Crime for one, can be addressed fairly easily at the current levels it exists in a city like San Francisco. The ease with which people are able to smash car windows in SF is ridiculous. The problem exists because of the lack of enforcement at all levels. I can guarantee that 95% of the smash and grabs can be attributed to maybe 200 individuals at best. If you start rounding them up and make sure they don’t get away with a slap on the wrist, you’ll immediately see the difference. And no, heavy fines and jail sentences for repeat petty crime is not morally questionable.
The same problems exist in lots of cities. Enforcement and recidivism prevention is not easy. You need competent staff and big budgets at all levels. For instance - what if 20 of those 200 are minors. Family court might just release them back to their parents. But if they’re unsupervised then they just do it again. And for adults what level of sentencing do you recommend for a misdemeanor? You can’t put them in prison. So they go to jail then get released and perpetrate again. Seriously, if crime were easy to solve we would be close to solving it, but we’re not.
I am not arguing for “solving crime”. If you read my comment, I specifically addressed the current levels of crime in SF. The current level of law and order in the city is below what is acceptable and achievable by a normally functioning city. Your car will be broken into within minutes of you leaving it, if you have anything at all visible in it. That is NOT the norm cities across the country, except a few. We don’t need to solve crime, we just need to not normalize it.
The rub of this is people conflate to race what they should conflate to economic circumstance. A poor white person is no more or less likely to commit a crime of opportunity as a poor black person, but most people don't understand nuance much less statistics or demography or history. It also doesn't help that a lot of police back then as well as today are racist.
a lot of minority folks are traumatized by not being able to walk down the street without being roughed up by police. innocent until proven guilty should be the bar we aspire to for everyone. if they tried the same tactic in a white neighborhood, it never would have stood.
So, again, you prefer leaving these people alone, despite the police having a reasonable idea that they're carrying a weapon? You know, I suppose, that people carrying a gun walk and carry themselves in a distinctive way. Or people jumping subway turnstiles often have other warrants out agains them.
The fact is, the Giulani / Bratton reforms worked. But I guess you prefer more crime. Even if you're the one being mugged?
> So, again, you prefer leaving these people alone, despite the police having a reasonable idea that they're carrying a weapon? You know, I suppose, that people carrying a gun walk and carry themselves in a distinctive way.
"The number of stops increased dramatically in 2008 to over half a million, 88% of which did not result in any fine or conviction, peaking in 2011 to 685,724 stops, again with 88% (603,437) resulting in no conviction. Leading to the remaining 82,287 resulting in convictions. On average, from 2002 to 2013, the percentage of individuals stopped without any convictions was 87.6%." [1]
Not terribly distinctive. They got it right less than 1/8th of the time. If that is your argument, that they were only stopping people they think had guns and were going to commit a violent crime, it's a terribly poor one. The vast majority of people were detained by the police with no cause other than looking a particular way.
So those stats (from a biased source!) are from 2008.
I guess that means you're happy with going back to the early days of Bratton's policing, then? By 2008 the battle was mostly won.
Assuming I believe your numbers (a stretch, but stay with me): do you have some other way of catching those 82,287 convictions? Or you just don't care?
The reason they were in minority neighborhoods is that that's where the crime is. And also where the crime victims are.
I care about catching guilty people, but I think we must protect the innocent from harassment as much as possible. I value liberty more than punishment.
Would you support this countrywide? Would you also support something like increased internet surveillance? A digital stop and frisk of every person, so we can catch all the digital bad guys? If so, why not? Because you might get caught up in it? I'm wondering where your line for these sorts of impositions is. It's easy to be for something if you don't expect to get caught in it.
I know that if I was mugged I might be more prone to accepting this sort of liberty loss, but that wouldn't be because I changed my ethical stance, it'd be because I was hurt and scared.
So you have to resort to hypotheticals to make your point. That sorta proves you've lost.
> I value liberty more than punishment
Putting your thumb on the scales and misstating the question. It's not about "punishment" -- it's safety. Yes, fear of punishment does dissuade some criminals from preying on victims.
And you've just admitted why NYC'ers broadly support stop-and-frisk: because they're "scared", too. As if that's something to be ashamed of.
As for "if you don't expect to get caught in it" -- you're right, I don't look like a mugger. You probably don't, either.
