Comment by closewith
3 days ago
> Put the criminals in prison. Do it often enough, and shoplifting ceases to be a problem of plague-like proportions. Big fan of accountability and immediate personal consequences and enforcing the law.
This just doesn't work. A high-trust society cannot be built by force.
> I am fatigued of the suicidal and deleterious empathy of those in charge who refuse to take second-order effects into account.
The irony here is palpable. An increasingly desperate poverty class with no hope of social mobility has many second-order effects, and none of them can be policed out of existence.
> A high-trust society cannot be built by force.
Imo we're kinda in the worse quadrant of whats possible.
You can either have high visibility/force of prevention efforts or low. And you can have high actual rates of crime or low.
Imo we currently have low actual rates of crime (you see people saying oh its rampant in California or whatever but im not there and can't make an accurate assessment of it over the internet) and highly visible (damn near pervasive) efforts at preventing crime in almost every corner of our lives. "please don't abuse our staff" "cctv in operation", facial recognition, constant assumptions that you are a threat. If I didn't know better its almost like they "want" people to be criminals -- it seems like according to some other threads there are at least some people whose jobs it would make easier
It is amazing to me that we have have failed so completely to report on the miraculous drop in crime rates over the past 30 years. People consistently report that crime is up, even when presented with contradictory evidence.
A major part of the problem, in my estimation, is that a lot of people don't actually perceive crime as crime but instead perceive divergence from their expected social hierarchies as crime. This is how you get people saying that crime in DC is high because they saw a person that looked homeless sitting on the metro. Although sitting on the metro is legal, a poor person doesn't "belong" there so this is seen as evidence of crime.
That's a good point. Perhaps people "feel" unsafe, not that, statistically, they in fact are.
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High trust societies can only exist when there are consequences for things like theft.
All examples of high trust societies show that those consequences must be social, because _by definition_, in a high-trust society, you must trust other people to do the right thing.
A punitive dictatorship or police state is not a high-trust society, even though laws may be strictly enforced. Likewise, in a high-trust society, behaviour is expected to be good and moral, even where not mandated by law.
Trust has to be earned. High-trust societies are awesome, but you can't just expect people to trust that they're not going to be robbed in the street if people keep getting robbed in the street, or that the few criminals that do exist will suffer consequences for their behavior if they're not actually suffering those consequences. That sort of culture takes time to build.
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And there-in lies the problem of modern society. There are no social consequences. The decline of religion and family with no suitable replacement has left most people without a peer group to exert these social consequences.
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A high-trust society cannot be built any way other than force!
Once you've removed the dredges of society (by force), all of the good, law-abiding citizens have better lives.
What you're describing is a police state and has never resulted in a high-trust society.
^ found the fascist.
> This just doesn't work. A high-trust society cannot be built by force.
To badly quote Mead, "It's the only thing that ever has". If the incentives are such that defecting becomes less attractive, defection will decrease.
I don’t think that’s what a high trust society is. In fact, I’m pretty sure the whole point of the thing is that people in a high trust society don’t defect even when they don’t think they’ll get caught, because they understand that not-defecting is part of the bargain everybody is engaging in to keep the good thing going.
You're just plain wrong. You can enforce compliance - a police state - but it inevitably worsens outcomes for both people who commit crimes and their victims.
But that isn't a high-trust society. In fact a high trust society requires minimal formal policing by definition (and a _lot_ of informal policing by parents, families, friends, and communities).
High-trust societies aren't without their problems, too, as trust is regularly abused.
A society where trust is regularly abused isn’t—or will not long remain—a “high-trust” society.
Also, it’s not clear me if you really meant that enforcing property laws inevitably worsens outcomes for those who would otherwise have been victims, or if you mean that the now-much-smaller pool of victims have a worse time with effective enforcement. I’d argue that both are false, but the latter at least seems arguable.
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What do you mean "this just doesn't work"?
You do understand that an overwhelming majority of crime and overall anti social behavior is done by a tiny percentage of people. Remove those people and you spare the rest of us.
For instance, the number of prisoners that have had 15 or more prior arrests is over 26%.
You can just have a 15 strikes and you're out policy and make a huge impact. Once these bad actors are out of society, high trust can be built. Stop letting a tiny percentage of people terrorize the rest of us.
It's not about poverty and ironically the biggest victims of this criminal behavior are poor people. Poor innocent people deal w theft, getting hassled and other consequences of criminal behavior at a much higher rate. It's not compassionate to let them suffer.
https://mleverything.substack.com/p/acceptance-of-crime-is-a...
> You do understand that an overwhelming majority of crime and overall anti social behavior is done by a tiny percentage of people.
Are you including all the bosses committing wage theft in this? Or are we only looking at a particular kind of crime?
Yes
> What do you mean "this just doesn't work"?
What I mean is that it doesn't work. Your proposal only increases crime, only deepens poverty, only worsens society.
> You do understand that an overwhelming majority of crime and overall anti social behavior is done by a tiny percentage of people. Remove those people and you spare the rest of us.
And yet, this policy has never worked. Three-stikes laws never work. Increased policing and more comprehensive criminal legislation never works. As long as the circumstances that caused the criminality persist, the problems returns ever more entrenched.
> It's not about poverty and ironically the biggest victims of this criminal behavior are poor people. Poor innocent people deal w theft, getting hassled and other consequences of criminal behavior at a much higher rate. It's not compassionate to let them suffer.
You are correct that the poorest suffer the most. As a society, we should aim to eradicate the poverty. Anything short of that is symptom control.
A policeman's job is only easy in a police state.
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Eschew flamebait.
Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Neither side of any political spectrum thinks that a law enforcement policy "works" if it reduces the incidence of criminal events against innocent people. Obviously if that was the goal, the easiest path is to remove laws and disband police. Instant crime rate drop.
But in fact both sides want to improve their societal outcomes and the policing/criminal policies that they support are by-and-large attempts to do that - improve society.
I'm neither left- nor right-wing in the US sense, but it is clear from examples around the world that high-trust societies emerge from the ground up and require strong family units, strong local communities, and strong engagement in larger politics.
While you do need police, you can't build communities by policing them. It's never worked anywhere.
I think another framework is blank slatism.
For instance, you can look at two countries and if one country has a higher prison population, that country over polices because every country and its people should have the same criminality level because all cultures and people are identical.
I remember feeling great shame that the US had such a high imprisonment rate. This led to a big decrease in state prison population and things like cashless bail and letting people go to basically like the stats. We need to get back to basics and remove people that are destructive and stop overanalyzing things
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Please don’t worry about the emdashes, worry about the broad and inaccurate generalizations being churned out by your flawed world model. I urge you to go to some actual criminal reformers in person.
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