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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   3684 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 7, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Do countries at war experience a suppression of crime rates on the home front as large numbers of disproportionately poorer young men are instead off fighting?

I don’t have a source handy, but I recall reading that crime rose considerably in London and other bombed-out English cities during the Blitz. Criminals would dress like air raid wardens and empty shops of their inventory, steal jewelry and wallets off corpses, and dump dead bodies in an area recently hit by bombs. The war effort meant that there were fewer police around, and the criminal element proved surprisingly adept at securing medical exemptions to the draft, either by bribing doctors or paying cripples to impersonate them at medical exams.

The 1946 Battle of Athens is possibly instructive as well. Once all the normal, upstanding, patriotic young men went to war, the only men left were scoundrels.

(Edited to fix link)

This is the correct bare link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Athens_(1946)

And this seems to be a good summary referenced in Wikipedia:

https://web.archive.org/web/20100624094438/http://www.americanheritage.com/articles/magazine/ah/1985/2/1985_2_72.shtml

Ah, thanks. I’ve corrected it in my comment.

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