Are you saying you would continue shopping in a store where you regularly saw violence against people who might be thieves, on the assumption you’d never be mistaken for one?

> just let people steal with impunity until they decide the costs are too high, and they have to close the store entirely

Has this actually happened? Or are the chain pharmacies using “shrinkage” as a scapegoat for other deficiencies? I find it incredibly hard to believe that retail theft puts an appreciable dent in profits.

more like "try that in a small town" police will see what happened, "atta boy" and get on with other things. never even reaches the courts.

you can use a reasonable amount of force to prevent people from taking property (or if you're acting as an agent thereof) in Texas. But still you can always be taken to civil court and be at the mercy of whatever judge. I imagine in San Francisco you will almost certainly lose to the criminal who was stealing something if you use any amount of force other than to defend yourself unless you're a cop

Why don't people from SF also get a pejorative?

>> And since every illegal immigrant is already a criminal...

>Not to be pedantic, but by definition it is, isn’t it?

It is not[0].

Being present in the US without legal status is a civil infraction and not a crime. Unlawful entry is a criminal act however.

That said, the vast majority of undocumented folks entered the US legally and overstayed their visas. Which is a civil issue, not a criminal one.

Those who made an (whether valid or not) asylum claim are legally in the United States until their asylum claim can be adjudicated.

[0] https://www.findlaw.com/legalblogs/criminal-defense/is-illeg...

No. Overstaying a visa or not leaving when temporary protected status is suddenly revoked (or asylum is not granted) is not a criminal offense under US federal law.

Immigration is a civil matter, not a criminal matter. It's not a crime per se to overstay a visa like say shoplifting or killing someone. It's more like there's a proceeding to determine whether you did overstay and then when there's a finding of fact they basically tell you you have to leave or they remove you from the country forcibly. It would be patently ridiculous to jail someone for overstaying or for working on a tourist visa or for any of a number of these things.

ICE can make them un-illegal by granting them parole, without further action from congress. AFAIK they can even do it unilaterally, though congress could choose to check them later.

Does that mean the boot-weirder is also a violent person in need of a boot to the mouth?

Or is it not “real” violence if it’s justified? In which case, pretty much all violent people will tell you they are justified.

Which means it reduces to “it’s ok for me to be violent because I’m righteous, unlike those thugs”

I remember the 70s and my experience was nothing like your mom's. Population centers have always been full of petty crime; rural places are still pretty free from crime. You can still move to plenty of towns with population <1000 in the US, and you'll have no trouble leaving your gun or laptop in your car there.

The one big difference though is today we have school shootings, so folks are pretty humorless about guns near schools. I'd love to hear your ideas for how to solve that, because they keep happening.

> I won't speculate on how we forsook it, but clearly something was forsaken.

I cant sum it up properly but three things come to mind: Fear - we have been filled with fear, this in turn leads to more people forsaking responsibility and wanting the government to act as a nanny to protect them, which leads to a lot of childish behavior whether it be people acting helpless or people aping being big and tough. So fear leading to a lack of responsibility leading to childish behavior. This makes people more self centered and less considerate of others around them.

Edit, to add: This lack of responsibility is also tied to legal liability of being sued. Cant take down a crook because they might get hurt and sue which makes me wonder what kind of legal system we have which ignores the irresponsible act of criminality. To me it's "live and die by the sword" - you fuck around and you find out. Of course this can be reversed, a person taking action against a criminal can be hurt and then who is responsible? The liability cuts deeply both ways. There is no way to win unless that changes or we install a safety net.

The problem is 'actual' reality is much more complicated than this.

50 years ago husbands beat the living shit out of their wives without recourse of the law. 50 years ago drunk driving was a socially acceptable past time. I knew people with dozens of DWIs and other that had killed people in alcohol related accidents that didn't get any prison time. What we call hate crimes now were just crimes that weren't investigated by the police.

This said, there is something that has change.

24/7 news and always on news with the internet. The fears we had of bad things happening to us were things we may have watched once a day, not every 15 minutes on the hour. That seemingly had a pretty large effect on how people viewed their safety in this world.

I'm going guess that at some point between the 70s and in 00s a lot of children were murdered in schools by people with guns.

I also refuse to go into a CVS. They are trash. It's a shame there as so many more of them than walgreens.

lol

You really have to be able to judge to self checkout ability of the people in line. Some will get stuck for 5 min before a clerk comes to do it for them.

