Are these neighborhoods “over policed” because their residents commit more crimes, or do the residents commit more crimes because their neighborhood is “over policed”?
I used to sit on my friends porch when I was in college before pot was legalized, smoking. We are white people in a white area. If we had been black I have no doubt the increased police presence would have resulted in us getting arrested. There are tons of other stupid things I did when younger where if there had been more cops around I would have gone to jail. More police means more people are arrested for the same crimes committed with impunity in less policed areas.
In addition the fact that you can be arrested for resisting arrest means that if a police officer wants to arrest you they can do so and create a crime afterwards. Recent headlines have shown very vividly how police actively encourage and look for confrontations hoping to spark a reaction. In a high crime area, everyone is a criminal in much the same way everything looks like a nail to a hammer.
Imagine if this man had actually actively resisted the officer:
The report you linked to is astonishing, not just for the violence committed against someone who, at the time he was questioned, was not in violation of the law, but also for the degree of force used considering the crime being investigated.
To wit:
> wrongly detained him after identifying him as a suspect in a panhandling case.
Slammed to the ground for being suspected of panhandling? (To my mind, panhandling is akin to free speech.)
Wait until you hear about Elijiah McClain, who was tackled then choked/injected with ketamine until he went into cardiac arrest and was eventually pronounced brain-dead. He had 911 called on him for walking while 'looking sketchy'.
The Elijah McClain case makes me very sad; not only for everything listed in the article, but also because he was a skinny, nerdy kid like most of my friends (and many of this site's readers, I imagine).
Just a regular guy going about his business, and he is murdered (and I don't use that term lightly) by the very people sworn to "protect and serve" him.
__EDIT__: It appears that the parent has removed their comment, so let me add context. Here I'm responding to the parent's claim that you can outright dismiss drug related crimes because it is all about violent offenses. I'm just trying to show that drugs play a big role and thus dismissing them is naive.
Thanks! So between 10 & 20% are in for drugs -- the lower figure if I try to exclude trafficking (although roughly, as they don't always break it down). And this means "in for nothing harder than drugs" since they are counting by the worst conviction.
It is mind-blowing how misleading this is. You should really consider editing your post. The majority of people in state prisons are there for VIOLENT CRIMES, and the plurality of people in local jails are there for violent crimes.
But you're also missing the point. I was responding to a comment that said we should dismiss drug related crimes. Maybe that is missing now that the person removed that comment but essentially they said
> we're not talking about drug, we're talking about violent crime.
So my response was more in the lines of "we can't dismiss drugs when they are a big factor."
Note: this is also why HN tries to prevent editing, because now the context of what I was responding to is completely lost.
Your stats are not why people are in jail nor prison. Your stats represent an extremely narrow selection of prisoners meeting the "federal" criteria. Your information is misleading to make it look like most people in jail are due to drug offenses, which is factually untrue.
My point is that outright dismissing drug related charges is ludicrous. But it appears that the parent edited their comment to the point of removal so this context was lost. I have edited my response to clarify.
Don't even know why I'm going to bother, but most of those drug offenses are trafficking crack/cocaine and meth, a large percentage of them also involve weapons. It's not people who were smoking weed on the porch.
You're being very selective. Federal prison only accounts for 22.3% of drug offending inmates[0]. Specifically in jails -- where 74% of occupants are not currently charged -- possession accounts for 56% of drug related offenses. Drugs accounts for 21% of occupants, (23% of convictions, 25.5% of non-convicted). In state prisons possession accounts for 25.5% of drug related offenses and 3.5% of the total state prison.
Jails, County, State, and Federal prisons are all different. It would definitely make sense that the more serious convictions, especially with harder drugs, goes to federal. That's kinda the point of federal...
Back to the preventive vs reactive. If you legalize all drugs, sell the harsh drugs in a controlled setting, the existing black markets would be destroyed. This argument will continue to be a circle, if we are saying "x people arrested" but "y shouldnt be a crime in the first place" "well y has to be illegal, look how much x we have."
All of the money put into cops, lawyers, prosecution, sentencing, prison, parole, etc could be put into tackling the consequences of legal use.
All of the money currently flowing into the black market, into gangs, into crime and violence causers, would try up.
4 in 10 arrests are marijuana related of those
"As has long been the case, around nine-in-ten U.S. marijuana arrests are for possessing the drug, rather than selling or manufacturing it."
How many of those that graduated to crack/meth etc. started out with simple marijuana arrests?
The difference is looking at federal prisons vs arrests and other prisons. Federal is for more egregious crimes, so it would make sense that less of them are for pot and more for harsher drugs.
It is difficult, but we have to try to be aware of the biases in the data we have. I should have mentioned in my first post that those were just federal stats. But I try to break down more in another comment state and jails, specifically about possession statistics.
I don't know, I was just pointing out the fact that people in federal prison are not there for smoking weed on the porch. I don't have the numbers handy, but I would guess that a vast majority of the marijuana arrests in your article result in a fine or probation at the very most.
Which I happen to agree is a waste of resources and probably does more harm than good by getting people started "in the system".
> Is that global statistics or statistics for "over policed" neighbourhoods the article and discussion is about?
Neither, it is US statistics.
Getting specifically the "over policed neighborhoods" statistics is a little trickier but when you do some location of arrest lookups you do see a higher percentage of arrests coming from those neighborhoods, so it would make for a reasonable assumption that those neighborhoods are a representative demographic of this dataset (if you're drawing from two jars and you draw 80% from one jar and 20% from the second jar, the marbles you have is a better representation of the contents of the first jar than they are of the second jar).
> We’re talking rape, burglary, murder, vandalism, and assault... Conversely, low-income neighborhoods have tons of hardcore crime like I’ve described.
Tons?
