This is a great point, and one that really isn't played up because it doesn't fit the whole profit-from-attention narrative that literally every media surface seems to be following.
It almost seems as if law enforcement 'need' these additional tools to keep them busy; find new, more trivial crime that's been hiding behind no one reporting it or being hurt by it.
Maybe if law enforcement resources could be applied to more corporate crime, that'd keep em busy till the cows come home.
I have this conversation with neighbors almost weekly, and I’ve had a bunch of them just say that I’m wrong with no real evidence or, and this is verbatim, “it doesn’t feel safer.”
This conversation is usually about how no one lets their kids play outside unsupervised anymore, but it applies to police as well. In Georgia they had to pass a law telling police they couldn’t arrest parents who let their kids go outside by themselves. The inciting incident literally had a police officer lecturing a mother about how many sickos are out there and then putting her in cuffs because her 10-year-old was a mile away by himself. Even since then, DFCS has been caught bullying parents into signing an agreement saying they were negligent and agreeing to a restrictive safety plan because they let their kid go to a nearby playground by themself.
It is insane and depressing about how people willingly restrict their lives and their kids lives because of the mistaken belief that the world isn’t as safe as it was when they were a kid. Not only that, but if you let your kids play outside without you, then you risk your neighbors calling the police on you and having to deal with whatever bs comes from that.
I have feeling that how safe you feel is correlates strongly to your media diet, and weakly to your surroundings. I'd be curious to see what studies have been done.
A friend of mine had the cops called on her by a neighbor because her kids were playing in the front yard and she wasn't out there with them.
I don't know what world people here live in, but I am not expecting kids in a front yard in the middle of the day in a quiet neighborhood on a dead end road to be snatched up.
Could it happen? Sure. Should we force our kids to live under fear that it will happen as soon as a parent isn't watching them? Absolutely not.
I heard about this story somewhere and couldn’t really believe it. I also thought that the US/German comparison videos about the fact we Germans let our kids go to school alone etc are a bit over the top.
Seems no.
But to be fair. Also in Germany things around security have changed. Where it was normal in my youth that my parents had actually no clue where I was while I was roaming the streets of Berlin (Courtesy to a Berlin wide public transport ticket I got for school). Today that doesn’t fly anymore. Kids have phones and get tracked every step. It’s the more controlled level of freedom.
Another connected anecdote that left me puzzled at the time: I spend some days in D.C last year (right before the National Guard got deployed) and wanted to do a short run from the Hotel. It was already going dark and I didn’t check for the weather and asked at the desk if it was ok outside to run. The answer was “yes it’s pretty safe around here.”
See my mind never made the connection that something harmful would be out there waiting for me.
> This conversation is usually about how no one lets their kids play outside unsupervised anymore,
Those two show overall fear is higher, not that reasonable fear is higher.
There's so much in current society that sells fear, that I'm not surprised. FOMO for the next Musk stock promotion. Stalkers, scammers, pedophiles. Burglar alarms being sold with a subscription at 70% profit margins (Verisure here in Sweden.) I recently calculated that I'd pay about $300k-600k in fees for every actual burglary where I live. The insurance deductible is way way lower than that, and I doubt they'd actually change the outcome. Incidentally, insurance companies care about water and fire damage, not burglary. But the scary marketing video with masked men in your garage sells well...
Of course, insurance is a a whole other chapter on selling fear. Sometimes warranted, mostly not. The Freetrailer app, used to book and pay for trailers, defaults to me paying for a deductibility reduction. With a big fat warning if I remove that, that if something happens, I might be liable for up to $700!
Not to mention the economy is always just one bad quarter away from a 1929 crash.
I blame media (new and old) for the fearmongering that sells my attention on low probability outcomes.
The internet has enabled essentially instant communication between any two or more parties anywhere on the planet.
The next 1929 is going to happen faster than the last one, with less warning, and the impact will be more widespread.
Or ...
We'll all see it coming ahead of time, behave perfectly rationally, and avoid the crisis entirely.
