Wanted to share this Public Safety Resources poster @ZohranKMamdani and my offices collaborated on.
We’re distributing them to local businesses, so our neighborhood is equipped with better ways of solving problems than simply summoning police every time a challenge arises. pic.twitter.com/zvpMWDRdeL
— Council Member Tiffany Cabán (D22) (@CabanD22) September 27, 2022
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This is one of those smal,l incremental, necessary-but-insufficient improvements in police reform that deserves more attention.
I’m seeing this sort of “alternate order enforcement” popping up in other locales, by other organizations.
The central idea springs from “Broken Windows” theory that minor breaches in behavioral norms can lead to more serious crimes.
But these minor breaches don’t necessarily need to be handled with guns and badges, but other forms of intervention.Report
I think the issue for many normies when it comes to the gentler the approach is that it seems like shifting the burden to the person who isn’t causing the problem rather than one deviating from from behavior norm to get into shape. The harder approach is more appealing at time because it doesn’t seem like burden shifting towards the non-problem causer.Report
I don’t think the analysis is even that deep. Having alternatives to the police isn’t the worst thing in the world, provided those alternative responders are well trained and effective. Of course one of the problems with the police is that they aren’t always well trained or effective, which itself is a cause of excessive use of force and other issues that prompt these kinds of programs.
Will these alternative responders be trained by the same people? By activists more versed in word choice than solving problems? The fact that this is coming from someone with power in the city government is its own kind of farce. I mean, if Tiffani Caban has the answers why not just fix the police?
To the extent this calls for individual citizens to intervene, I doubt the issue is burden shifting so much as asking untrained people to take risks for which they can no longer rely on the professionals. The result of that is going to be less of the imagined police free utopia and more of that incident in the bodega we debated over the summer.Report
Why SHOULD the police be used as mental health counselors instead of y’know, actual mental health counselors?
Or conversely, why do mental health counselors need to be trained in firearms and criminology?
I would think that using the minimum force and violence needed is an approach to be applauded.Report
Look, if it’s effective it’s effective, and good for them. My question is whether they’re going to do what they need for it to be effective. I’m also not sure we can neatly sort incidents quite the way this implies we can but I’m open to being proven wrong.Report
The bulk of that official gov sheet is an effort to get random civilians to be more effective at dealing with this.
The one section on “mental health crisis” (mhc) expressly warns that using their hotline might end with the cops doing bad things. Is this an effort to use mental health counselors or isn’t this? I can’t tell from the sheet.Report
The sheet is asking citizens to be active players in their community and warns that left unaddressed, a mild mental health issue will become a serious problem needing violence to resolve. The theme repeated over and over is to find ways to de-escalate conflict and resolve it without asking the government to intervene.
Which as I mentioned is Broken Windows thinking, that small breaches of public order must be dealt with. The only difference here is that most of those small breaches don’t need guns or violence to be resolved.Report
We need to have realistic expectations on what “resolve” means.
Getting mental health issues addressed is either extremely easy or extremely hard. I have several family members who are mentally ill. The ones that admit they have a problem and get treatment are effectively normal.
The one that flatly refuses to consider she has a problem is not. She burns down all of her relationships. She’s convinced its everyone else’s fault. A half dozen people have each, dozens of times, explained to her slowly and clearly exactly what she’s doing and that they think she’s mentally ill, and that doesn’t change anything.
We’re trying these reforms because we don’t want cops shooting people dead because of mental health crisis. The cops aren’t the root of the problem and it’s not clear we even have solutions. Are we willing to live with councilors getting killed by the worst of the mentally ill in their worst moment?
The idea that we can just tell the mentally ill they have a problem, or even tell their family that there’s a problem, seems unlikely to be useful. The family already knows and the individual won’t believe you.Report
The Front Range cities appear to be working quite hard to not be the last city to have a mental health co-responder unit, with real mental health professionals. From everything I have read, the regular LEOs are quite happy having those pros take the lead on the appropriate calls.Report
Right, because the very last thing any officer dreamed of when they went to the academy is “spending my day rousting with schizophrenics, drunks, and assorted cranks from streetcorners” and very few police chiefs really want to have their budget sucked dry by petty matters that could be taken care with just a discussion.
Joseph Wambaugh, who you probably remember from the Blue Knight movie and New Centurions, went into this with his novels about cop life on the streets where mostly their job entailed being marriage counselors, mental health counselors, arbitrators of petty contract disputes and scarecrows to ward off graffiti artists and turnstile jumpers.Report
I am largely starting to think that LeeEsq has a real point when you look at debates on the Anglo-left as being debates over how much should people tolerate various levels of “disorder.”
There seems to be a variant of left-wing thought in the U.S. that we should put up with a lot of visible disorder because it “afflicts the comfortable.” I’m not sure where this belief came from but its adherents largely do not realize how they end up shooting themselves in the feet more than not. But there seems to be a certain kind of mental health advocate that thinks seeing mental health crisis on the street will (at somepoint, eventually) lead to a flood of funding for mental health as opposed to compassion fatigue.
See also debates on public decorum for public transit. Whenever I suggest that maybe having people blast music loudly without headphones discourages or turns people from taking public transit, someone is always ready to jump in and fight with “Says you whitie” or something very close.Report
FWIW, no one despises boomboxes more than me, and I would add to the gripe list those cars with extra loud mufflers and the young men who aggressively rev them for the express purpose of pissing me off.
The idea that we should subordinate our personal behavior to communal norms isn’t really antithetical to the left, though.
Notice how when it comes to things the right likes to do, its all “My right to a gun is more important than your dead children”.
Like, are there people over at Gateway Pundit saying, “Wow, aggressive displays of open carry of guns really hurts our cause and makes us look bad!”?
I doubt it. I mean, i agree with you that doggedly defending rudeness and belligerent behavior is a poor way to attract people to a cause.
I just don’t think that those sorts of liberals are really that common, and aren’t moving the needle much, anymore than the 2A fetishists are creating Democratic converts.Report
What’s the goal?
Is it to get more people to ride public transit? If the goal is to get more people to ride public transit, you may wish to push for the equivalent of house-to-house searches for guns.Report
I’m not sure how much I fully agree to be honest. My view is that they might be small in number but they know how to present themselves in debates.Report
We may just travel in different circles.
I guess I’m just tired of the “shanda fur die conservatives” theory of politics, where we liberals are supposed to flinch and beg forgiveness every time some liberal somewhere says something dumb.
Its not like Biden is out there calling some Asian lady “Coco Chow”, and its not like AOC is threatening to defund federal law enforcement, and there aren’t liberals calling in bomb threats to childrens hospitals.
Conversely, Kamala Harris being a law and order prosecutor didn’t seem to win very many converts.
Over the coming days I’ll be doing more of the “Troll or Republican” posts. If anyone wants to post a stupid comment from a liberal about boombox freedom, well, go right ahead.Report
I take BART and walk a lot. When I’m working in the East Bay, I can even go to the place of work from my house. It isn’t uncommon for me to see somebody with obvious mental health problems ranting rather loudly about something. Same on BART. While nothing has happened yet, there is always the potential that something could happen. People generally do not like having to deal with things like this everyday but at least part of the Woke-Activist set believes that having to confront this is a good thing.