Rape seems an unnecessarily emotional grab here, since most rapes are perpetrated by someone the victim knows and aren't restricted by income.
Vandalism happens everywhere as well.
> It’s always the people in the white upper-class neighborhoods who think the police are the problem.
My mom grew up poor and told me to not trust the police and certainly not let them in the house without a warrant.
> ...because they celebrate...
Who is "they", in this context?
"Tons." "Always." "They." Your language suggests an agenda that you're presenting in absolutes.
I was more upset that the parent was implying that his neighborhood would have equal arrest numbers if the police had been more present on account of his pot smoking. I hope everyone can see what a stupid argument that is and that’s the hill I’m willing to die on here.
> There are tons of other stupid things I did when younger where if there had been more cops around I would have gone to jail.
That's what the person you replied to said. Not that more police would have been more arrests based on (just) their pot smoking, but on other behavior as well. I saw a lot of vandalism that led to kids being dragged by their ears back to their parents in middle-class neighborhoods, that would've resulted in arrests (even for misdemeanors) for kids in poor neighborhoods (where I've also lived and seen this difference).
In white neighborhoods small crimes would lead to police dragging the kid home, in minority neighborhoods they'd end up with a misdemeanor record (at least). All of this creates a bias in the algorithms which generally assume that someone with a criminal record of some sort is going to be a higher risk individual (which is probably a safe assumption for many crimes), but it is biased because people aren't charged with crimes at equal rates due to the biases in the existing system that these algorithms are more likely to exacerbate than alleviate. Now that the minority community has a thicker criminal record, the policing in that neighborhood continues to go up which continues to create increased conflict between the police and residents as the police end up arresting people for increasingly minor offenses, along with the major ones.
A lack of policing or difference in attitude of the police in poor and/or minority communities versus middle-class/wealthy and/or white communities is very much present in the US (and probably the world). This leads algorithms like those under discussion to end up inheriting the same or similar biases, whether the developers and marketers intended it or not.
I think maybe you're missing the point? I don't think the parent was implying that there'd be equal arrest numbers.
The difference is that if you send all the cops to the "bad neighborhoods", then the "good neighborhoods" get away with a lot of crime, even if that crime is low-level.
Let's say all neighborhoods have 100 instances of low-level crime per day. A so-called "bad" neighborhood -- where most of the cops get sent to -- also has instances of much worse crime.
The end result of this officer allocation scheme is that people get arrested in the "bad" neighborhood for a mix of low-level crime and worse crime. But pretty much no one at all gets arrested in the "good" neighborhood, because there's basically no police presence there. So maybe you see in the "good" neighborhood a handful of arrests for those 100 instances of low-level crime, but in the "bad" neighborhood you see 60 arrests for that similar crime. (You also see arrests for more severe crime, but that's not the point.)
I'm of course making up numbers here, but regardless of the magnitude of the numbers, even if they differ between neighborhoods, the percentage of crime handled ends up being much lower in the "good" neighborhoods because of the simple fact that police aren't there to handle it. Sure, they'll come out if called, but response time is longer, and they have very little ability to see things happening in real-time.
Meanwhile, if you feed this data into your algorithm, it will start to believe that there's basically no low-level crime in the "good" neighborhoods -- even though it's the same! -- so it prioritizes those neighborhoods even less.
If you feed an algorithm bad data, it will only give you more bad data. And it becomes worse when you act on that data and feed it more results based on that bad data.
That very specific qualm doesn't mean that increased police presence helps though in the higher crime neighborhood. See my previous response, but basically all things can be true.
It can (and evidence supports that) at ac basic level:
1. There are more crimes committed in one neighborhood than another
2. Increasing police presence in the higher crime neighborhood does not decrease the occurrence of such crimes
3. Increased police presence leads to unjustified disproportionate enforcement of smaller violations being broken equally by both neighborhoods
Your original reply goes much farther than simply claiming less natural crime, and then adds a lot of armchair sociology without backing. When you ask rhetorical questions and follow with "I don't know", you are implying without evidence and it's not a constructive argument that appears in good faith.
Given a long enough timeline of increased arrests, police presence and assumption of guilt, why would my neighborhood not eventually have the same number of arrests and crime. Unless your argument is that there is something physically different in the other neighborhood that drives them towards crime. If that's your argument and I am having a hard time seeing what else it could be then I think we are done here.
Of course poor neighborhoods are going to have higher crime. Unless you have been truly poor you won’t understand the sense of desperation that can lead to bad decisions.
You grow up in a food scarce household with a parent addicted to painkillers with no guidance on what a path to a successful future is and crime becomes a lot more palatable. Getting in the game starts to look like the only possible way to “make it”.
I agree. Every time there is an article like this you get the same arguments, the same discussions, and the same comments. Back and forth, back and forth, over and over again.
But if you actually bother to do some reading on the subject the conclusions are overwhelmingly clear. Over and over again social programs show very clearly that if you improve education and give people better opportunities to escape the poverty trap and better themselves you reduce crime.
The formula is simple really: if you give people opportunities to make an honest living then they will, for the most part, make an honest living; if you don't give people the opportunity to make an honest living then they will, for the most part, make a dishonest living.
I agree with you but my question is does increased police presence lead to a poor neighborhood. Take for example a middle class white neighborhood. If there was a sudden and very visible increased presence over years, arresting people for minor offences, watching everyone and questioning everyone, would that neighborhood become a poor neighborhood. I think it would. I think people who could would move out, property values would drop and the people who could not move out would have a higher predisposition to crime as they were worked into the system.
> We’re not taking about specious arguments like pot arrests and improper turn signals. We’re talking rape, burglary, murder, vandalism, and assault.
Look at arrest data, the former is exactly what we're talking about. Most of these cases of police brutality come from basically random stops that focus on such minor violations (turn signals, jaywalking, etc) or "your car/description matches a potential subject". See parent and weed usage vs who gets caught with weed.