Based on how we handled 9/11, and spent 20 years and $20 trillion to get 1 guy, im preparing for the former, not the later, because most people are not rational in the face of a crisis.
> The next 1929 is going to happen faster than the last one
For sure, and for reasons we can't imagine today.
I sometimes think about nuclear accidents. It seems very unlikely that we've already seen the worst accident that will ever be. Same goes for so many technologies less than 100 years old. Safety standards need to go up in parity with the scaling up to keep MTBF in check. Given what I've seen of human greed, I hold only partial hope that'll happen as energy demands increase. Hopefully batteries, wind, solar and regulatory oversight are enough.
This is so depressing; my parents in the late 60’s/early 70’s would be serving a life sentence for negligence according to current standards, given how utterly (but basically harmlessly) feral we were back in the day.
The issue is overpopulation. In an underpopulated area neighbors tend to be neighbors, in an overpopulated one they tend to call police on your noisy kids to take you down a peg.
I think it's only safer since we're doing less. We're more immobile; sitting on our phones, TVs, iPads. We order stuff online instead of going to the store. There's also less adventure without immediate reconciliation. We can corroborate if what we're doing out-and-about is correct from a simple google search anywhere, which reduces person-to-person interaction.
Indeed, in my experience all these tools do is offset policing to "easy" crimes and the harder problems continually get ignored. It's largely been accepted in my city, for example, that traffic enforcement no longer happens.
A "fun" observation I've had is that politicians and police tells us that they are focusing on crimes that increases the perception of safety. Then for some reason they spend time on petty drug deals, gangs that mostly fight internally and other crimes that the average person would never experience.
If they wanted to do something to increase feeling of safety, and justice, they'd crack down on bike theft.
Yes, we also have a local politician who is very much into the appearance of "tough on crime" and has done vanity work with police like catching homeless shoplifters attempting to resell food on the street. The police also love bragging about impounding unregistered scooters and dirtbikes.
> If I would have to rate difficulty of Traffic enforcement, I would have put it quite low... What makes it so difficult?
The problem with traffic enforcement is that the police want it to remain available as a pretext to stop anyone when they want to.
For example, the MUTCD recommends that speed limits typically be set to the 85th percentile traffic speed. One of the reasons for this is that speed differentials are very dangerous. Another is that you typically want laws to have at least a little bit of leeway between "thing law abiding people are expected to actually do" and "thing with government-imposed penalties", rather than having them separated by 0.
But US speed limits are regularly set 10-15 MPH below that speed, so that the majority of traffic is exceeding them. Because then the police have an excuse to pull over anyone they want to. This is also often used a source of fine revenue because as long as they don't do so much enforcement that people actually comply with the law, they can periodically park a patrol car on the side of the road and "efficiently" hand out one ticket after another.
Which is the problem with automated enforcement. If people were consistently fined then you would get compliance rather than widespread violations. At which point people might object more strongly to the speed limits not being set by the book. But regardless of which way that comes out, it causes you to lose the fine revenue and the pretext to stop anyone, since you stop having both of those if you do either of the things that results in most people being in compliance with the law.
As someone from the UK, all these points seem ridiculous to me, are they really valid elsewhere?
I get that point 1 is extremely valid in a place like the US where everyone can have a gun.
Do other countries not enforce fines?
In the UK you can have your car confiscated on the spot if the automated number plate recognition in a patrol car flags you don't have insurance. Fines are enforced, but escalating that to non-payment of fines seems like something they could do (people might complain, but only the ones not paying their fines!)
Re point (1), it's definitely not just guns. In the US:
- Suppose a vehicle chooses not to stop. What's the safest way to complete the stop? High-speed chases are dangerous. The eventual spike trap or pushing the tail end of the car or whatnot is dangerous. The fleeing person won't be in a sound state of mind for safe driving even if not followed. Toss in a little human error like forgetting to turn your lights and sirens on, and these are predictably extremely dangerous. Just under 1% end in a fatality.