Generally other countries seem much better about the idea that there should be a certain amount of decorum in the commons, especially transit. In the United States you have people across the spectrum favoring different kinds of disorder, the man armed to his teeth and acting like a giant asshole on the right, people blasting music loudly on the left or the homeless and mentally ill on the left, and rude message T-shits all over. I am not sure why so many Americans seem opposed to public decorum.Report
We aren’t a homogeneous society economically, culturally or historically. Plus a lot of us recognize that individual liberty is actually opposed to that sort of strict social rule construct. Doubly so in a nation that chooses to spend so relatively little in both supporting its citizens actual needs AND in its transportation options.Report
And this is why SFH in the suburbs, not living in multifamily housing, and not taking mass transit will always be a thing in the USA.Report
You can have single family homes and transit co-exist. Australia manages to do it. No reason America can’t. Even America used to do single family homes and mass transit.Report
Only if there is a social compact that allows ‘normies’ to feel safe/not grossed out by fellow mass transit riders …… now a days …. not so much. Lets not even broach the subject of social distancing/the next pandemic. Much safer driving than mass transit.Report
Oh as an urban resident only a few blocks from Skid Row, I completely agree about the need for norms of public behavior.
Whether it is open carry of guns, MeToo issues, respecting peoples pronouns, or graffiti I think more self-policing and etiquette would greatly improve us as a society.Report
Based on the popularity of crude and rude message T-shirts I’ve seen, I am somewhat doubtful of the ability of Americans to self-police. There are simply too many people that are going to do what they want to do. Many of them personally benefit from committing minor to medium acts of disorder by looking cool to people they want to impress. That needs to change.Report
Other developed democracies seem to have at least some understanding that being out in public requires a certain amount of decorum. America seems to really struggle with this. Many people across the spectrum seem tolerant of behavior that would be seen as disrespectful at best in other democracies. What type of bad behavior gets tolerated and who you tolerate varies quite a bit by group but there is a certain attraction to disorderly behavior in the United States.Report
I believe that many people mistake cause and effect. The gentler approach some other democracies have on these things is very much contingent on more orderly societies. We see how quickly that can change in places like Sweden when things start to at least appear to get out of control.
Which goes back to the larger point. There’s nothing inherently wrong with having responders other than armed police, provided they actually solve problems, which means eliminating disorder. If they show up and don’t help or place the blame for the situation on the caller? It will be treated as a joke, because it will be one.Report
I don’t think there’s an easily drawn line between those two things. That problem is why we keep having anti-gun laws proposed that couldn’t have stopped the thing they’re supposed to have stopped.
What it comes down to is it’s pretty close to impossible to totally restructure society to eliminate gun deaths. Or lightning strikes. Or drownings.Report
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Hard disagree. That sort of futalism has no place in human affairs. If this were reallyt thes case we could not have put a significaant dent in drunk driving deaths, or car crash deaths or even drug overdose deaths. You may not like all the solutions proposed so far, but throwing up your hands and ceding the field to gun violence is no answer.Report
The solutions I’ve seen so far either involve political moves that won’t survive review or it’s stuff that won’t actually tackle the problem or it’s stuff that comes into conflict with other pet projects of the people calling for ending gun violence.
Everybody loves getting rid of tacticool add-ons like bump stocks but that won’t really touch handgun deaths.
If you want handgun confiscation, you’re going to have to deal with the fact that it’s going to have disparate impact and, get this, you’re going to have to not care.
And, on top of all this, you’re going to have to rely on a police force that, until very recently, a significant portion of the gun control types were screaming to have defunded and, in multiple cases, have demonstrated that they absolutely do not in any way whatsoever want to have to deal with armed people who are willing to shoot bullets.Report
Drunk driving deaths is about 10k a year. The number of gun deaths we care about rounds to zero.
If we’re going to get spun up and demand totally banning alcohol every time anyone dies from a drunk driver, then we have the anti-gun conflict in a nut shell.
If “putting a significant dent” in gun deaths had a reasonable measurement we’d already be done.
This is why I like the lightning strike or water death examples. Society isn’t willing to put the resources into totally eliminating all of them.Report
I’m pulling data from different sources, so these might not be consistent. But I’m seeing 45222 gun deaths in the US in 2020. Of those, 54% were suicides, 43% were murder, and the remainder roughly split 1% each accident, law enforcement-related, and undetermined.
Regarding suicide, about half of all suicides use guns. If we’re focused on youth, there were 172 firearm suicides under age 15, and 2800 aged 15-24. I’m sure that some people are more likely to commit suicide because of gun availability, but with half of them not using guns, and a very small number of youth gun suicides, I don’t know that that’s an area where policy would help.
Likewise, there are very little gains to be made from reducing accidents or law enforcement-related gun deaths.
About 80% of murders in the US are gun-related. That seems like the area that we’d be able to address through policy. Would you be willing to look at social policy, or social issues beyond policy? The latter may include suicides as well.Report
What gives you a belief I wouldn’t look at social policy? Especially since 45,222 gun deaths a year seems to be a big public health issue, especially in urban areas.Report
What if the best changes were the promotion of religion, stop-and-frisk, and the militarization of our borders for drug interdiction?Report
We have data on those things – what does that data tell you?Report
On a preliminary review, that those things are correlated with a decline in gun murder. And that’s the thing, I truly don’t believe that you’re willing to examine your own policies to look for ways to reduce gun murders. You’ve listed a few of your side’s preferred policies below, but you also are treating white-on-black police killings as if they’re statistically significant. That doesn’t indicate an open mind.Report
Wow – a guy says he doesn’t his nephew killed for being a black kid and your response is to keep a more open mind? Wow.
That aside, the statistics for black men being killed by police indicate they are twice or more as likely to be killed then white men. It may be a small proportion of gun deaths overall, but it’s not nothing.
https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/10.2105/AJPH.2018.304559Report
Again, it’s hard for me to keep track of you and Chip, but if the goal here is to apply the same kind of thinking to gun deaths as to auto deaths, we should be thinking about initiatives that would help the highest number of people. Our suicide and black-male-on-black-male homicide problems dwarf anything else.
And I’m not saying that to promote my side. Personally I’ve been a big supporter of gun safety. But statistically, there aren’t that many accidental gun deaths, so I’m not going to push that as a solution. I hate the idea of even a single kid dying from mishandling a weapon or from law enforcement, but if you combine them, they account for a week’s worth of the gun deaths in the US every year.Report
What if we did indeed promote religion and established social norms of welcoming immigrants and treating them with compassion and care?
Suppose we had a national ethos of the Good Samaritan and offered medical care and lodging to all regardless of ability to pay?
Imagine if it we strictly enforced a social etiquette of treating everyone, gay or straight, cis or trans, as they wished to be treated?
If we shunned the carrying of weapons and encouraged an atmosphere of trust and cooperation instead of fear and suspicion?Report
It’s hard to picture any of these things having an effect on total gun deaths, with the exception of the implicit undermining of gender roles increasing the suicide rate. You may consider each of them worth doing, but there’s no reason to think they’d reduce gun deaths.Report
Also, since we’ve used auto safety as an analogy, and we put more effort into seatbelts than meteor-safe roofs, shouldn’t we move “assault weapons” bans and white-on-black police shootings all the way back behind the back burner?Report
Are you willing to close all the background check loopholes? Fully fund all background check systems? Enact and properly fund Red Flag laws? Those would be good starts.