Not to mention that you throw in rape/murder/assault into a sentence with vandalism. Police have a historically terrible track record with rapes in both processing cases as well as no record of stopping them. Police react to these incidents, not prevent them. The idea that police presence stops these is not supported either as when police reduced their presence in NYC neighborhoods, crime actually went down.[1]
I agree up until you say "few good people living in those neighbourhoods" it's the other way around .. you'd be amazed at how few people are generally responsible for crime in any given area.
A question to ask is what are the demographics? Is the support a plurality, old people, young people, homeowners, a silent majority a vocal minority, do we know?
Seemed to me to be made up of a wide variety of demographics, but organized by respected community leaders who typically are homeowners in the areas they live.
I hear what you are saying but disagree to a point. How many of these people getting arrested for the serious crimes have pre existing arrests / convictions for minor crimes? Once you have a couple of minor arrests and you are in the system, finding a career and advancing yourself becomes increasingly difficult. I would make an uneducated assumption that if they had not gotten the minor infractions and had a future perhaps the major infractions would not have happened. With that said there are always going to be bad people that require police intervention. Further adding to this if you grow up in an environment where there is a high criminal element you may be more predisposed to it, starting with minor infractions like marijuana use and then you are arrested and the self fulfilling prophecy repeats.
Massively increased policing has created the environment in which many of these people are born and turn to crime. If you are constantly treated like a criminal, you may come to think of yourself as one.
In the UK we have what's know as youth offending services, the main aim of which is to keep youths out of the courts and criminal system by utilising more appropriate methods of disposal for minor offences like drug possession.
This seems like a great idea. We should not be essentially damning people to a much more challenging life due to youthful indiscretions. Obviously some crimes are worse than others.
Unfortunately, law and order has to be standardized for everybody, regardless of background. Pot was decriminalized in many states already. Are there other things you would like to decriminalize? There are avenues for those, but it’s not a fast turn-around, those things take time.
The law is standardized for everyone, its enforcement that is the issue. There are clear differences in enforcement for different races and different wealth levels.
My example occurred many moons ago before pot was decriminalized any where. I am old :)
Yes agreed, enforcement has to be standardized as well. Justice should be blind, except to the law. The pendulum swinging though has me worried, where dangerous crimes are currently unenforced.
The knee-jerk reaction against policing will cause more harm than good, all in the name of some nebulous "long term" outcome that is borderline undefinable.
Some knee-jerk reactions that we're seeing or considering"
1. Banning facial recognition.
2. Banning predictive policing (this article).
3. Defunding police departments
4. California's ACA5 amendment that seeks to remove anti-discrimination laws, allowing racial and gender discrimination.
In our society, everyone is a lawbreaker. There are so many laws that surely everyone is guilty of breaking some law. This results in police being able to discriminate by selectively enforcing laws. Since everyone is probably doing something illegal, police do racist things by profiling people who are 'probably doing [something illegal]' without sounding racist.
It's a common pattern in societies where the laws are so invasive and numerous that everyone breaks them. We need reasonable laws that are equally and fully enforced to reduce this particular outlet of racism.
One of the things I recently started thinking about is how most of the "wacky hijinks" in TV Shows and Movies would almost definitely result in your arrest today.
Many of the "innocent pranks" and "fun times" that my grandparents and parents would tell me about from their youth, also have components that have been made illegal now.
Almost every Senior Prank has some component of B&E / vandalism.
I've just found it odd how the media we consume seems to exist in this completely different world, where baristas live in massive apartments they could never afford and most of the fun and excitement of the story comes from situations that in real life would most likely end in your arrest.
It seems like decades of being "tough on crime" and having a "war on drugs" has created a society where everyone is always breaking some law. That means that we are all at the mercy of Law Enforcement officers as they use their "professional discretion" to decide who is breaking it enough.
Do you have an air freshener in your car, the police can pull you over for it.
Then claim they smell alcohol or marijuana and search your person and vehicle. As long as they stopped you "in good faith" because they thought, even incorrectly, that they could stop you for obstructed view, then it's cool with the courts.
It seems like we are overdue for a correction. While every crime statistic has pointed to the fact that we live in the safest time in history, we continue with zero-tolerance tough-on-crime policy making that does nothing to make us safer.
You don't even need an air freshener in the car. On a Friday night you could very well get pulled over because "your tail-lights weren't on" e.g. the cop is fishing for a DUI even though you were driving fine. When you turn out not to be drunk, the cop writes you a ticket but don't worry, all you have to do is show up at traffic court to get it cleared! Never mind that the car's light switch was set to "auto" the whole time and if the headlights were on, the taillights were also on...
It's important to be correct about the particular nature of the injustice: the police aren't profiling people who are probably doing something illegal. To the extent that police do profile (I don't think it's a question that they do, only to what extent), their profiling is based on who they perceive to be the most likely of committing the worst offenses, not simply "who is likely to be doing anything illegal at all".
That said, even if black Americans are more likely to commit these worst of offenses (as reported by victims), it's still unjust because any given black individual may not be guilty and doesn't deserve increased scrutiny based on the color of their skin--justice ought to be colorblind and individualistic.
That said, not everything that appears to be profiling is actually profiling. Police are deployed more densely to areas with high violent crime, and these areas tend to skew black. That means they're more likely to witness more minor offenses as well. The racial disparity here isn't due to profiling, its due to the high incidence of violent crime in certain predominately-minority communities. This is an important distinction because it determines the best course of action to solve the disparity problem--if the problem is mostly attributable to police profiling, then fixing profiling is the most urgent problem. If it's due to high incidence of violence in communities, then the best solutions will be various anti-violence programs and keeping violent offenders off of the streets (and ideally rehabilitating them).