- There's an elevated risk of wrecks, side-swipes, and whatnot by virtue of being on the side of the road, often in dangerous areas.
- Most assaults on police officers don't involve guns. There are something like 7-8k assaults on officers due to traffic stops annually, despite knowing they carry guns. A little over a hundred of those result in serious injury to the officer, most of which don't use guns in the process.
- Don't forget injury to the passengers. 100k/yr are injured by the police at a traffic stop. Again, that's usually without guns. And why wouldn't they be? The police have nearly a carte blanche, and they're being placed into an environment where they know they're at risk, with perceived risk being higher than actual risk.
You mention the UK, so how do they fare? They have 100x fewer traffic stops, so I'll scale up the numbers accordingly. In particular, that means they have 2.5x officers injured just from vehicles being rammed during stops than the US has assaults on officers in total. That's suggestive of gun violence not being the entire story regarding traffic stop safety.
Mind you, that's not quite apples to apples. The UK has 5x fewer people and 2-3x fewer miles driven per person per year, suggesting we're missing another factor of 5-10 when trying to figure out why the US has more traffic stops, and my first guess would be that the UK police have a selection bias toward more serious offenses, so the higher safety rates of the US police are at least in part due to pulling over a higher share of less violent individuals.
Nevertheless, it's not just gun violence. Traffic stops are dangerous elsewhere too. (not to be interpreted as a comment on gun policy, rather that it's annoying to see important conversations like consequences of traffic stop safety derailed by irrelevant nationalistic swipes and jabs)
How much of the violence you list is because of warrant enforcement via 'traffic stop'?
Traffic stops should be used for traffic enforcement and treated as community policing, not as the main method of hoping to stumble on things the police should have resolved via actual police work and effort.
From here [0], extrapolating based on relative rates of traffic stops vs other police-initiated contact. An estimated 32k of those required hospitalization.
It seems like our federal system is an obstacle. I'm in Maryland and a huge fraction of our biggest habitual traffic violators somehow get Virginia license plates.
> Do other countries not enforce fines?
Where I live (Baltimore, MD) the 10 vehicles with the most unpaid speeding tickets owe $81,000 between them. So you can push 10k in unpaid fines and remain on the road somehow.
Remove the warrant check portion of traffic stops and suddenly they become much much less risky and just normal community policing. But adding that 'the person may have a warrant and the US justice system is happy to hand down 10+ year sentences (which are basically life sentences, you aren't getting a life back after 10 years) every traffic stop by choice become much more high risk.
Policing shouldn't be done via traffic stops. Traffic stops should be done via traffic stops.
The rules and numbers are allowed to be what they are so long as mass tasteful/mild noncompliance is tolerated. The second you start robotically (electronic robots vs meat robots in uniform does not matter in this case) fining people for taking lefts on red arrows at 1am or exceeding the speed limit a bit in the base case you will see politicians pandering to voters by changing those rules such that the typical person can behave typically without any particular care to abide by them and generally not break them.
Law enforcement largely exists in the US to protect Corporate crime. Has done since it's beginnings as an institution, finding roots in the south in slave patrols, and roots in the north in protecting private property.
The cops are not now nor have they ever been an institution to protect the people, they are there to protect the Peace. What's the Peace? Largely seems to be whatever makes the rich people happy.
The police protect "property owners" and "property rights."
And this is why the homeless remain homeless.
No matter where they stand, its someone elses property, and they have little to no rights.
You can't feed yourself if you are forced to keep walking.
DeShaney v. Winnebago County Department of Social Services (1989) held that the Constitution generally does not require the government to protect people from harm inflicted by private individuals.
Town of Castle Rock v. Gonzales (2005), held that a woman did not have a constitutional entitlement to police enforcement of a restraining order.
You are forced to pay taxes for service that you may/may not actually receive.
You are forced to tell the truth to people who are allowed to tell you lies.
The system is designed to protect the system, and we are just passing through it while we are alive.