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equating racial profiling to specific bug reports, or what are you implying? let's just speak in plaintext instead of using simplistic analogies.

apologies if i deciphered your message wrongly.

In code, the manifestation of the buggy behavior is often quite some distance away from the underlying cause of the bug.

This is going nowhere in any case but maybe at very, very least use a whole programming language as an example. Like, if you use JavaScript you are going to find more bugs because someone made up some unscientific figure about ratio of bugs per computer language.

No shoplifting enforcement is done through the courts and most importantly, the police. There is a huge difference here.

Courts incur costs between fees and lawyers, and even filing a report with the dept of labor (the typical recourse most people take at first) means you have to wait while you aren't being compensated for that time. Given wage theft in the majority of cases impacts people who can't often afford to go without those lost wages, this is a tough situation to be in, and even if you go through the labor department with a complaint, manage to get it reviewed in a timely manner (it typically takes months before hearing anything), you may still end up in court anyway depending on a number of factors.

You could sue for the lost wages directly, but again, this becomes an issue of cost, getting the case heard and tried in a timely manner etc. This could drag on for months to years, depending.

On the other hand, if a store sees someone shoplifting, they can and do call the police, and they can and will arrest someone for shoplifting. Its dealt with close to or during the incident occurring. Thats a really big difference in the feedback loop.

Imagine now, that you could call the police when you have a verifiable instance of wage theft, and the person(s) responsible was arrested and you given upfront restitution pending trial. That would be the equivalent of how we treat shoplifting vs wage theft. The differences are not minor, and I imagine they're intentional on behalf of lobbying from business groups.

If business owners or their subordinates were being arrested for wage theft I imagine things would change quickly, but there's such a lag time between actual accountability and the instance of it happening - and even when found guilty they simply pay the back wages plus penalties in the best case scenario, and thats if it gets to the point of either a lawsuit or arbitration on behalf of the labor department - that they have done the calculation that paying incorrect compensation (the most common form of wage theft) is overall costing them less than paying out labor disputes, as with anything that has hefty process attached to it without guaranteed results, it discourages the most vulnerable from engaging with that system even though they would benefit most.

They aren't equivalent, and its disingenuous to see them as such.

Anecdotally, I had a Hispanic friend once who had been a professional thief (not when I knew him but before). His grandfather had won the lottery so he had a guaranteed income, but he did it for fun and because that’s what the cool people did.

Gut feelings are also highly effective as tools to direct policy.

In places that have more crime, they typically don't prosecute effectively. A significant chunk of NYC's shoplifting was just ~350 people, if I remember the NY Times article correctly from a few years back, but they just keep getting released back to do more of it, while more and more steps are taken by private businesses in response, like locked cases and limited hours, the burden for which is more keenly felt by the poor.

Then you are looking at it from a totally wrong perspective anyways, just like most people do. The homeless encampments are full of people with mental illness challenges and/or in one or another way related to drugs. It is why I cannot stand drug use apologists and drug dealer/traffickers defenders that at the same time lament poverty and homelessness.

The poverty is not the cause, it is the symptom of the system’s rot. Especially when you compare other countries and societies that are poorer, but have far fewer of those problems and less crime. Drug addiction is not cheap.

The irony is that your very perspective is the very kind of mentality that has led to the circumstances where we can’t do anything about it even if we wanted to, while the powerful and rich simply do a cost benefit analysis of it because of that and conclude it is easier to, e.g., import replacements for the humans that have been destroyed by drugs and mental illness, which then also drives down the wages/salaries, and drives up the costs of living and drives up the profits of the rich you blame. It’s a kind of “the blind men and an elephant” problem. You keep scratching at the scabs of your self-inflicted cuts, but they don’t seem to be healing.

It really always astonished me that even here, in a community of people in a domain where logic is necessary there is still this stranglehold of irrational proto-religious, emotion based belief and dogma.

That's a good point. Perhaps people "feel" unsafe, not that, statistically, they in fact are.

Trust has to be earned. High-trust societies are awesome, but you can't just expect people to trust that they're not going to be robbed in the street if people keep getting robbed in the street, or that the few criminals that do exist will suffer consequences for their behavior if they're not actually suffering those consequences. That sort of culture takes time to build.

And there-in lies the problem of modern society. There are no social consequences. The decline of religion and family with no suitable replacement has left most people without a peer group to exert these social consequences.

A society where trust is regularly abused isn’t—or will not long remain—a “high-trust” society.