That sort of nuance is almost never brought to the fore, unfortunately. Right now, public policy and media-attention seems to be entirely driven by empathy and outrage.
Look at the efforts put into reducing bugs in software: how much money is spent on that, new paradigms are creating to reduce bugs, linters are written and used, etc.
What are the specific, and large-scale efforts made to make the law and enforcement more equal?
We could at least try as hard as software bugs - rather than the current situation where the scale is tipped in the other way (ie there are numerous incentives to introduce 'bugs' into the system and not many to take them out)
I think the real answer is both. The fact is, lower income neighborhoods do have more crime. That's just common sense. People do what they have to to survive.
This results in heavier policing, which then creates a cycle. You put people in prison for a felony, and when they come out they don't have many options. They're in a worse place then when they went in. Not many places hire prior felons. So then they end up committing crime again and going back. For more on this google "incarceration cycle" or similar.
This also obviously has a bad effect on future generations. Kids are growing up on a single income cause one of their parents are in jail, and that makes it more likely they'll too eventually be forced to enter crime.
I believe, and the data shows this, that the vast majority of people don't commit crime because they want to. They do it because they feel like they don't have any other good options.
The only real way to break this cycle is try to do things besides policing and incarcerating. Focus on rehabilitation and social services. The initial investment will likely need to be huge, but in the long run, I think it would pay off.
While I'm sure there are good police out there, broken windows policies effectively act as a safe haven for a subset of cops to enforce arbitrary (usually racial) bias whenever they feel like it. There's no impetus to actually do the neighborhood policing they claim aspire to--just a universal excuse to allocate resources and attention in the name of making neighborhoods "safe".
Metric gaming is real. Ex. strapped for money or not meeting your quota? Stop some drunk teens on a weekend night before the end of your shift and you can make time and a half because your lookup is "still processing" well past 5 PM. End up writing a citation for the kids, tell yourself that they can afford it, tell them that they should be grateful, and wash your hands clean of it all because you're doing "neighborhood policing".
What if there's an actual crime to report in these neighborhoods?
Two squad cars pulled up to my building. The first thing said to me: "OK who was it? Black? Hispanic?"
They have me ride with them as they stopped every non-white group of kids, at least 30 over the course of ~2 hours despite my repeated remarks that no one had actually seen the perpetrator(s). I wanted to back out at this point, but they had to have a case to justify their time. Frustrated, they took me back to the station and had me go through a photo book of juvenile delinquents in the neighborhood they had compiled. It was photos of entirely black and hispanic youth captioned by their name, address (at which they could be arrested), and some minor crime that was enough to put them in the book. They were practically begging me to just point out any dark face. I just wanted to report a stolen phone.
9-10 years ago. Spanish Harlem during peak stop and frisk era/doctrine.
What I remember most was how routine it all was for everyone involved. Driver would sometimes pull the car up on kids drug raid style, swerving into the sidewalk. They'd turn on the high-beams and within a few words and seconds, it was a pop-up police lineup.
The only description of the suspects was this: a group of kids, one of them was wearing a bright hoodie. No one had even seen their faces. I was adamant about this as well but these cops didn't believe me. They instead kept asking me to "be real" with them and that I shouldn't "feel the need to be PC" around them. They acted as if I was self-censoring for virtue signalling instead of being honest. I just wanted them to log my IMEI and keep a lookout for my phone on CL/eBay because they had been doing press releases about it at the time. Apparently that was the less accessible option.
It scares me to think how much negative impact that one group of police might've had. When I think about how frustrated they became when I told them the truth over and over. Maybe they're used to more central park Karen type of crime reports.
For some some petty crimes (running red lights, not socially distancing, etc..), all neighborhoods actually commit them at a fairly consistent rate, but it is not enforced consistently.
For instance, here in Chicago it is common to find people not following the social distancing rules, but predominately white neighborhoods largely get a pass while black and brown neighborhoods get enforced.
So to answer your question, the crimes are occurring everywhere but statistically speaking black and brown people are more likely to face penalties for crime while white people are not.
Your source (a blog with a pretty transparent agenda) didn't mention that the neighborhoods commit them at a fairly consistent rate, it only said that Chance The Rapper said that he saw people at Millennium Park not social distancing. Chance omitted that police broke up the crowd at Millennium Park as well:
> Monday protesters in Millennium Park were dispersed by police after gathering too closely as well.
Your blog post did say that our mayor (who is herself black and lesbian--for those who find these identities more credible--and who has been very consistently outspoken about her concerns about racially disparate outcomes with respect to COVID) denied disproportionate enforcement in black communities:
> The reality is the Chicago Police Department is active and engaged all over the city and doing it with an eye toward equity, and I would have it no other way as mayor of this city,” Lightfoot said. “I can tell you, based upon the statistics we’ve been keeping for weeks, those dispersal orders are happening all over the city — and yes, in white areas, in Latinx areas, in moneyed areas of the city.
As for disparities in the number of arrests, if this isn't driven by an increase in quantity, size, or density of gatherings in minority neighborhoods, it's probably driven by an increase in brandished firearms, gunshots, etc: https://abc7chicago.com/chicago-crime-police-officers-injure....
Anyway, this is all anecdata from late March which was very early days for the whole COVID debacle.
The Block Club is a local non-profit news organization, it seems a bit disingenuous to delegitimize them by calling them a "blog with a pretty transparent agenda".
The fact that the mayor is black and lesbian has little to do with the disproportionate enforcement of crimes and bringing up her race/sexual orientation is a poor way of denying the legitimacy of the claims made by Chance AND local news sources.
Your last point seems to be the only real argument made but the majority of arrests have more to do with petty and drug related offenses as opposed to firearms according to the U.S. DoJ.
