new | show | ask | jobs Github

newspaper1 a day ago

This is a myopic view of the situation. Suppose you had $100M to spend. What would lower crime more:

1. Helping to shelter the homeless, deal with mental health issues and make sure people are properly fed.

2. Build a mass surveillance network at the expense of all of the above.

Regardless, mass surveillance is far worse than any amount of car theft.

▲

Amezarak a day ago | parent [-]

[flagged]

▲

newspaper1 a day ago | parent [-]

Incorrect on all counts: https://www.numberanalytics.com/blog/impact-of-social-welfar...

Obviously investing in social health improves crime rates. That's just common sense (and backed by all historical data).

▲

Amezarak a day ago | parent [-]

About 20% of US GDP is social spending. What percentage of GDP will get us where we need to be? Why does California have so many notorious problems when, compared with many other states, its social spending is so generous?

Social systems are not as simple as "give people more money", particularly when millions of people have already been socialized into criminality. Thinking this is a total misunderstanding. Most criminals are not stealing to get bread to feed their family. They commit crimes because a) it's fun b) it's what their peers are doing / needed for their social standing and c) it beats working for a living. Yes, a well-socialized conscientious person would never do this except in cases of severe hardship - but that's not the reality of what's happening.

▲

newspaper1 a day ago | parent [-]

California notoriously does not house the homeless nor feed them, leading to massive amounts of crime by people with mental illness having to live on the street. It also has some of the worst wealth inequality on the planet. When a 1 bedroom shack costs >$1M, you've basically taken a sledge hammer to any concept of a society.

20% of US GDP goes mostly to social security, imagine how much crime we'd have if we didn't spend that and every senior citizen had to scavenge for food! I would say at least 99% of of the money we spend on police and the military should instead go to social support and local infrastructure improvements.

▲

Amezarak 16 hours ago | parent [-]

3% of the US GDP is spent on defense - I don't have good numbers for LEO. So your argument is that if we spend 3% more of our GDP and move from 20% to 23%, that will solve crime? [1]

You are mistaking me as an opponent of social spending. I am not. What I am an opponent of is the obvious untruth that we can spend our way out of our social problems. This idea is not only wasting enormous sums of money, it's degrading the justice system (by getting criminals released) and the education system (by lowering standards and ruining the education of conscientious children in the name of keeping all kids in school, no matter how bad.) This is an actively destructive idea.

[1] This is an extra curious idea because of course, for the most part, military spending is a jobs program for young 20 somethings, veterans, and engineers, and obviously even if the police were net-neutral, that would be a jobs program as well. So the hypothesis is that firing the millions of people employed in these sectors and spending more on social workers and benefits would somehow be a net positive over that.

Edit: Small correction. 20% of GDP is dedicated to government social spending. 33% is on both private and public social spending. So 1 out of every 3 dollars in the US is spent on social programs right now. And your contention is that 36% is what’s going to move the needle?

▲

newspaper1 12 hours ago | parent [-]

3% on military and 4% on police. So yes, 7% more spent on improving the country instead of making it worse is certainly a huge improvement.

▲

Amezarak 8 hours ago | parent [-]

Can you quantify how much it improves? How much will say, homicides go down if we eliminate police and defense spending and put it toward social programs?

Can you explain why 33% -> 40% will make such a huge difference? Why didn’t the first 33%? Why are most other countries able to spend much less? At what dollar amount can we safely gauge whether it is working?

▲

newspaper1 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Obviously you can't quantify exactly how much it will improve. My point being that instead of spending our money to make the world a worse place, making our actual country a better place will very obviously reduce crime. The money is helpful, but eliminating police and our military presence around the globe are the biggest wins. We need to stop employing sociopathic sadists armed with heavy weaponry and we need to stop imprisoning so many people (US has the largest prison population in the world).

> Why are most other countries able to spend much less?

Because they don't have an armed force of "police" constantly damaging their society and they don't ship off their children to commit terrorist acts abroad and allow them to come back violent, radicalized and full of PTSD. We should follow their lead.

▲

Amezarak 2 hours ago | parent [-]

> we need to stop imprisoning so many people

We need to imprison more people. The single biggest predictor for future crime is past crime. Multiple offenders are doing almost all the crime. Your hypothesis that we should just let them all out and stop arresting them and they will just stop committing crimes because there are no more mean cops to persecute them is so absurd it beggars belief. Do you know any of these people?

From my perspective, you seem to be making a common error that do-gooders make: projecting your own psychological state onto that of the average criminal. You wouldn't do any of these things, as a conscientious, decent human being, except under severe duress, or perhaps relentless persecution - so they wouldn't either. And that first part is true. It would take a long period of intense suffering, breakdown, and resocialization before the average upstanding citizen began engaging in common criminality.

But I assure you this is not how the average criminal thinks. In millions of tragically unfortunate cases, they were socialized from the beginning into criminality. You cannot fix this with feel-good interventions like therapy or 'equitable' interventions in schools. You are dealing with a different culture. You cannot fix it except maybe through a very long and arduous process analagous to the one that would turn you into a criminal. The will to do this does not exist. It would require prison reform - but not the kind you would approve of.

Consider historical cases, like that of the Comanche - it took many wars to stop them and force them to stop just killing people for sport. Surrounded, at gun point, and under forced re-acculturation, with many 'incidents' still breaking out, you have many examples of them grousing that living like this is just not worth it, compared with riding around having fun killing and looting while your slaves did all the work. This is the sort of situation you are dealing with when it comes to the average criminal mindset. You are dealing with an alien culture in your midst. And it spreads! Social disorder is contagious and breeds itself. While you pooh-pooh the idea of simply removing offenders from the population, a hundred kids are missing out on an education because of three ineducable kids disrupting the school for everyone else, who can't be removed because that wouldn't be fair. Someone down on their luck has their car get stolen with no consequences for the thief and wonders what's the point of doing right. A young unemployed adult with some criminal friends decides to go out with them one night - nothing's happened to them so far, after all. A teenage girl ends up pimped out in LA, and ends up so deeply misocialized by the experience that even when the cops do manage to rescue her, she just goes back to it.

There's always some base rate, because people with low impulse control / antisocial disorders / aggression always exist. But you get beyond that, like we are now, when criminal subcultures emerge. And you absolutely cannot fix it by spending more money - they'll gladly take your benefits and keep stealing and killing.

The only solution, besides radical re-education camps, is removing these people from the general population. Fortunately, most career criminals are already known to the police and are the ones committing most of the crime. Lock up everyone with 2 prior violent crime convictions and violent crime drops by 50% overnight. That's quantifiable.

	▲	newspaper1 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		> From my perspective, you seem to be making a common error that do-gooders make: projecting your own psychological state onto that of the average criminal. I know many people who have broken the law. Like most people, I break it all the time. The US already has the largest prison population in the world. Clearly that doesn't work, and common sense would agree. Putting people in prison is not just costly, every person has connections to society that get damaged. And that's not even getting into over-armed, sadistic police running around everywhere. The real crime is that my tax dollars are stolen to support this fascist force. > Consider historical cases, like that of the Comanche - it took many wars to stop them and force them to stop just killing people for sport. You're talking about the genocide of Indigenous Americans. You know the Comanche aren't the bad guys right? We're too far apart to continue this conversation.