Also, it’s not clear me if you really meant that enforcing property laws inevitably worsens outcomes for those who would otherwise have been victims, or if you mean that the now-much-smaller pool of victims have a worse time with effective enforcement. I’d argue that both are false, but the latter at least seems arguable.

Yes

Eschew flamebait.

Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Please don’t worry about the emdashes, worry about the broad and inaccurate generalizations being churned out by your flawed world model. I urge you to go to some actual criminal reformers in person.

Neither side of any political spectrum thinks that a law enforcement policy "works" if it reduces the incidence of criminal events against innocent people. Obviously if that was the goal, the easiest path is to remove laws and disband police. Instant crime rate drop.

But in fact both sides want to improve their societal outcomes and the policing/criminal policies that they support are by-and-large attempts to do that - improve society.

I'm neither left- nor right-wing in the US sense, but it is clear from examples around the world that high-trust societies emerge from the ground up and require strong family units, strong local communities, and strong engagement in larger politics.

While you do need police, you can't build communities by policing them. It's never worked anywhere.

I think another framework is blank slatism.

For instance, you can look at two countries and if one country has a higher prison population, that country over polices because every country and its people should have the same criminality level because all cultures and people are identical.

I remember feeling great shame that the US had such a high imprisonment rate. This led to a big decrease in state prison population and things like cashless bail and letting people go to basically like the stats. We need to get back to basics and remove people that are destructive and stop overanalyzing things

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A thief is, by definition, a criminal

Yeah my bad, I'm sure the drill tasted amazing. Probably enough calories to feed a family of 3.

True. Even in the strictest US states, the lockdowns were actually voluntary stay-at-home orders, because very few people could survive more than a few days without trips to get food, and there are a lot of necessary services that have to happen. Just for one small example, how many homes across the country need a plumber in a typical day, and would have sewage problems and disease eventually if plumbers weren't allowed to move around to do their work?

The idea that the virus ever could have been stopped if we'd just all cooperated harder was a retcon invented later by people who wanted to criticize other people for not caring as much as they did. The actual experts always said the best we could do was spread it out.

Australia managed to keep COVID out for nearly two years, before they ran out of resources. Stop all non-local travel, identify where it's spread to, establish a buffer zone, wait to see if we drew our buffer zone large enough… two weeks later, and most of the world can be business as usual (minus globe-hopping); two months later, and COVID-19 is as dead as smallpox… assuming everything went right. Realistically, it might take four or five months for everyone infected to recover (or die): but it's a lot easier to enforce a quarantine when there are a hundred cases in the whole world.

This would be expensive, but as expensive as what we did was? Surely not! So, other regions providing funding and resources to the regions taking on the burden would be a strictly rational move.

You might say "oh, but people didn't know about the spread!"… but that's a ridiculous claim. The Less Wrong crowd tracked it in near-real-time from open source intelligence, and governments had access to more intelligence than that. The number of governments giving nonsensical advice, like "masks don't work because the respiratory disease is not spread via aerosols", and "replace your soap with dilute alcohol", lampshades a broad coordination problem. (We're not much past the "sweet-smelling herbs will protect from the plague" advice of yore, it seems.)

The things we needed to do were done – but for ridiculous political reasons, nearly everyone waited until after the disease had reached their regions to close their borders: internationally and intranationally, at every level! (The algorithm in Pandemic II's easy mode was more sensible than that.) So much of that effort, that psychological torment, was wasted. Even if the whole world had taken Australia's approach, we still would've brought the disease to manageable levels within a year. But there wasn't the political will… and so it goes. I think we're less prepared for the next novel disease outbreak, now.

New Zealand had about 5 million people, and PM Ardern successfully implemented a total lockdown that drove new COVID cases to effectively zero. Then she was voted out, and per Aurynn Shaw the plague ships were let back in.

It can be done. It just requires leadership, discipline, and the willingness to take strict, decisive, politically unpopular measures against violators and spreaders of misinformation. As Schwarzenegger said, when there's a pandemic on, screw your freedoms.

Its immediate deadliness has decreased, but it still causes cardiopulmonary and brain damage, and effects are cumulative with repeated exposure, and now it's endemic and frequently asymptomatic. Differently nasty, but not less nasty.

Not more: sooner (and, as clearly stated in my previous comment, less). By the time most countries were doing lockdowns, it was to prevent their local health systems from completely collapsing, not to contain and eliminate the disease in any real sense.

I think the comparison to plague is accurate, since quarantine and social distancing were effective in reducing mortality during the Black Death, as were plague vaccines.