> The Block Club is a local non-profit news organization, it seems a bit disingenuous to delegitimize them by calling them a "blog with a pretty transparent agenda".
We can agree to disagree I guess. They're not exactly subtle about their biases, but then again, neither are mainstream media outlets these days.
> The fact that the mayor is black and lesbian has little to do with the disproportionate enforcement of crimes and bringing up her race/sexual orientation is a poor way of denying the legitimacy of the claims made by Chance AND local news sources.
Is this satire? Of course the mayor's identities have nothing to do with the claim--as I said, I put that in there to head off predictable identitarian rebuttals. The mayor's identity would only "invalidate" Chance's claims if you believed that the racial, etc identity of the claimant is paramount and the content of the claims is unimportant--this would be textbook bigotry so I'm sure this wasn't where you were going. No, Chance's claim is invalid because it's an anecdote and one which is incorrect at that (per local news sources as well as the mayor, anyway).
> Your last point seems to be the only real argument made but the majority of arrests have more to do with petty and drug related offenses as opposed to firearms according to the U.S. DoJ.
I don't see what that has to do with Chicago's covid experience.
I'm trying to learn more about this. What I am reading suggests this is the wrong frame. What if all the money spent over-policing these neighborhoods was instead spent on social services to support the people living there? Would that decrease the crime rate more or less than the policing?
I'm not sure, but I'm becoming more convinced by this line of argument...
I thought that this book[1] was an enlightening read into the topic.
It outlined that the conventional thinking about crime falls into two broad categories: "heroes/villains" (there are bad people that just do bad and need to be stopped) vs. "victims/survivors" (criminals are effectively created by poor circumstances / just want to feed their families, etc).
The author argues (with research to back it up) that the truth is neither / both / there are other factors at play, on of the more interesting factors just being "opportunity".
I don't think your comment should be downvoted (perhaps something about the book/author itself?). The heroes/villains trope has been heavily overplayed by US culture and before 2016, by politicians of all stripes.
I've heard the police department captains in the area I live describe the scenario as a "war", "wolves and sheep", etc.
That's not to say there aren't really heroic cops or that there aren't really bad criminals, either. But the idea that either of them exist and act independently from their surrounding context, whether that is a corrupt police union or an impoverished struggling community, is very shortsighted.
If anything, that set of tropes needs to be taken down several notches, and the corruption and poverty/inequality need to be addressed directly. We've tried the approach of militarization of police and mass-imprisonment for non-violent offenses. It hasn't worked.
The bulk of social services spending is social security and medicare, which _each_ account for somewhere between 20-30% of federal spending. Military spending is closer to 15-20% of the federal budget
There are some semantic issues, e.g., the distinction between "mandatory" and "discretionary" expenditures, but the data is pretty easy to explore.
Essentially you are "both right". > 50% of total spending is Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Whether that is "social services" is another semantic question.
> Whether that is "social services" is another semantic question.
This is puzzling to me. I don't think I've ever heard anyone argue that social security, medicare, and medicaid aren't social services. As far as I'm aware, everyone agrees that these are all social services. I would be curious to hear arguments for excluding it from the "social services" rubric.
> Police are funded by the municipal or county government, not the fed
It's not that black and white, because...
Police slush funds are funded (indirectly) by the federal government—drug search and seizures are passed off to the feds to prosecute (because many states have laws banning the practice), and the feds shares a portion of the value seized back with the local police department. Win-win.
Food for thought, that factoid doesn't say anything.
For multiple reasons actually:
From the fact that we could be spending any arbitrary percentage and it wouldn't mean it was enough...
To the fact your 50% number doesn't map to 50% spent of the type of social services they meant. Just because it Social Security has the word social in it doesn't mean it's helping the way these social services would...
or crime is a function of income inequality, and ways to fight it are police (reactive) or preventative social spending (proactive.) it's like arguing over fire departments vs electrical code. neglecting the latter leads to more of the former.
Even things like urban planning, where you put your low income housing. If you build low income housing in high income areas, it prevents ghettos from forming.
Is there evidence for this though? The great crime decline in cities like NYC were due to increased policing and the “broken window” policy, along with stop & frisk.
That is what its proponents would want you to believe, except that it's not borne out by evidence. There were similar drops in other cities that didn't violate the civil rights of the citizens.
And that's putting aside the question of whether it's right to deny people their rights in order to deter crime.
I'm of the impression that NYC experienced steeper decreases than other cities? I'll have to look into this more. Do you have any resources to recommend? (thank you for distinguishing between "did it work" and "was it ethical"--it's so tedious when these are conflated).
Literally every city in America, regardless of their approach to policing, has experienced a massive drop in crime rates from 1990 forward. This tends to undermine arguments that broken windows or stop-and-frisk are effective policies.
> Literally every city in America, regardless of their approach to policing, has experienced a massive drop in crime rates from 1990 forward.
I've never heard of anyone arguing that policing did not increase nationwide in the 90s. All of the data we have suggests otherwise, and pushing back on that is basically the entire point of the recent BLM protests.
One simple way we know crime was more aggressively enforced in EVERY city beginning in the early 90s is because so many more people were locked up during that time period (just review the incarceration rates).
I'm not sure that your conclusion of universality can be supported by the evidence. For example Middlesex County, Massachusetts has had roughly flat incarceration rate for decades.
The median household income in Middlesex is over $100K (that's where Harvard is located, right next to MIT). Incarcerations were also flat in Martha's Vineyard, but so what?
My priors say Middlesex wouldn't show increased rates of incarceration regardless of the amount of policing, the passage of three-strikes laws, the passage of the Clinton crime bill, etc. due to the demographics of the area. What do your prior's say?