This seems like a pretty abstract claim to me. What does "protect the people" mean vs "whatever makes the rich people happy"? There are laws on the books which the police enforce.
Now, I agree that the police are not your friends, and they are incentivized to find crimes when there may not really be any at times, but I disagree with the notion that they are simply the lapdogs of the wealthy. In fact, it seems like in a lot of places in California it's the law-abiding, wealthier citizens that are hassled most by the police for minor infractions, because they know they can actually extract revenue from them.
You work at a retail store. You take $100 from the till. They have you on camera. Management calls cops, and has you arrested for misdemeanor theft. You spend night in jail.
You work in retail store. You log in at 9am. And your manager was told to cut payroll and edits your (and 9 other peoples) timecards to the tune of $1000. You catch this. Management refuses to correct it and/or punish the manager. Nobody is arrested. You're told this is a civil issue.
Wage theft is larger than all other theft combined, but treated as a civil, not criminal matter. I wonder why.
You secured your expensive road bike ($2000) cause its your primary transportation. You put a gps tag on it, so if its ever stolen, you can make the appropriate report and retrieval. The lock was cut, and the bike taken. Its at a nearby house. You report it. Cops wont take report and wont get the stolen property. You even have definite proof. They dont care, and they dont have to.
Target (retailer) has a policy to let people steal from them, and to do facial recognition until a thief surpasses the statutory felony limit (usually $1000). THEY send a report to the police, which isnt ignored, and the police go do the corporates' dirty work and arrest the alleged perpetrator.
During the 1980's there was well known pushes (by Biden etm) to criminalize cocaine severely. But the cocaine they punished wasnt the white powder. That was used predominantly by executives. Instead, the heavy criminalization focused on crack cocaine, which was used predominantly by the lower (poor, black) people. Punishments were upwards of 10x disparity against the poor classes.
The misattributed quote "If the penalty for a crime is a fine, then that law only exists for the lower class" (to Final Fantasy Tactics, not true attribution), is something we see all the time.
Anthropic - mass for-profit copyright fraud against the public? Fine.
All insurance - if you lie? Insurance fraud. If they lie, get rekt and die or something.
Banks - guilty of mass laundering and made $50B? Oh, $2B fine. $48B profit. If a human did that, theyd go to jail for decades.
These disparities exist everywhere in "law". Law only defends elite, wealthy, donor class, and well known monied local elites. It almost never defends the average wronged citizen.
Almost every middle/lower class ill disappears if you eliminate wage theft and close the tax loopholes that wealthy people take advantage of. They're massive distortions of the economic machinery, and no one should be surprised that things don't make sense even when circumstances are "normal".
not really, it's about having less dumb cops and having more specialists roles. Spending less money on weapons of war and more on training and education.
>what happens when society solves its issues and theres no need to 'keep them busy' :(
Look at the engineering and surveying firms over the past 50yr. Cops will likely see something like that. Like they'll get written into all sorts of laws and processes despite the scope of the "value" they provide being narrower than ever.
It'll turn into a low effort make-work job. Like Realtors(TM) with extra steps to justify their existence.
Like no amount of 1080p Ring footage of your door getting kicked in will suffice, the insurance company will not believe your house has been broken into until a certified license holding cop shows up and signs off on it.
I don't expect many people to be okay with justice being enforce by the average citizen.
People will always have conflicts from time to time, the only question is whether we let them deal with it themselves or have an authority with a uniform and a badge who is supposed to be trustworthy enough to handle it.
> whether we let them deal with it themselves or have an authority with a uniform and a badge who is supposed to be trustworthy enough to handle it
a trial by jury is the closest thing i think to a compromise between those two, where someones societal peers decide whether there even is a conflict and then who is "guilty"
a trustworthy person is needed to haul the relevant parties to the quorum and then deal with punishments, though with cell phones and cameras everywhere these days...
Agreed, I do appreciate the concept of a jury of your peers though I think we've gone down the wrong path as they're implemented today.