And as for police shootings – black men are shot by police officers is a percentage that is disproportionate to their presence in the population. Until that changes I want it on the fore front – mostly for the parochial reason that I have a teenage black nephew that I want to see grow to manhood.Report
It is wildly inappropriate to use “presence in the population” for this sort of evaluation.
It’s pretending all zip codes (cultures, whatever) all have the same levels of violence and require the same level of police interactions.
Your nephew’s big dangers on growing to manhood map well to his age group’s in his zip-code. If getting shot by the police is a serious concern for his area, then he has so many other problems that it still shouldn’t be a top concern.Report
I’d reply differently than Dark Matter, but addressing the same underlying idea: black men are shot by police officers significantly more than whites in general, but not significantly more than whites during interactions with police. And the totals are insignificant compared to the numbers of black men shot by non-police.Report
If we’re really interested in reducing the numbers…
1) The murder rate for my zip code is zero and has been for years. Ergo doing the gun grabber routine can’t help me on this issue. Worse, if I’m in a situation where I decide my personal crime risk is high enough that I should be armed, gun restriction will be making me less secure, not more.
2) Suicide is a problem, and it’s why I don’t have a gun. However although it helps a family in a culture where the gun is a symbol of death, it’s doubtful it can help a culture long term because something else will become that symbol. Gun free societies can have scary high suicide rates.
IMHO the most cost effective way to deal with this is more widespread treatment of depression. There are magic pills available, they work, they’re also close to free. The medical community are gate keepers of these drugs.
Depression is also one of the mental illnesses that DOESN’T cause people to resist treatment.
3) By the numbers, school shootings are a rounding error. They effectively don’t exist. Trying to leverage them for cultural cramdowns just generates well deserved distrust.Report
Great – how do you propose we do this? Because it will take a significant shirt if funds from somewhere, and probably changes in legal apparatus to ensure compliance. That will – eventually – run square against personal liberty considerations.
If that’s true, then we don’t need school resource officers or putting kids – including my kids – through “routine” active shooter” drills do we?Report
The weird part is idk. I talked to my Uber driver about this and she, having suffered from depression for decades, had no clue these drugs even existed much less that they were decades off patent.
You’ve lost me. What is the reasoning here? The Depressed seek treatment, they don’t resist it.
Yes.Report
In watching this exchange, where basically the vonservative position is “No way to stop this, we just to live with it!” then reflecting on Lee’s observation of the impact of telling people to just resign themselves to social disorder.Report
That’s false though. I’ve been talking about policies, and even Dark Matter seems open.Report
We don’t restructure society and issue vast cultural cramdowns for problems that affect less than a thousand people. The solution would cause more problems than the existing problem. If you believe your solution is less of a problem then go over the current problem and your solutions side effects.
Cheap miracle drugs that cure depression exist and really do work. However they’re clearly not gun control so that might not be acceptable.Report
What policies?
“Religion, stop-and-frisk, and the militarization of our borders for drug interdiction?”
You walked back religion as being ineffective at reducing gun violence, and stop and frisk has been shown to be a complete failure and as far as militarization of the border, I’ll let Dark Matter address why that is madness.Report
No, I didn’t walk back anything. You just simply disregarded my ideas. That’s what proves you’re not serious about this – you’re only considering the things you already wanted.Report
*Chip quotes a bunch of stuff out of the Gospels*
“It’s hard to picture any of these things having an effect on total gun deaths”
Don’t look at me to explain this- you wrote it.Report
You used a bunch of ideas in the Gospels as a grounding for your usual policy recommendations, but never showed a connection between those recommendations and a likely decrease in gun deaths. That’s not me walking back from the idea that religion correlates to a decrease in murder and suicide.
And again here, I don’t want to use a broad brush. I’ve seen studies that try to correlate regional beliefs to regional behaviour, and they seem really tenuous. So I’m not claiming to know that religious practice diminishes gun violence. A quick look online and it seems to be treated as a sociological fact though.
If you wanted to decrease gun deaths, you’d consider different things. You want to support your usual policies without considering different things, so why should I think you care about gun deaths?Report
Who brought up religion in the first place and why?Report
If you page up, you’ll see that I brought it up because I think it’s the kind of thing that (a) could help our society, and (b) wouldn’t be supported by a large portion of the people who claim they want to help society. Am I wrong?Report
I responded as I did because I believe the same things.
I mean the part about immigration alone would provoke a riot from Republicans.Report
Religion is a stand in for “culture”. If [people with cultures that have very high crime rates] had a different culture (which could be measured by their changing religions), then crime would go down.
It’s a true statement on the face of it but it’s also giving [my religion] too much credit and power.Report
As I said, I haven’t dug into this, but I’m guessing the sociological data isn’t solely focused on my religion.Report
I think you’re displaying a common fallacy. Stop-and-frisk policies coincided with a decrease in violent crime, and when they were abandoned (after a lag) violent crime increased. But to your memory, you didn’t like a policy and then it disappeared, so you assume it was proven ineffective.
I’m being really cautious here because I don’t want to do the same thing. That’s why I’m not saying that stop-and-frisk reduced violent crime. Correlation isn’t everything. But I’m doing that because I’m serious about the subject, not trying to score points.Report
To riff off your thought process here, it always brings to mind for me an interesting, though obviously dark, question.
What should/could our murder rate realistically be? If we could get it to 3/100k, which would be more than cutting it in half, but still be around twice France or the UK, would the temperature come down on the subject, or would we still be in a constant state of moral panic and culture war over why ‘we still have twice the homicide rate of other big, rich democracies’? What if we did it without any change in firearm laws?
I don’t know the answer but I think it’s something everyone should ask themselves to help get at what their stance is actually about on this subject.Report
Exclude a few sub-cultures and our murder rate is the equal to the nicer places in Europe.
Trying to get to that by taking guns out of my zip code (zero murders in two decades or so), is nonsense.
In terms of practicality, reducing the murder rate is…. “how do we destroy or reform our extremely violent sub-cultures”.
Largely we refuse to talk about that. IMHO the entire gun control argument is an effort to avoid thinking about this. A way to avoid the issues.
I’m fine if the answer is “we don’t destroy sub-cultures because it’s racist or whatever”. My zip code’s murder rate is zero, it’s not my problem.Report
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmucyqOOKZUReport
“Exclude a few sub-cultures and our murder rate is the equal to the nicer places in Europe.”
It’s hard to back up this stat. The 2020 homicide rates per 100k in the six most populous European countries were:
Italy 0.5
Spain 0.6
Germany 0.9
UK (approx.) 1.2
France 1.3
Russia 4.7
The US rate for non-blacks is about 2.7, and for blacks about 24.8. You might be able to decrease the 2.7 by identifying other sub-cultures, but the data probably isn’t strong enough. If you’re going with urban versus rural populations, you’ve got to figure that the European rates would drop in the same way. Also, when you start excluding urban areas, you’re excluding most of the people.
