← Back to context

Comment by foxglacier

2 days ago

OK to Ghana.

Woodmore is a gated community so obviously it has an unrepresentative population.

I would think hard on Ghana. It has no shortage of black people living in poverty. Yet it's extremely safe compared to the US as a whole. You're far less likely to be the victim of a violent crime walking down a street in Ghana surrounded by impoverished black people than you are in many streets in the U.S. Not all of Africa is like that. Many countries are more dangerous than the U.S. But Ghana shows pretty clearly that it's not a racial or even strictly a poverty issue. And that increasing our incarceration rate is quite possibly the opposite of what needs to be done. We need to consider other solutions.

It feels good and easy to say lock the bad people up. But the numbers don't show that as a solution if the real issue you're trying to solve is decrease violent crime.

Also Sierra Leone in Africa with a homicide rate a third that of the USofA.

Both Ghana and Sierra Leone are gated communities, just as the USofA, the UK, and Australia are.

I'd suggest that Woodmore fails to meet you particular bias, hence you rule it out.

Woodmore likely meets your four intended criteria depending upon the level of internal surveillance .. I suspect it's not surveillance that prevents Woodmore occupants from killing each other.

  • Gated communities don't count because residents have to be wealthy enough to buy their way in, so they're populated by a non-violent-criminally-biased sample of the general population. Some countries might count as gated communities if they're heavily populated by 1st generation immigrants who had to be wealthy to get in, otherwise no, they're just full of whatever random people were born there or moved there without any selection pressure against crime.