The courts have done a great job demonizing jury nullification, for example. In my opinion that's a feature not a bug, it gives the public a say over what laws they agree with enforcing.
I've also seen far too many examples of cases that seem blatantly unproven but forced through because of a combination of poor defence council and politically hot topics that the DA seems to want under their belt.
There's a whole host of laws that people break daily. Even a book about it "3 felonies a day".
Most of those 'crimes' shouldnt be. And thats what parts of the jury nullification movements are all about; judging the law BEFORE judging the person.
Also the more data captured about every human, the more criminality can be found, especially in things that shouldnt have ever been criminal. And having higher "bust" numbers and proof of evil criminality element (regular humans doing normal things that are criminalized by the elite) then allows them to write bigger checks for more pervasive surveillance.
Its the classic long tail, and exponential cost increases for of a logarithmic decay of detection.
Our society could restart with a good review of all laws. And those laws with nobody else harmed should be scrapped.
He knew it would be stupid to post that tweet. He had actually said to himself, as he thumbed-up the "send" gesture, "It's probably stupid to post this tweet." But he'd done it anyway. He was mad, he needed to vent. The internet would know just how, his joining in with a cacophony of other angry voices. He hadn't given his own concern a second thought at the time, though, nor of the 8chan brigade that immediately descended from the cyber-ether to light up his n-list with death threats, hate speech, his address (or, at least the fake one he spoofed), his phone number (ditto). That was normal. The people who wrote these things were typically hundreds of miles away, where the conservative half of the country had anaphased years earlier. There were, of course, always the stories of young black men, reckless online, being dragged out of their homes, never seen again. But in a world ruled by informed probabilistic behavior, an educated adult worried little about things with a 1/10000th chance of killing you.
But then he'd gotten the email. The one on his personal account. The account his parents had set up for him as a child, that was only used for official business, that he was to guard more closely than an SSN (after all, it was worth more). The email that included his real address, his real phone number. And suddenly, he didn't feel safe in his apartment anymore. So he'd stayed home from work, begun packing clothes, batteries, replacement s-cells, food; backed up and wiped his home storage, just to be safe. That took too long. It was another thing he shouldn't have done.
At 6:45 pm, a knock sounded on the door, and a gruff voice announced, "POLICE, OPEN UP," and his heart froze in his chest. This was how it always started. It was a callback to when there WERE police: before the public lost confidence in law enforcement; before their rights to weapons, their unofficial immunity in the courtroom, all of that, was stripped, deemed too dangerous in the hands of an institution rife with corruption and abuse; before departments around the nation, unable or unwilling to face a reality where they had to use amiable coercion rather than cruel force to maintain order, disbanded en masse; before the people, true to the American spirit of ingenuity, turned to technology and dogged practice to self-police their own communities.
That had been the good news. Ubiquitous personal surveillance, accountability to one's neighbors, and a nationalized forensics service that provided unbiased expertise when necessary had lowered crime to previously unimaginable levels (after a brief rise, during which many activities previously deemed crimes were recognized as the treatable social dysfunction that they were). The bad news was that many of America's men in blue were unprepared for the realities of unemployment, being unemployable, pariah-hood. So some - a fractional minority, to be sure, but enough - fell back on what they knew, the core traditions ensconced and enshrined in police practice from the days when departments had first formed, as slave-catchers and Ku Klux Klan offshoots, security for the wealthy or sundown towns: they ganged up and started killing n*ggers and poor people.
(Originally written in 2015, a few months after the Ferguson protests and shortly after Freddie Gray was murdered.)
This is a great point, and one that really isn't played up because it doesn't fit the whole profit-from-attention narrative that literally every media surface seems to be following.
It almost seems as if law enforcement 'need' these additional tools to keep them busy; find new, more trivial crime that's been hiding behind no one reporting it or being hurt by it.
Maybe if law enforcement resources could be applied to more corporate crime, that'd keep em busy till the cows come home.