I guess there are nearly-perfectly-safe neighborhoods in Europe and the US, but overall the average white guy in the US is some 5x more likely to kill someone than the average Western European.Report
Russia 4.7
Is that dying with defenestration or from defenestration?Report
It’s actually an interesting but depressing thing to look at Russia’s death rates by cause. Alcohol poisoning, alcohol-related diseases, and accidents are all very common. And a high number of those accidents are alcohol-related, although I’m sure some accidents are state-approved.Report
To get 5x you need to take Italy (their best non-micro state) as their standard. Their three biggest countries are Germany, UK, and France with rates of 0.9, 1.2, and 1.3.
Averages distort more than is useful on this subject. Blacks rate of 25 really means 5-10% of them have a rate that’s 20x-10x that.
Given just how stark the math is, my expectation is we also have violent white sub-cultures that have crazy high levels. They’re just smaller as a percentage of population. The Sopranos and Hell’s Angels don’t represent “average” White any more than a Chicago gang is “average” Black, but the math’s effects will be similar.
I can’t find a link but if memory serves, two thirds(?) of all zip codes have no murders.Report
The problem is we don’t have murder data by subculture. Maybe it can be teased out by zip code, but I’ve never looked at the data like that.Report
It’s a tough question. There’s never been a country this big that’s managed to avoid oppression, and I think part of that is that we’re ungovernable. It’s like big, free, and non-violent: pick two. That’s a simplistic way of putting it, but I hope you know what I mean.Report
I get what you’re saying. And I really fall somewhere between you and Dark on this particular line of discussion. On the one hand I think you’re right, that American society is objectively more murderous than Western European and rich democratic Asian societies in a way that can’t be completely explained away by a ‘but for’ reference to particular subcultures.
At the same time I think Dark brings up a valuable point on maintaining perspective within the statistics. Per your response to him, you’re right that the average white American is still about 5x more likely to murder than, say, your average Frenchman. But we’re also talking about gross numbers of murders that are so small that characterizing it that way can itself pretty misleading about the (actually quite good) reality of the rarity of murder in America outside of a handful of outlier jurisdictions (which are notably bad by Western standards but not necessarily by global or hemispheric standards), especially when you compare it to global stats.Report
But you can play this game any way you want.
“If you take out the black murderers, black culture is no more violent than any other.”
The disconnected logic here is the assertion that murders by black or urban or poor people is the natural and predictable outcome of black or urban or poor culture.
But murders by black or urban or poor Americans is not the natural and predictable outcome of American culture.
The attempt being made here is to use the the “society made me do it!” logic, but conveniently wall off only a part of society as the alien Outgroup.
Like, a black young man in Chicago belongs to the sets of “youth”, “male”, “black”, and “Chicago”, but is completely outside the set of “Americans”.
His criminality is the product of youth, blackness, maleness, and Chicago-ness, but absolutely not in any way the product of his American-ness.Report
The problem with doing that is that it might lead you to say that this group is less American than that group.Report
I hope that wasn’t directed at my comments. As I’ve said, American culture runs more violent than “average” European. Black American culture runs more violent than that. I generally subscribe to the argument made by Thomas Sowell in “Black Rednecks and White Liberals”, which depicts contemporary black American culture as very much a product of American culture.Report
No actually it was pushing back on Darks logic of “But for this subculture…”Report
Please actually read what I wrote. My second sentence expressly said I agree that American society is objectively more murderous than some (but certainly not all) other societies.
But it isn’t a game to look at the context of that, at least if we’re actually interested in figuring out what’s happening and why. The idea that America is uniquely awash in blood and violence is also objectively false and it’s highly misleading to approach this subject as if it isn’t, or as if a very significant degree of the violence isn’t highly localized in certain places and among certain populations.Report
It’s the “certain populations” that is misleading because it draws the boundary enclosing those populations arbitrarily in a way that makes it convenient rather than helpful.
As if murder is just somehow a mysterious but inevitable consequence of belonging to that “certain population”.
The assertion can’t explain a causal variable, other than correlation. And it can’t point towards a solution.
Even when you narrow the set down to “fatherless young men” the conclusion is left dangling- what is the causal variable and what can we do about it?
Which brings me back to my point.
No matter what the solution is, it involves collective action.Report
I can see why you’d be concerned that kind of thinking. But you can’t think that InMD is encouraging it.
As for your last sentence, it seems like a non sequitur to me.Report
I’m… confused. You say you’re looking for a causal variable but also seem to be saying you don’t want to do the kinds of comparative analysis necessary to identify them.Report
No I’m looking for a causal variable, because all these statistical analyses never seem to offer one.
The most common statistical analysis goes like this:
“Gosh, the murder rate for Irishmen is sky high compared to normal people. Its completely fair to assume that Irishmen are prone to murder.”
What’s missing is the A, a causal variable and B, an actionable conclusion.
A. What is it about Irish-ness that causes them to become murderous? If you can’t answer that, then maybe the Irishness isn’t the issue.
B. How can the causal variable in Irishmen be curbed? The conclusion has to be actionable- Its doesn’t help to say “Make them become less Irish!”
Notice how B implies collective action. This is because only rarely does A, the causal variable, go away or cure itself without some outside intervention.
All of which brings me back to the “murders are primarily among a small subculture”.
It is true, but only trivially true. It’s about as helpful as saying, “Most murderers belong to a culture which encourages murder.”Report
“Collective” Solutions?
I can’t lower the average by making myself less murderous because I’m already at zero.
I, and businesses in general and the middle class in general, are already punishing this sort of behavior by refusing to engage with it. Businesses won’t locate where their employees might get killed. I won’t live or let my kids go to school where their safety is an issue.
Now we run into the problem that terrorism causes poverty. No economic development means things are going to suck there.
However fundamentally this is a cultural choice and I can’t make it for them. It comes with tradeoffs that create problems but that’s true for everything.
I think it’s more than a little nuts that the rest of society enables this and even encourages it but that’s a different problem. They’re going to be as violent as they want to be for as long as they want it.
If we’re going to talk about society not encouraging this…
1) End the war on drugs. It’s price supports for illegal/bad behavior.
2) Get rid of the poverty trap. That probably means reducing benefits and/or tax reform.
3) Get rid of the marriage penalties. That probably means reducing benefits.
A ton of this is going to be counter intuitive. Getting rid of income evaluations for qualifications for various programs so they’re not targeting the poor.Report
These are all good, and collective solutions.
I would add, that we develop a culture which encourages adherence to norms of etiquette and behavior, as a way of diverting young people drifting into the cultures you speak of.
And by this I mean youth groups like Scouts, church groups, sports and music programs.
These things absolutely do work, and they do scale.
And here is where someone might jump in with a sneering reference to the church abuse scandals or Scout abuse scandals or sports abuse scandals, to which I reply, “Yes which is exactly why reducing murders begins with developing a culture that nurtures and protects children instead of abusing them”.Report
Agreed, and agreed… however we have a problem.
Let’s talk about my caste: Functional middle class people who are interested in their children having educational opportunities.
People from my caste are the backbone of the leadership and organization of these organizations. So every little league team had the coach and the coach’s kid. That was true in Volleyball, and in First Robotics. Our First Robotic’s team had an non-engineering “marketing” wing because the lead’s daughter didn’t want to be an engineer.
People from my caste are also going to flee violent areas. That’s really, really nasty because it’s getting rid of the economic dollars, jobs, and leadership/organizational caste.
The result is well off areas are filled with educational enrichment opportunities while poorer areas are not.Report
So wouldn’t it make sense for people of your caste to pitch in and collectively help those others?Report
Why coach their team when I can coach hers? And when the coach’s kid ages out, typically we need a new coach.
