The recent decriminalization of looting has also resulted in a surge of stealing and crime in cities. Businesses have to spend a lot to armor their stores, hire security guards, and cover the losses. Many just close up shop and flee. This will increase poverty and inequality.
The problem is that we saw crime increases before police protests and defunding movements, including in cities that aren't in California, so it really doesn't make sense to blame the recent "defund the police" movement for all of that increase. When you actually sit down and do the math, there is no strong correlation between police defunding/reforms and the recent crime wave -- cities that didn't alter their policing strategy also saw increases in crime.
The other thing that's worth bringing up once again is that people don't just claim that decreasing crime... decreases crime. They claim it decreases inequality, they claim it's responsible for decreasing other ills. But the only stats that they're ever interested in are crime stats, at which point they just kind of jump to the conclusion that "of course businesses will have to spend more money to armor stores."
There's not good data to support this -- the most convincing example is San Francisco, which when you dig into, also doesn't really hold up. Store closings in San Francisco aren't that much higher than the rest of the country.
> This will increase poverty and inequality.
And again... opposed to before?
What's frustrating about this is that we have a strategy we're trying -- tough on crime -- that is not reducing inequality. And whenever anyone suggests alternative strategies, the response is, "that will make inequality worse." But the existing approach is not working right now. It's all based on fear of what's about to happen. It's not based on looking back at historical data and saying, "we implemented stop and frisk and then people got better jobs." Because that didn't happen.
It's always based around this idea that society is about to fall apart, not tangible data that crime rates are causal for the other harms.
Good questions. But the data doesn't back up your conclusion.
You can point at other countries, you can bring up anecdotes, but the overall trends in the US do not match what you're saying. We're still in a scenario where crime rates seem to be decoupled from protest/decriminalization rates, and where store closure rates across the country don't line up neatly with areas that have decreased policing/prosecution strategies.
It doesn't matter how logical your theory seems when written down if it doesn't hold true in the real world. You can bring up any argument or example you like, but I'm still going to keep asking you about that broader trend. Either there is a component to this that you are missing that overrides the effect you would expect to see -- or the causal effect isn't there. But unless you're going to claim that the data is wrong, one of those things has to be the case or else we would see a strong correlation between economic health of cities and whether or not they changed police/prosecution strategies, and we don't. As best as we can see, stuff like homicides are rising in every city, and every city is struggling with store closures regardless of what they've done recently with their police forces.
I also never said that 100% of inequality was caused by crime. I said that crime is a cause of inequality. Just like smoking is a cause of death.
It's pretty obvious that crime causes a reduction in the standard of living of the criminal, his family, and his community. I understand that obviousness is not proof, but you seem to thing it doesn't. Why do you think that?
Well, short answer to all of them, I'm not 100% certain, but apparently not for any reasons that show up predictably in national trends. :)
You want me to treat this like it's a personal question, but whatever answer I give you doesn't matter if it doesn't reflect what other people are doing.
If I tell you that I would choose to open a business in the high-crime area, are you going to be shocked and concede the argument? Of course not. You know on some level that asking someone's opinion on a web forum is not the same thing as examining national economic trends.
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> I also never said that 100% of inequality was caused by crime. I said that crime is a cause of inequality.
If you're just saying that crime is a contributing factor, sure I buy that, absolutely. But that's a very different thing then complaining that people have the causation backwards. We might as well say that both crime and inequality contribute to each other in subtle ways, crime/poverty being a cyclical problem is just as obvious of a conclusion, so I'm not sure what your objection is if that's the case.
More to the point though, saying "it's a factor" isn't necessarily the same thing as saying it should be the primary factor we focus on. We have a lot of data now saying that pulling the lever on crime is not influential enough to seriously impact inequality. At best, that's the conclusion we can draw from that data.
Saying that crime is a weak cause of inequality that doesn't show up in national trends is effectively the same thing as saying we can kind of ignore it when talking about inequality. Because it obviously doesn't matter enough to be visible.
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> It's pretty obvious that crime causes a reduction in the standard of living of the criminal, his family, and his community. I understand that obviousness is not proof, but you seem to thing it doesn't. Why do you think that?
I think it's complicated -- I think that the correlation between poverty and crime rates is much higher than the correlation between inequality and crime rates, and there might be a couple of reasons for that. Crime rates contain a lot of crimes against communities, and inequality is not always focused within communities, so maybe there's a contributing factor there? Maybe it's that there are thresholds of inequality of outcomes that need to be present before they start influencing people's behavior? Or maybe because crimes are influenced by existing poverty, crimes do more to keep communities at existing levels rather than lower their outcomes further? Heck, maybe it's just that only certain crimes impact or are influenced by inequality and the data is not granular enough to pick out meaningful trends. I certainly buy that white-collar crimes like wage theft could reasonably have an impact on national economic outcomes. But I think my biggest conclusion is that anyone who claims to have a perfect explanation for any of that stuff is either selling something or deluding themselves.
I do know what the data says, which is that decreasing crime levels have not lead to decreasing inequality. I do know what the data says about policing, which is that police budgets and policies at least in the short term don't really seem to be affecting the economic health of cities in any predictable way. I do know what the data says about crime rates themselves, which is that there doesn't seem to be any really strong trend I can find that's predictive of how much of an increase in crime a given city will have seen over 2020-2022.
The actual data about the recent crime increases gets really confusing the closer you look at it. Homicides and violent crimes are up, property crimes are not rising by the same amount -- by some metrics they're going down. This is really weird, it doesn't fit with a lot of narratives. It doesn't fit with narratives about lawlessness and degradation of society, but it also doesn't fit super-well with narratives about times being tough during the pandemic, because on the surface we would expect thefts to rise more than homicides in that case. People have offered explanations that maybe people traveling less makes it harder to steal things? Which... maybe that's true. It's a plausible theory, but there's not really data to back it up.
Regardless, I don't think that the right way to approach any of these questions is to say, "I have a theory that seems obvious to me, it doesn't match with the data, but I'm not sure what the better theory is so I'm just going to keep confidently asserting it." I think at some point it's better to take a step back and say, "I notice I am confused." I don't really need to offer you an alternative explanation as to why inequality is going up in order to disprove that crime is a major reason. I can just point at the numbers and say that if crime was a major reason, the numbers would be different. You don't need to replace a theory to prove it wrong.
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Now, could crime be a contributing factor to inequality? I guess. Maybe crime causes inequality trends and inequality trends cause crime. Both seem obvious from some explanations, and there's about the same amount of data for both conclusions -- which is to say, not much. But clearly these metrics are not strongly correlated, so if we're interested in tackling inequality, this might not be the best place for us to focus our efforts.
Just recently it was reported that after the cops were not allowed to chase car thiefs, car thefts went up 50%.
https://mynorthwest.com/3327635/dramatic-rise-in-car-thefts-...
The recent decriminalization of looting has also resulted in a surge of stealing and crime in cities. Businesses have to spend a lot to armor their stores, hire security guards, and cover the losses. Many just close up shop and flee. This will increase poverty and inequality.