Universality (to me) means "more criminals were incarcerated everywhere we expected them to be (based on demographics) and regardless of changes in local policies or funding, because there was a nationwide push to increase incarceration rates in the 90s." Do you mean something else by "universality"? Maybe we just disagree over definitions or something.
And yet, the crime rate in that county (and in Cambridge and Lowell) reflects the same plunging nature as the rest of the state and nation, since 1990 peak.
Take the big CSV from the github I posted, combine it with the FBI UCR data, and try to find a correlation between incarceration rate and crime rate.
I have, it's the main topic I study. I've just never met anyone with the view that increased incarcerations rates are not associated with decreases in crime (specifically, violent crime), and I don't think the data supports that either. I literally have no idea how you came to that conclusion given the stats available to researchers over the last 40 years.
I'm not suggesting that there aren't other ways to decrease crime besides incarceration, there are many possibilities. But I don't think there's any data showing that incarcerating criminals doesn't reduce (violent) crime.
So I'll just assume we agree in general, and that our definitions are different somehow, since we seem to be looking at the same datasets.
It’s clear that incarceration rates are associated with falling violent crime, to the extent that one went up and the other went down, but the existence of large jurisdictions that enjoyed the latter without the former casts doubt on the idea of causation.
The drop in crime happened nationwide during this same time in places which did not include NYC. [1] The timing of this seemed to have been more coincidental with the drop in crime.
To some degree. Compare London and Paris: both large, multicultural cities.In Paris, the separation between rich and poor is very clear when it comes to housing location.In London, social housing is often buit even in very expensive areas. London doesn't have no go zones, however, large,purpose built social housing estates sometimes become 'city within the city' and the bigger the estate,the bigger the problems.
I was under the impression that this is more likely related to the reduction in lead in the air. At first glance that seems plausible. See murders by year[1] and the presence of lead[2], the timelines seem to match.
“In the 1970s and early ’80s, we built 70 percent of our subsidized units in the wealthiest white districts,” Myron Orfield said. “The metro’s affordable-housing plan was one of the best in the country.”
"Only three large metros where at least half the homes are within reach for young middle-class families also finish in the top 10 in the Harvard-Berkeley mobility study: Salt Lake City, Pittsburgh, and Minneapolis–St. Paul. The last is particularly remarkable. The Minneapolis–St. Paul metro area is richer by median household income than Pittsburgh or Salt Lake City (or New York, or Chicago, or Los Angeles). Among residents under 35, the Twin Cities place in the top 10 for highest college-graduation rate, highest median earnings, and lowest poverty rate, according to the most recent census figures. And yet, according to the Center for Housing Policy, low-income families can rent a home and commute to work more affordably in Minneapolis–St. Paul than in all but one other major metro area (Washington, D.C.). Perhaps most impressive, the Twin Cities have the highest employment rate for 18-to-34-year-olds in the country."
"In 2008, Seoul imported a version of Minneapolis’s tax-sharing scheme. Since then, the gap in funding for social services among the city’s districts has narrowed. According to a 2012 analysis by Sun Ki Kwon, then a graduate student at the University of Kentucky, this has helped Seoul’s poorest communities grow their tax bases while only minimally affecting the city’s richest districts."
Did you read the article. Minneapolis, for close to 50 years, has been an example of how to do low income housing better than everyone else. Policy within the last decade has eroded this gain. It has gotten worse since these policies have rolled back.
Is it perfect? No. Does low income housing alone prevent police from fracturing families and communities by enforcing drug law? No.
Is there evidence for your claim? My impression was that the impact of those approaches/policies was found to be non-existent to relatively small (in terms of reducing crime, that is - they probably had a significant negative impact on the quality of life of the groups most affected by them).
While this is absolutely true, I'm not sure it's a reasonable argument for defunding the police today. You wouldn't defund the fire department today, because in ten years buildings will average a better standard. The social issues need to be dealt with first, which could take some years.
On the other hand, that the police have become what appears to be a poorly trained, violent militia is indeed a problem that should be dealt with today. Perhaps by defunding. I don't know...
If fire departments were carrying out the same injustices as police, then it would be pretty reasonable to push for the same massive changes in fire departments.
Crime is a function of far more than just income inequality. If you perform your regressions on this single variable and then attempt to extrapolate those results to make policy, you're going to end up spending a lot of money without solving anything. Worse is that you'll potentially put millions of lives at risk.
If we want to solve problems in society we must be prepared to acknowledge all of their potential causes.
I have spent my entire adult life, some 15 years, in pursuit of objective inquiry and this is a hill that I am willing to die on, or be martyred when it inevitably costs me my job.
I don’t think many people are arguing that income inequality is the only variable in the crime equation. What factors do you think are generally underemphasized today?
The problem as I see it is if you watch someone long enough they will break some law eventually, be it minor, which can then escalate things. For example if the person could not afford a fine they may end up in jail. So now you have to police disproportionately patrolling these neighbourhoods pulling people over. It’s unfair and certainly leads to hardships for some.
Next a big issue I have is what defines a “crime” as they say? Because a poor man selling a bag of marijuana on the corner to make some grocery money will go to jail if caught but the business man can pay the fee and open a dispensary and profit immune to police. A poor man soliciting sex off the street jail, a rich man hiring an escort no issues. So they laws are discriminatory and the “crimes” these communities are supposedly breaking is questionable.
Point a) Some neighbourhoods have more police in them, because they have more criminal activity. They are almost always poor neighbourhoods. We want there to be more police, the same way we want more doctors in places where the sick people are (hospitals).
Point b) Police officers have mandatory quotas - to fulfill those quotas, they go to places where they're more likely to make arrests, the same way fishermen go fishing where the fish are more likely to be.
Because police work based on quotas, they'll bust people for whatever is easiest to catch while satisfying the quota criteria.