Then we have transit times. My kid’s school is a ten minute walk. If I start volunteering somewhere, driving 45 minutes to a needy school is way more time/gas consuming.
On some abstract level you’re right, but the motivation for most people is helping MY CHILD. They’re not hostile to other children, someone needs to fill out the other 8 spots on the baseball team or the ranks of the other teams, but the core desire is selfish.Report
If I could argue for Chip, there isn’t one causal variable, and an attempt to find one could easily turn into us/them thinking. Never mind “could”. Dark Matter says “My zip code’s murder rate is zero, it’s not my problem.” And I don’t think Chip is looking for a causal variable; he’s warning that correlation isn’t causation. We can do a lot of things to steer the ten-year-old kid away from a bad path precisely because it’s not predetermined. We can look out for lots of things, make lots of improvements, because that kid is in the same culture as we are and none of us are automatons.
ETA: I see that Chip replied while I was writing, so I could delete this, and I see that he went in a different direction than I did…but I’m curious if he thinks he’d sign off on what I just wrote, so I’m leaving it up.Report
Yep, we are in agreement here.Report
Mark this day. Chip, Pinky, and I agree.Report
Just replying to all points here, I would start out by saying I don’t endorse the not my zip code not my problem way of thinking. However I also don’t agree with the idea that we help anything by disregarding facts and comparative analysis just because they may be fodder for people we disagree with or, who may have, reductive, crank kind of perspectives.
There’s also the question of how we are supposed to know what kind of collective action might make sense if we have pre-emptively determined that any sort of talk of identifiable trends and particulars that consistently show up are off the table, to say nothing of matters of personal agency. Like are we really going to sit here and pretend the issues upon which we must collectively act are the same in a jurisdiction with 1 murder a year as those in one 100 miles away that have 300? Is it really too dangerous to acknowledge that maybe some different things are going on in some very different places? I don’t think so.
So sure, recognize the circular nature of a certain type of murder arises from culture and culture causes murder kind of thinking. But we can walk and chew bubble gum here.Report
If the plan to fix this assumes “average” means “spread evenly across all zip codes”, then it’s doomed to fail because that’s not the underlying reality.
This fact is deeply uncomfortable and often ignored. Ergo we end up with proposed laws that entirely affect my zip code (because we’re law abiding) and which have no affect on the zips that have problems (because they’re not).
As bad as that is, we also have resource allocation problems. A rich suburb would like to focus it’s resources on it’s own issues/children and the voters will insist on it. The cheapest thing to do for the struggling urban area next door will be nothing. Dealing with those issues is very time/effort/resource intensive.
There are arguments that the rich suburb should be taxed to help the urban area. There are arguments that this would be enabling them, i.e. rewarding what should be punished.
“Us v Them” is one of the core natures of the problem.Report
This really depends on the state. Plenty of wealthy suburbs do in fact subsidize development, schools, and other public services in poorer jurisdictions within the state. The debate of course is whether it’s effective, whether it’s enough, etc. Answers depend on who you ask.Report
I haven’t been talking about laws that affect everyone equally. I haven’t even been necessarily talking about laws. I’m definitely not pushing a gun-control or tax-hike line. The point of my first comment was that if we really are taking gun murder seriously, we should be willing to consider things outside our longstanding agendas.
If your position is that there are no murders near you so you can’t do much, that I can accept. Or that you’re in a position to do more good for the world elsewhere. But “my zip code’s murder rate is zero, it’s not my problem” isn’t a good statement. Maybe the sentiment behind it is common, but it’s not good.Report
The problem is it is “Predictable”.
The five worse zip codes in Chicago for murder this year will very likely do real bad next year. Chicago as a whole will likely do real bad next year and the following.
The reverse is also true; I live in a majority minority zip and my kid goes to a majority minority school. The way to bet is our zip’s murder rate will continue to maintain it’s normal “zero” murders.
If a local school gets shot up and the murder rate for that year massively increased for that zip, then the next year the rate will go down to normal.Report
This is an example of what I mean, where the correlation is just left dangling, as if the causal variable and conclusion are just so obvious they don’t need to be stated.
Which I guess it is.
There is something about Chicago, maybe the air coming off the lake or something, but we obviously must relocate everyone in the city to somewhere else.Report
The same group of people is predictably murderous every year. It’s so measurable we could link it to a handful of zip codes.
That’s our starting fact. That we don’t know all the details doesn’t change that the same group of people are predictably murderous every year.
If we try to describe which group of people, then we’re going to end up describing something that in other conversations would be called a culture.
Cultural habits are going to be things like unwed pregnancy, distrust of the police/law, acceptance of violence, and so on. Probably a ton of anti-female, anti-education, and anti-economic-prosperity attitudes will be in there too.
Our expectation should be that if we magically relocate everyone in that zip to somewhere outside of Chicago, the problem will follow them. Sort of like how if an immigrant’s previous community had problems with honor killings, then it might continue.Report
unwed pregnancy, distrust of the police/law, acceptance of violence, and so on. Probably a ton of anti-female, anti-education, and anti-economic-prosperity attitudes will be in there too.
Oh! I didn’t realize you were talking about rednecks.
What’s happening is by pointing the finger at “culture” you’re trying to frame the problem as unsolvable.
Bad culture is to blame, and we can’t change culture, so therefore there is no solution other then exclusion and containment.
But of course, you are living in the midst of a decades-long empirical demonstration that culture can and does change, and is susceptible to aggressive advocacy efforts.Report
“Oh! I didn’t realize you were talking about rednecks.”
You should have known that. I bring it up every time we get into one of these discussions. The cultural traits ascribed to the US urban black culture were ascribed to the US Southern redneck culture, which the urban blacks brought with them. Those traits were ascribed to the Northern English / Scottish culture, which the US Southern rednecks brought with them. Gambling, skirt-chasing, emotion-based religious worship, clan pride, ostentatious spending, lower priority on education, even grammatical structures: you can follow them across the map with migration patterns. The uptight Southern English became the uptight Northeastern American.Report
No, I’m trying to define the problem. If we’re unwilling to point a finger at culture then the next most predictive variable is race, which means it’s racist to try or do anything. So then we’re stuck with policies that pretend my zip code has a problem as bad as the worst Chicago zip. And since the solution isn’t directed at the problem, it fails.
If we were allowed to examine dysfunctional cultures, call them dysfunctional, and examine their impact, then we could narrowly tailor policies to address them. [Culture X’s] [unwillingness to contact the police] is identified as the largest problem so we push hard on that. Everything from getting [Culture X’s] celebs to talk about it to passing policies which encourage it.
If it’s racist to even talk about this, much less study it, then we’re all stuck pretending that dysfunctional cultural habits have nothing to do with the problems they create. At that point the only alternative available is exclusion and containment at an individual level. Various people will wave fingers and squeak about how racism is the only possible reason to pretend that zip codes matter and my entire caste will think they’re insane and ignore them.
Which means by ignoring this we’re concentrating poverty.
