Comment by hcarvalhoalves
13 years ago
That´s the worst angle to look at this issue, though. It´s the way a white boy from a 1st world country would look at it.
Having many laws and inneficient law enforcement is the recipe for disaster. You just get corruption and lack of isonomy (poor people get jail, rich people get a bail for stupid crimes). Come to Brazil and marvel at the result of your theory. Police is inefficient, rich people get away from murder, and when they catch a poor criminal they execute for banal crimes (e.g., drug posession) with the understanding the judiciary doesn´t work.
What you want is less bogus laws around individual liberties rather than less law enforcement.
This is exactly the scenario I was trying to describe. In a world where we're all technically violating the law at some point, and where we're all being monitored intensively, then it's essentially up to those in power to "decide" who is punished and who isn't, without any real standard of measure. In that world, it seems pretty clear who ends up in jail and who doesn't. ACAB.
Conversely, if we lived in the same world of intensive surveillance, but where law enforcement was instead 100% efficient, we wouldn't have the often valuable ability to break the law.
It's possible to say that we should have better laws, or different laws, or only the "right" laws. But we don't actually have any agency over that (or to the extent that we do, it's often a result of breaking those laws). What we do have some agency over is the internet, and the technical means to stymie surveillance.
> Conversely, if we lived in the same world of intensive surveillance, but where law enforcement was instead 100% efficient, we wouldn't have the often valuable ability to break the law.
You can break the law. You just can't avoid punishment. Difference is subtle, but important.
My country lived 20 years in a dictatorship but the people breaking the law (including intellectuals/communists from middle class), for good or for worse, were the ones that forced a change back into democracy. Now the president is an "ex-terrorist", and we have superfluous legislation and bad law enforcement because the ones now in power abhor it. The result is corruption and crime.
This is just arguing two sides of the same crap (paternal, surveillance state in one side; granny, lenient state in the other) without changing the rules of the game (e.g., less state).
>You can break the law. You just can't avoid punishment. Difference is subtle, but important.
Yes and no. If you can break the law and the penalty is tolerable then you can get the same result as if enforcement is less than completely effective: People break the law and just take their lumps.
The trouble is that when a movement is only just getting started and doesn't yet have popular support, the first thing the government will try to do in the face of people taking their lumps is to ratchet up the penalties to try to deter them. And then, against perfect enforcement, the number of people willing to break the law falls off a cliff because it isn't worth spending decades in prison for the vast majority of would-be supporters -- or if it is then all the supporters end up imprisoned indefinitely or executed and the movement fails.
It is a terrible way to look at it, even if you're white, because you can always be the wrong kind of white person.
Where I grew up, kids on the hockey team, or whose dad owned the car dealership, would repeatedly get away with drunk driving and beating up their girlfriends, whereas poor kids were regularly taken down to the station for skateboarding, even though there were no laws against it.
I'm not an American, and my country is, especially now, poorer than the parent's (he said Brasil, IIRC).
Nothing about some "white boy perspective" to what I said.
That's based on a misunderstanding about what I meant by saying the police should not be totally efficient.
Less efficient != discrimination.
Less efficient != corruption.
It's not a two way association. One could say that a "corrupt police" is "less efficient" but the inverse is not true.
If anything, with it being less efficient, in the way I describe, FEWER poor, black, "wrong kind of white" etc people will actually get caught.
That's like saying two wrongs make a right.
3 replies →
Yep, I think you get the idea about "white boy from 1st world" though... Someone from a "higher caste", with more influence in the society or who can afford lawyers.
>Having many laws and inneficient law enforcement is the recipe for disaster. You just get corruption and lack of isonomy (poor people get jail, rich people get a bail for stupid crimes). Come to Brazil and marvel at the result of your theory.
Those are not the results of "my theory". Heck that's not my theory either!
First, who said anything about "many laws"? I'm also against having too many laws.
Second, inefficiency != lack of isonomy. Or rather, it can lead to random lack of isonomy (ie. whether rich or poor, colored or not) -- which is not the same as the situation you describe, which is about inequality of law enforcement between rich and poor.
For example, if the police cannot demand a drug testing, then neither rich nor poor can be found with 100% certainty after having taken some. If the police cannot demand your ISP records, then they have a harder time enforcing 100% crackdown on piracy, whether you are rich or poor etc etc.
I was talking about "less efficiency", in the sense of being against giving those kind of "enablers" (which make 100% enforcement a closer possibility) to the police.
Not in favour of discriminating between rich and poor.
>What you want is less bogus laws around individual liberties rather than less law enforcement.
That's good too, but my point was another. That even for good laws, total enforcement of them would make a nightmarish situation. A couple of examples:
1) I wouldn't want everybody to have free reign to spray paint anything they wish. But I'd like for people determined and willing to express something to be able to do it, even if it means I also have to stand some people that just spray BS tags.
2) I wouldn't want all people to go 150 miles on the highway whenever they like. But if the road is empty, it's straight for miles, and you have a nice car, I wouldn't like people to not be able to step on it for some innocent fun.
In this case, fines and speed cops are OK. But not devices like "compulsory speed control" on all cars, or "total speed radar tracking" on all roads, which would enable something like 100% enforcement of the speed limit.
So, when I talk about less "efficiency", I mean not enabling the police to the point of it being a total control state for every aspect of people's lives.
A lot of the times, some of the improvements to society, art, morals, etc, come by breaking the law. Rosa Parks, IIRC, broke the law that day, too.
Your speeding example is a great example on why being able to get away from infraction isn't the holy grail.
Automatic fines reinforces isonomy (everybody is fined equally), and that's a good thing. If some people can game the system, regulation is useless (traffic turns into survival of the fittest, it's game theory).
If someone feels like speeding for civil disobedience, they still can, the state is not making it impossible to (it would if cars couldn't go over limit, for technical reasons). So one can break the law, but face the consequence as everybody else, and argue on the legal system wether this is fair or not. That's what judges and public opinion are for.
When enough people break the law, either the legislation changes or the people change the legislators. But you need penalties being applied to cause pressure for change, otherwise you only get inertia in the legislative.
I actually think that fewer laws and more limits on law enforcement practices is the way to go. I am not that thrilled about isonomy because I think that history shows that isonomy never really is implemented and in fact merely shifts power towards those deciding how the laws are to be enforced.
Look for example at our experience in the US with mandatory sentencing guidelines. This was done to take away leeway in sentencing from judges and in the name of isonomy.
What happened however was different. The problem is that not all cases of a crime are created equal and so instead of judges having sentencing discretion, that was put in the hands of the prosecutor (who would then decide when to prosecute a lesser included offence).
The result is quite striking when you look at drug prosecutions today. It's not law enforcement that makes the difference but prosecutorial discretion. The problem is that human life does not really admit of a situation where a purely mechanical view of justice actually does justice. Total isonomy would not be a justice system but merely one which distributes injustice equally and blindly.
I don't there is a way around this, and I think further we are better just openly admitting that isonomy is neither attainable nor desirable, but instead work to ensure that we really try to ensure real justice and hold people accountable, from the grass roots, for their decisions.