If you want to be informed on this subject in more detail, the best resource I've found is interviews with Dr Michael Wood, he has a youtube channel and has been on Joe Rogan a couple of times.
There are a few things going on. One is that police can choose what crimes to enforce, and city police tend to enforce crimes committed by lower income people. For example lower income people are more likely to be street level drug dealers, other crimes are more likely to be committed by higher income people.
Then in looking for dealers, police go to lower income neighborhoods. If you look for something you will end up finding it, if you don't look you won't find it. This leads to things like pretext traffic stops, where someone is stopped for a minor violation that wouldn't normally get someone stopped. The police can then detect something else, like the smell of drugs or drug paraphernalia in the car, which they use as cause to search the car. In searching the car they find something that can lead to criminal charges.
This leads to lower income people receiving fines for minor traffic violations, and minor drug violations, at a higher rate the higher income people. The same lower income people struggle to pay those fines more, which puts them in a worse place, possibly leading to more desperate crimes.
Policing is punitive, and doesn't help solve underlying problems. Imprisoning and fining poor people doesn't help them or society.
I don't think this is as much of a racial issue as people make it out to be, it just happens that in the US the low income urban housing projects are predominantly non-white. Low income people in rural areas are less likely to be over policed because there are physically less police per squeal mile in rural areas. And with less people in rural areas, things are more likely to go unnoticed.
If you look at somewhere like the UK, where low income urban council estates (housing projects) are often predominantly white, you see the same over policing, profiling, and pretext stops. But instead of profiling young black males in hoodies driving around a lower income neighborhood, they profile young white males in hoodies driving around a lower income neighborhood.
Stats for Part I offenses are based on incidents reported to the police, not arrests made by the police. These offenses include homicide, aggravated assault, robbery, burglary, rape, theft, etc. This is how cities typically measure their crime rate and how high crime areas are identified.
Stats for Part II offenses are based on arrests only. These offenses include minor assaults, fraud, forgery, drugs crimes, prostitution, weapon violations, loitering, etc. A large subset of Part II offenses do not have a specific victim so the stats are driven by police enforcement.
Only one answer is socially acceptable, regardless of what statistics indicate. And we are building a dangerous world by going down this unscientific path.
I am genuinely concerned that this will bleed into ML science and we may find ourselves collectively pursuing a rabbit hole of bad science in a vain attempt to reconcile empirical data with ideology.
This preference for ideology instead of data reminds me of weird stuff that would happen with science in the Soviet Union. You had things in the Soviet Union like Lysenkoism[1] where a kook got power and explained his science in ideological terms and his theories, unsupported by data, were adopted and defended to the detriment of agricultural production. Workers adopted the theories because people were so afraid of criticizing the dominant ideology that they adopted whatever "science" was mandated in order to avoid being purged. Disagreement with official science was considered proof that one was a political subversive.
"More than 3,000 mainstream biologists were dismissed or imprisoned, and numerous scientists were executed in the campaign to suppress scientific opponents."
> Joseph Stalin supported the campaign. More than 3,000 mainstream biologists were dismissed or imprisoned, and numerous scientists were executed in the campaign to suppress scientific opponents.
Wow, so what sort of rationale can we make of this? Is the logic, "Stalin supports bunk science theory", "other scientists critique said theory", "therefore they indirectly critique Stalin and reduce his legitimacy/credibility"? Something like that? Are politicians expected to grasp every scientific thing they must evaluate accurately? Why wouldn't they accept and admit 'yah maybe we got this one wrong, sorry honest mistake' than to go out and murder folks. That seems widely overreactive.
When you get a paranoid murderous psychopath like Stalin in power, "rationale" may be stretching it.
But I think it went something like this. Marx was "scientific" - Marx had created a "science" of economics and sociology, and it was the official truth of the USSR. If some crank could show that his crackpot theory of agriculture was the logical consequence of Marxism's established truth, then it too had to be the official truth of the USSR. The science was settled; all that was left was for everyone to fall in line and implement it. Anyone who opposed that was both unscientific and unpatriotic.
Except the science was objectively wrong, and implementing it resulted in disaster.
That's the fundamental problem. We are ruling out possible results in advance, based on arbitrary social conventions, not data.
This is fundamentally unscientific and will lead to stagnation at best, regression at worst, and progress only in the unlikely case. At some point we will have to reconcile the fact that the same mathematical and scientific techniques which we correctly apply to other sets of data produce unacceptable results any time models are conditioned on demographic data.
This might be true for certain kinds of crime (possession or sale of drugs). We know it's not true for many other kinds of crime (especially violent crime) because these communities report crimes at a higher rate and because the murder rate in these communities is much higher. Crime reports and murder rates aren't functions of police presence (they don't depend on police stumbling upon a crime in progress). There are also more shootings, stabbings, assaults, etc as reported by healthcare officials.
(I shouldn't have to say this, but none of my argument above suggests that the US incarceration rate is ideal or otherwise not a problem).
> Are these neighborhoods “over policed” because their residents commit more crimes, or do the residents commit more crimes because their neighborhood is “over policed”?
Your question is flawed because it omits too many variables, including the racial differences in what is enforced as a crime, the endemic poverty and resulting tattered social fabric in high crime neighborhoods that pushes residents - especially younger ones - into situations where committing crime becomes an ever more "rational" choice.
We have data on the incarceration rates of Americans as a whole, versus other countries.
I think the current activist climate is in response to the fact that the status quo is built on the premise that all that befalls the troubled populations in the US is always because they deserve it, and they brought it upon themselves. And therefore, all the prevailing cultural/ policing/ political/ fiscal positions that have been in response to these conditions are reasonable.