And btw I fully expect these cultural bad habits are just as poisonous when they’re done by whites, so identifying which cultures are having problems and which values are fueling it would help all races.Report
Do you cower in fear that you might be unfairly called a racist? Do you think I do? At this point, a good percentage of the population (including elected officials) are so used to it that it doesn’t even slow us down. With that out of the way, we can be mature adults. How do you think we can instill good cultural habits?Report
You and I get to hide behind anonymous handles. If we were academic researchers, just suggesting a sub-culture might be more murderous and has bad values would be a career ending move.
RE: How to instill good cultural habits
1) End the war on drugs. It’s price supports for illegal/bad behavior.
2) Get rid of the poverty trap. That probably means reducing benefits and/or tax reform.
3) Get rid of the marriage penalties. That probably means reducing benefits.
4) Try to reduce unwed parenthood, teenage parenthood, and parenthood where the parents don’t have the resources to raise children. Free access to abortion. Linking benefits to marriage status.
This is counter intuitive because a lot of what we’ve tried is to increase the amount of resources given to those who “need” it, which has enabled bad behavior.
5) Strongly encourage research into all this and try to tease out what cultural habits are “good” and run experiments on how to encourage them.
This isn’t my field, humans and cultures are complex, and it’s all too easy to make assumptions about behavior that aren’t correct.Report
For one thing, no one can watch you vote. But you can also have conversations in the real world. There are the charities we choose to support and the work we can do by hand (actual hands). We can also be truthful in our professional lives, whatever particular true statement we find being ignored. And as silly as these online conversations can be, I think they can do some good.
The thing about your list – some of which I agree with, some of which I disagree with – is that it’s almost all governmental. Government can change culture, but it’s not the only thing that can. I’m more interested in the question, what can a person do to support change in a culture?Report
What can a person do to support change in someone else’s culture? If you don’t live there, not much. When he did live in Chicago my brother tried mentoring. Shunning is more my style.
Now as Chip has pointed out, we’re probably becoming less violent. Slowly. Gradually. Over the generations. We also have some techniques that work at an individual level (helping one kid).
I like pointing to gov action because it’s big enough to push on culture. Short of that we’re pretty much in hope and pray territory.Report
When it comes to culture I think what we’re dealing with is an often unstated contradiction. I mentioned on the thread about the Hasidic schools that there probably are some very heavy-handed, coercive assimilation measures we could take with a small religious minority if we really wanted to. The same is true here and the obvious way to do it is via the state but with sufficient unity of purpose it could also be done via cultural hegemony as well.
Of course the morality of those kinds of measures have themselves come into question over recent decades, and not totally without good reason. So we have the natural human desire to do something but with the vast majority of those somethings deemed out of the question or too problematic to consider. The political and/or sociological result is a perpetual problem that cannot ethically be solved.Report
There’s a lot of room for stuff to backfire on us. Clinton’s expansion on the War on Drugs was motivated in part as an attempt to “help”. Then we also have various efforts to force the Native Americans to change cultures.
And targeting a culture isn’t all that different from targeting a people.Report
The way to avoid this is to talk about this “culture” you refer to.
Except, talk about it seriously and in depth.
Because right now, there is some generalized vague handwaving at a “culture” that appears indistinguishable from a “people”.
Like, what exactly, is this “culture” you speak of?
How would you define what is or isn’t a part of it?
How do you ascribe a specific crime to a culture, versus just an individual?
Like if a guy embezzles money from his company, is this an example of “culture” or just a guy acting badly? A teenage kid vandalizes a car just for kicks- is he the product of a “culture” or is he just being a jerk?Report
Whichever suits your purpose at the time?Report
Specific crimes are always an individual thing.
Where it becomes a cultural problem is when we have predictability, especially predictability that seems linked to cultural values.
It’s not “a people” unless you can evidence to multiple countries/cultures. For example in every country/culture in the world men are more violent than women and young men are more violent than old. The black middle class in Chicago who live in rich neighborhoods don’t run around shooting their romantic rivals because of respect.
If you have a kid who thinks getting good grades is acting white and that it’s appropriate to kill your romantic rivals, then that’s a cultural problem even if he doesn’t actually engage in violence. Odds are extremely good he lives in a zip code where those beliefs are common and the murder rate reflects that.
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Acting%20WhiteReport
“Odds are extremely good he lives in a zip code where those beliefs are common and the murder rate reflects that.”
Yes, and…?
You need to get serious about this, and do a lot more thinking.
Because a “culture of failure” does exist and has been documented.
Generally speaking it is where you have a small group of neighbors and kin groups who see themselves as isolated and outside the larger social group and not beholden to their rules.
So rulebreaking becomes acceptable, just so long as it is directed outside the group because they have strict rules for how to treat people inside the group.
The group is marked by a preference for Darwinian power struggle as opposed to egalitarianism, and so cruelty and humiliation are considered fair play.
But hey, we’ve just discovered Ingroup/ Outgroup, cliques and classes.
Everything that is said about Chicago gangs can be found among rural white people, or snobby elites, or the “frat-bro” culture of Wall Street.
This isn’t to deny the problem by making it diffuse.
Its to point out that the scolding and public service admonishments we aim at lower income people apply to ourselves as well.
Yes, WE should behave better, and WE should treat each other with kindness instead of cruelty, and WE should respect the rules even when they are difficult.Report
That last paragraph is true, but it doesn’t necessarily pertain to the topic. You’re not denying the problem by making it diffuse, but three’s a limited impact that your improved kindness can have on an isolated Chicago gang. And while the people in my zip code should be better people, they’re not killing each other at high rates. (Well, my zip code yes, but most of ours, no.)Report
The whole issue of “what if we looked at murder like infectious disease?” is always really interesting.Report
But Dark isn’t talking about the trigger pullers.
He’s talking about the broader culture that nurtures them, sustains them and gives approval to their efforts. He specifically referenced the kid who “thinks” incorrect values, even if he isn’t actually a criminal.
Consider the “gangsta rap” culture. Its marked by consumerism, competition, aggression and hyper masculine cliches.
Aren’t these all just slightly exaggerated traits of what cultural conservatives normally extoll?
Or consider the famous “Tiger moms” of Asian culture, or the stereotype of studiousness and competitiveness of Jewish culture.
Don’t these things, when taken to excess, produce dark outcomes of corner-cutting, cheating, and ultimately lawbreaking?
Of course they do. The thing about culture is that any sort of norms of behavior can easily slide from being beneficial to being toxic.Report
I don’t think you and he have the same idea of “culture”. At least, I’m not sure you do, so you probably shouldn’t assume you are.
And I know that you and I don’t have the same idea of cultural conservatism. The things you just listed are redneck traits, but that’s not the same thing.
But even so. Even if we say that every culture’s traits can be exaggerated to become destructive. That notion gets us no closer to a solution to gun deaths.Report
Yes.
Broadening the conversation to include cultures that aren’t predictably murderous probably doesn’t go anywhere useful.
Yes, you might dislike those cultures and consider them problematic. However since they’re not predictably murderous, they’re not relevant to a conversation on how to reduce murder rates.Report
Why? What are you suggesting here? That culture has nothing to do with murder rates? Is it racist to even suggest that?
I live in a zip code whose predicted murder rate is zero.
