood is so fucked that government is not capable of fixing it as it is today.

Any attempts to use more police enforcement and harsher punishments and whatever will just make the problems worse, for you as well as for the people you're talking about. We've seen that through decades of 'tough on crime' policies.

The only way anyone can fix a neighborhood like that is by going upstream and attacking the reasons neighborhoods become like that in the first place. You can't fix the people and places that already fucked that bad, but you can try to make sure the next generation is marginally less like that by getting to them before they're that fucked.

So in a sense, yeah, I agree that I'm not trying to help you, right now today. Not because I don't care about your concerns, but because I don't think it's really possible to give you what you want.

But what I am trying to do is intended to help you and people like you who live 10, 20, 50 years from now (among others, of course).

That's the best I think we're capable of.

Any attempts to use more police enforcement and harsher punishments and whatever will just make the problems worse, for you as well as for the people you're talking about. We've seen that through decades of 'tough on crime' policies.

Do we know this? I thought the general consensus was that "tough on crime" policies like NYC's vaunted "broken windows" efforts, while expensive and not as world-shaking as initially billed, did drastically cut down on street crime and enable the revitalization of the city. I thought that the general consensus was that the harsh policies adopted in the 80's and 90's were a major factor in the plunging murder rate in the U.S., which only started upticking again after the recent racial brouhahas (Ferguson, Minneapolis, etc.) put the kibosh on aggressive policing of the poor and disproportionately black communities where most serious crime crawls up out of.

I thought that the general consensus was that the harsh policies adopted in the 80's and 90's were a major factor in the plunging murder rate in the U.S.

I'll note that this is a study area with a lot of motivated actors but the other leading explanations I'm aware of are reduction in leaded gasoline and greater access to abortion. I think there's decent evidence to attribute the plunge to the tough-on-crime policies, but overall I don't have enough info to form an opinion.

The most recent meta-analysis I've seen on lead-crime was this, which as I read it suggests that lead likely was responsible for somewhere between zero and one third - closer to zero in the most rigorous studies - of the crime surge.

Anthony Higney, Nick Hanley, and Mirko Moro, “The Lead-Crime Hypothesis: A MetaAnalysis,” University of Glasgow Institute of Biodiversity, Animal Health & Comparative Medicine, Discussion Papers in Environmental and One Health Economics series, no. 2021–02, Feb. 21, 2021.

And as for the abortion explanation, my understanding was that the Freaknomics guy's study was pretty convincingly critiqued here: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=270126

YMMV, of course.

Thanks, this shifts my belief towards accepting "tough on crime" as the more likely explanation.

You are absolutely correct, and anyone arguing otherwise is doing so because they are unwilling to accept the other consequences of those policies - namely, mass incarceration and ubiquitous intrusive policing of poor black people, drug addicts, and the mentally ill.

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