That's called the Just-World Hypothesis, and I don't know that anybody professes it as a policy framework, though regular people do and I think it could be said to underlie a lot of prejudices and bigotries in people who do affect public policy, but it has to be hidden unless you're Steve King (R-IA). Victim-blaming is very common in the US.
Of course it depends on which troubled population. For rural white poor people all their problems are framed as being from external uncontrollable pressures – they're losing jobs because of globalization, they're in an opioid epidemic because of pharma. Their struggles are not just dismissed as personal responsibility failures.
More crimes are documented because of extra policing, but that is different from whether more crimes are committed. Crimes of different degrees are happening all around, but if you look particularly in one area that is where you'll see crime.
More policing may indeed catch more minor crimes that would otherwise go unobserved.
But the morgue has a pretty close to 100% set of data on murder victims. It's hard to argue that those are caused by catching more criminals. (And in fact, murders in high-crime neighborhoods are less likely to be solved. If anything, murders are caused by this failure to catch first-time murderers, before their second go. Their victims are also, usually, residents of the same bad neighborhoods.)
But how does the level of policing in an area affect murder rates? I don't know the answer, but from statistics I've seen, it seems pretty clear that police are not exactly great at solving murders.
Are you seriously claiming that the presence of police increases the murder rate? Or are you actually asking to know by what mechanisms policing can prevent murders?
Once you are talking about solving a murder, clearly that one was not prevented. It may draw detectives to the neighborhood looking for clues. It's pretty hard to argue that the causality runs from these detectives to the murder though.
Yea I couldn't figure it out. The context of the thread was which way the causality goes from density of policing to level of crime. What were you saying then?
This is somewhat tangential to your point, but I think catching more “criminals” (I.e. people who break laws, which is virtually everyone at some point - though many won’t even realize it and are unlikely to face consequences) can certainly lead to an increase in crime. In the US, at least, contact with the criminal justice system can significantly reduce social and economic opportunities and increase the likelihood that an individual will engage in future criminal activity.
"catch[ing] more criminals" was a quote from above. But I used it when discussing murder, not jaywalking.
I agree that being locked up once surely makes going straight harder (because employers are wary) and going crooked easier (as you now have more contacts). This is a real problem we should try to address. But I'm not convinced that looking the other way at violent crime is at all the right approach.
However, there is no way this is the main causal link between policing & crime. It's like suggesting that the birth rate is caused by hiring more schoolteachers in a neighborhood, ignoring the obvious fact that the city hires them (largely) based on observed need.
> I agree that being locked up once surely makes going straight harder (because employers are wary) and going crooked easier (as you now have more contacts).
It's not just a question of "going straight" - most "criminals" aren't professionals who have to make a discrete decision to stop their hypothetical "life of crime." Even if we ignore the types of "crime" that essentially involve engaging in normal behavior and being unlucky enough to get caught (ex. jaywalking, driving after having a few drinks at happy hour, or smoking marijuana) and look at violent crime, you'll find that a significant percentage of that is the result of social/psychological/economic instability and is directed at those within the social network of the individual involved. Many of these crimes are so-called "crimes of passion" or the result of some form of mental illness - in neither case is an individual likely to stop, think carefully, and rationally conclude that committing a violent crime is in their best interest.
You can lock someone like that up to prevent them from repeating actions that harm those around them, but you can only do that retroactively (which does little in material terms for victims). Given that less than half of crimes committed each year (including violent crime) are even reported to the police, and that a majority of crimes which are reported to the police aren't solved, it seems much more proactive to work towards a solution that prevents people from ending up in the type of situation that produces criminals to begin with. Proactive policing can easily be at odds with that goal if it throws petty criminals into unmanageable situations that preclude them from having a "normal" life. We can't forget that poverty itself is hugely correlated with crime.
> But I'm not convinced that looking the other way at violent crime is at all the right approach.
I don't think anyone is proposing "looking the other way" with regard to violent crime. I'm certainly not. I think it would be beneficial to make prisons more humane, in that it would increase the chance of rehabilitating them, but I don't think enacting some real-life version of "The Purge" is a reasonable course of action.
> However, there is no way this is the main causal link between policing & crime.
Oh, I definitely agree. My intention was to point out an edge case, not imply that police are the main source of crime.
This appears to be the primary concern raised in the article. But surely data scientists could put in guards against this, such as weighting the crime count versus the time spent policing the area? In fact, presumably any functional predictive policing system must already do that, else you'd just tend towards policing one area incredibly intensively.
If they are concerned about the police arrest stats or racism biasing the data set, they could keep the input to something hard to interfere with, like where murders occur or where crimes are reported by the public, rather than where arrests occur.
My opinion is that predictive policing does need regulation, but banning it entirely, to me, seems like an overreaction that will over time result in much less effective use of police resources. I suppose time will tell.
That wouldn't explain things like murder and other violent crimes. It's not like people are regularly getting murdered in the suburbs, but nobody bothered to check.
I think there are a lot of factors that go into a persons environment that influence something like murder rates.
Also, depending on what you consider a violent crime, lack of reporting / local police department's doing something about the report can very well have skew crime rates in certain areas.
Agreed, I don't think those neighborhoods just happen to have a bunch of violent people, but I keep seeing people make the naive agument that the difference in crime rate for those areas is caused by police presence. I remember after the protests in Baltimore that the police stopped doing as much proactive policing, and people who lived in the bad neighborhoods were complaining that the police weren't doing enough to prevent crime in their neighborhoods. There are underlying social issues that need to be dealt with that won't be fixed by removing police.
This is not an "honest question". It's an intentional attempt to give equal weight to a fundamentally racist hypothesis to its alternatives.
If you want to posit that low-income, black communities are inherently violent and need violence to keep them in line then at least don't be coward with your views.
Are these neighborhoods “over policed” because their residents commit more crimes, or do the residents commit more crimes because their neighborhood is “over policed”?