If we want to reduce the murder rate, then me being nicer to my neighbors can’t help. The group that needs to change their behavior lives in a different zip and has a different culture.Report
Let me take a shot at the underlying trait expressed here. It’s strong preference for immediate gratification over delayed gratification. This could come from a mental lack, or a lack of discipline growing up, or an irrational or rational distrust of the nature of things to reward effort. That last point deserves note. If academic success has no benefit, and you’re going to get shot before you turn 24 no matter what choices you make, it’s really hard to make the argument for delayed gratification.Report
Two very interesting and sensible comments.Report
The first problem is half of illegal immigrants get here legally and overstay their visa.
The second problem is immigration is a net positive for the US and the really painful parts exist just because we’ve made it illegal. Criminalizing what would be normal immigration and/or guest workers just creates criminals and prevents us from focusing on actual criminals.
Society needs to pass laws that aren’t ignored by too many people. This is the same issue that makes me think going full anti-gun would cause the same sorts of issues with people ignoring the law.
The 3rd problem is everything else associated with prohibition. That includes corruption of law enforcement and teaching large numbers of people they can’t use the law.Report
You may notice I didn’t say anything about immigration. I said “the militarization of our borders for drug interdiction”. This is another example of why I don’t think people are serious about gun deaths. They’re just looking to classify policies into “mine” and “not mine”.Report
On the subject of treating the mentally ill: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/04/opinion/us-mental-health-community-centers.html
Interestingly they don’t mention the depressed. Probably because we have decent treatments now and the depressed are willing to take them. Linking this to suicide, over 50 percent of all people who die by suicide suffer from major depression (google).
My impression is most of those are untreated. I think Depression meds are something like ten bucks a year.Report
Lighten up, Robert.Report
The big question I have is whether Jaybird posted this because he thinks it is good or whether he is trolling to own the libs again. Well the answer is probably not that surprising.Report
If your response to this is not “I think X about this” but “What does Jaybird think about this”, then you are flattering me to a degree that you probably shouldn’t want to.Report
“Jaybird is just doing this to TRIGGER the LIBS,” the lib said, triggered.Report
Does Jaybird live rent free in your head 24/7?Report
I get that this is more a symptom of activists’ tendency to use histrionic language than an actual substantive inconsistency, but I’m still rolling my eyes at the idea of an assault serious enough to warrant describing the victim as a “survivor” not meriting a call to the police.Report
One of the bullet points above got me to thinking about naloxone and the Peltzman effect. The Peltzman effect is where measures put in place to make riskier activities safer cause people to engage in those activities more often, partially offsetting the reduction in risk. If access to naloxone makes opioids appear safer, then more people might start using them, at least partially offsetting the reduction in mortality, in addition to worsening other problems associated with opioid abuse.
Surprisingly (meaning that I’m surprised that the study got conducted and published in the current zeitgeist, not that I’m particularly surprised by the results), at least one such study (PDF) has been done, finding that increasing access to naloxone had no net effect on opioid mortality, and increased opioid-related theft and emergency room visits. The methodology exploited the fact that different states expanded naloxone access at different times, so it’s not just a matter of the opioid epidemic worsening at the same time that naloxone access was expanded.Report
“Hello. 331? Yes. Hi. This is awkward, but… Someone experiencing homelessness outside my store just came in and took a dump in front of the milk cartons. Now I”m experiencing homelessness. Can you send a street outreach team ASAP. Also, so they do you have an Aisle Outreach team, or maybe just industrial strength cleaning solution they can bring?”Report
Due to unexpectedly high call volumes, your wait time for a conflicts remediation and community advocacy counselor is… sixty.. hours and.. seven-teen…minutes.Report
To be fair, for all the happy implied talk that the MEND program will do “conflict remediation” in mental health or homeless issues, their website strongly implies it’s more designed to deal with businesses behaving badly. Noise complaints. Parking. Garbage.
But you have a business, then going into mediation with another business rather than having the cops enforce things pointwise might be the way to go.
So the good news is this doesn’t seem to have anything to do with homelessness or mental health issues. That’s also the bad news.Report
When was the last time you called 911?
Would you be surprised to learn that the LAPD will frequently ignore 911 calls which they deem insufficiently serious?
Calls like public disorder, minor fighting, vandalism and theft are often either ignored, or the police show up hours later.
They aren’t being lazy. They just prioritize their resources and address serious things like gunfire or injury calls over “Some guy took a dump in my store” or “A woman in the alley is screaming at invisible demons”.Report
Yes, I have personally had experience with that sort of thing.Report
I follow a scanner Twitter account here in Chicago. It’s amazing what people call 911 for.
Really, it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world to have beat cops be a thing again.Report
One of the unanticipated benefits of the mental health care co-responders along the Front Range has been the ability of the pros to connect many repeat 911 callers with dial-up support groups suited to their particular problems.Report
That’s great. It didn’t take long for that kind of infrastructure to get going, did it? Hopefully, this can become a model for other cities to follow.Report
Six-seven years to get where we are now? And it’s certainly not perfect. I’m not sure how well the model translates into areas that aren’t pretty wealthy, booming population growth, with fairly tough education standards for the cops.
All of the cities require two years of college. At least one requires an undergraduate degree. Most won’t count work experience or military service towards the education requirement.
I think one of the hidden factors is the difference between metro area structure in the West versus older areas in the East. I’m used to big suburbs: most of Denver’s individual suburbs are more than 100,000 people. I’m always surprised reading about areas like St. Louis, and Ferguson, where there are dozens of little suburbs, all of which necessarily have a top-heavy personnel system. (Eg, eight 15,000-people suburbs with eight police chiefs, where a suburb with a population of 120,000 has just one.)Report
To be slightly fair, I think this is because people do not realize that precincts have local numbers that you can call. To be unfair, a lot of people are BBQ Beckys.Report
The whole reason people call the cops is because that way everyone can pretend it’s Just The Cops doing it, and not This Specific Guy Starting A Personal Beef.
Which, yeah, we all know that the cops didn’t just happen to show up, we all know they got called; but that “pretend that it’s not a personal thing” is kind of the essence of urban living, the thing that lets there actually be a dense-residence city versus a collection of walled compounds each with its own set of privately-hired armed guards.Report
The system is supposed to separate the “personal beef against this person so let’s make stuff up” and “anyone would object to this, that’s why it’s illegal”.Report
Sort of tying a few of the comments together here:
Dark raises a very good point that most violence is committed by a small number of people.
If you just look at statistics, you might think that my zip code (90015) is very violent.
But its really just a series of assaults between people who know each other and have history. Eliminate them from the statistics, and my neighborhood is as peaceful as any other.
But…you can’t. “The subways are very pleasant places, if you ignore the boomboxes and grafitti and people crapping on the seats!” doesn’t really work.
A murder on my block, even if I know it is between two people who are strangers to me destabilizes the neighborhood. A person spraying graffiti signals that the world is lawless.
So we are back to “How do we reform/ ameliorate/ change these small minorities of violent people?
That question has been studied for millenia, but one consensus that just about everyone comes to is that the path from a casual slight and rudeness to first degree murder is smooth and imperceptible. There isn’t a bright shining line between the two poles.
Jumping a turnstyle, speaking an ethnic slur, misgendering a trans person….these are small but important parts of the breakdown of civil order that lead inexorably to murder and mayhem.
Yes, I included the last two because what we call “wokeness” or “political correctness” is really just a new variation on the ancient system of etiquette which has always been defined as “Making others feel comfortable in my presence”.
Upthread I asked, “What if we really did become a religious society and embraced the norms established by most of the major faith traditions? (Which are essentially just being kind and thoughtful towards each other).
This would obviously cure the small group of very violent people by producing fewer of them. But…how many people here really want to live there, and accept the restrictions it places upon our actions?
Most of the time when people talk about law and order, they really are talking about a world where OTHER people are confined and restricted, while the speaker is free to be rude, selfish, and cruel towards others.Report
Not the world, just your neighborhood. The gangs of Chicago understand other neighborhoods operate by different rules and those rules are stacked against them. Other people summon and cooperate with the police and so on.
IMHO any effort to broaden the focus to everyone is ignoring the problem. Everyone doesn’t need their murder rate reduced. Everyone being more polite won’t help. My zip totally disarming won’t help Chicago.
How many people do you personally know? Hundreds? Let’s say 100 really well, 1k well, and in passing 10k.
Back of the envelope time. Assume 5% of Chicago commits all it’s murders, so that sub-culture has a murder rate of something like 500 per 100k.
So if you’re from that sub-culture, you know of 50 people who die via murder every year. You will personally know 5. You’ll lose someone you personally know really well every other year. So by age 20 that’s 10 people you personally knew well, 100 people you knew, and 1000 you knew of.
There’s no need to try to draw a line from someone hearing a rudeness to murder when the people killing each other are swimming in murder. They learn murder is how you deal with some things.
I’m fine with stopping turnstyle jumping as a way to showcase that the law has some meaning, that’s a good thing. It probably helps at the margin and will make life better for the masses.
But it’s not a break down in society’s rules that’s driving these numbers. Society’s rules there are a real man kill’s his lover’s boyfriend if she’s cheating on you.
This implies we need a LOT more policing on the effected groups, thus programs like stop and frisk. And that instantly takes us into racism territory and the police functioning as an invading army forcing rules/behavior on people they don’t want.
Not sure what other tools we’ve got. Since marriage+children is pretty much the best way to get violent young men to be less violent, we do something there. Link benefits to marriage status, something like that. And yes, that’s asking lots of young women to put up with relationships that I’d prevent my daughters from being in.Report
There’s a great thread here written by David Simon (the guy behind The Wire).
The gist is: WE NEED POLICE AND POLICING. We just need them CAPTURING VIOLENT CRIMINALS INSTEAD OF POT DEALERS.
I agree with this. There *IS* a need for prison. We do need to sequester a small handful of persons away from the rest of the population and some of them need to be sequestered away from them indefinitely.
BUT THEY AREN’T (necessarily) THE ONES INVOLVED WITH DRUGS AND THOSE ARE THE ONLY ONES THE COPS CARE ABOUT WHAT THE HELLReport
That was a good thread.Report
He’s a great Twitter follow. He’s seen what the WoD has done to his city and he’s definitely not a fan.Report
Very good threat. Lots of good points in there.Report
Sometimes I think Simon is given a pass on his views on this subject I don’t think he quite deserves, but when he’s right, he’s right. He’s definitely not operating out of an ivy tower which goes a long way towards grounding his perspective in reality.Report
You’re trying to reduce murders by attacking murderers which is a mistake.
That isn’t meant to be a zen paradox but to illustrate that by the time a murder happens, it is at the tail end of a long trail of carnage and chaos and social disorder.
Like, in 2037 there is going to be a murder. It will be committed by someone who is today just a troubled 10 year old boy who bullies a classmate.
The way to prevent that murder is to intervene and move that little boy his path.
But to do that, he needs to be surrounded by adults who are loving and selfless and thoughtful of other people.
This isn’t a new or novel idea. It’s ancient and well known concept that a virtuous and peaceful society demands virtuous and peaceful behavior of all of its citizens.
Murders are just the mushrooms that pop up from a rotting soil.Report
You aren’t wrong. But murderers should also be caught and put in prison.
It’s a strange type of reform that suggests apprehending them should be something other than a top priority. Failing at it isn’t doing that 10 year old boy any favors either.Report
There shouldn’t be any tension between preventing fires and extinguishing them.Report
By that statement you’re indicating that gun control is too late too.Report
We just need better role models.
But not in the way that conservatives have been whining about.Report
Pretty sure Chicago already has lots of gun control.Report
Not really. The Supreme Court put paid to that.Report
You seem to be claiming that all cultures equally oppose violence. I don’t think that correct. Think of the old South, was everyone who kept slaves abused as a child?
The little boy in your example is surrounded by adults who teach him that violence is the way things are resolved. Prison is somewhere between a risk and a rite of passage. The police are just a rival gang and should never be contacted.
It’s fine to suggest a Hawaii style intervention (what I think you’re suggesting), but we can’t tell the difference between that future murderer and the entire generation of his cohorts who are all also at risk. Hawaii made that work for dozens, Chicago has dozens of thousands. Doing an intervention for all of them is impossible, we don’t have the resources.
Culture means so many people that society doesn’t have the resources to stop it.Report
Yes, every family who kept slaves was teaching their children to be awful, sociopathic people.
And its weird to say that we can’t intervene to reduce crime, when we have seen crime steadily decline for several decades now.
So obviously we ARE doing something that is working. The thing is, “intervention” is a myth because it assumes its opposite, an “untouched” state of nature. Everything that happens is some sort of an intervention, in that everything that happens produces a result, intended or otherwise.
Offshoring was an intervention. Eliminating leaded gasoline was an intervention. The internet was an intervention. Cutting taxes or not cutting them is an intervention.
Society is like a giant version of the butterfly effect where literally every act touches and influences something else for better or worse.Report
I’m uncomfortable labeling the current situation as a success.
Big picture, it all depends on what time frame you want to see a solution and what the goal posts are.
If you are good with it taking generations for our extremely violent sub-culture to calm down, then we’re fine.
If you want to uplift the current generation, or even just the children, then we don’t know what to do. There are things we can do for one specific child but won’t work at the scale needed.Report
We already have data from a decades long experiment testing whether locking people up without also trying to change them is a good method. I think most people would agree the hypothesis has not been proven.Report
Here is another component of crime fighting and carceral reform:
Voters support Newsom’s mental health plan and back mandatory kindergarten, poll shows
California voters strongly support Gov. Gavin Newsom’s plan to set up a new court system for people struggling with a combination of severe mental illness, homelessness and substance use, but split with the governor on requiring children to attend kindergarten, a new poll shows.
Newsom introduced his sweeping Community Assistance, Recovery and Empowerment (CARE) Court proposal earlier this year amid increasing concern over the number of people living in crisis on California’s streets. Legislation to codify CARE Court, Senate Bill 1338, easily passed the Legislature with bipartisan support, and Newsom signed the measure into law last month.
Civil and disability rights groups spent the majority of the legislative session in fervent opposition to CARE Court over concerns the new law could criminalize homelessness and lead to mentally ill people being coerced into treatment.
Despite those fears, voters expressed overwhelming support for the new law, according to a new UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies poll co-sponsored by the Los Angeles Times. The poll asked voters if they supported the plan that would “provide court-ordered treatment for Californians struggling with severe mental illness including those who are homeless” and noted that “the CARE Court would have the authority to order mental health treatment for people with severe mental illnesses even if they did not seek it.”
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-10-06/voters-strongly-support-newsoms-mental-health-planReport