Treating violence as a public health problem has produced great results
mosaicscience.com
mosaicscience.com
As far from perfect as police in the UK are, I get the impression that the Brits have a very different relationship from the police than most Americans do.
It's probably a cultural difference.
Even with family as law enforcement, I've never trusted police. As a vet I'm disgusted by their lack of training and quickness to shoot first and ask questions later. Last I checked the average is 32 dogs shot by US cops a day. I don't even need to delve into the refusal to wear body cams, race issues, etc. etc. American police have not given Americans any reason to assume they are ever on the same side.
Eighteen year old infantrymen, who have an infinitely greater chance of danger, have more resolve and professionalism than American cops. I'd trust that 18 year old ground pounder over a cop any day over any thing.
An idiot with authority is a bad time for everyone.
You tell me how many dogs, blacks, children, wtf-ever. is required before it's OK to 1) Earnestly hold police and the system accountable and 2) To have a healthy wariness, if not outright distrust, of cops and LEOs in general.
Seems to me like we've passed those thresholds and then-some a while ago.
A few shows I’d recommend are: 999 What’s Your Emergency 24 Hours in Police Custody The Met
I fully acknowledge the risk that these shows are positively edited to present police in the best light, but I get a sense the British police followed in these programmes have a much heavier focus on deescalation in their training than many of the police forces in the US.
>This meant ramping up traditional penal measures – increased stop-and-search and stricter sentencing for knife possession – alongside preventive measures in line with the public health approach.
Resulted in all of the most recalcitrant offenders being put behind bars right at the onset of the program, leaving behind only those people more amenable to non-violence.
Or put another way, when the doctor mentions seeing constant repeated faces in her ER:
>Often, the same people would come back through the accident and emergency departments again and again, repeated victims and perpetrators of violent attacks.
Would simply locking up every one of those people have produced a similar or greater drop in violent crime compared to the VRU approach? Is the "violent interceptor" and community outreach and counselors and all that simply gilding a lily?
Also:
>The incident has stayed with her, an indication of how bad the situation in her city had become.
Well that or it's 1890s Germany. The Junkers loved to scar each other on the face with their dueling swords, as a way to prove their manhood and as a mark of inclusion in the aristocratic orders.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dueling_scar
Some cultures get barbed wire tattoos around their arm, others a superficial slashing wound to the face. Tomato tomato ....that expression really doesn't work in text.
When looking at trends, murder rate is a better metric than counting violent crimes, because statistics for other violence are quite easily impacted by changes in policies of how to record reports.
A dead person is a dead person, it's a very consistent metric. Of course, it is also a changing metric as emergency care improves - wounds that used to be deadly can now be treated. For instance, Swedish cities are reporting a vastly improved care for shooting wounds, as hospitals have gained experience and developed methods in treating them.
Othe crime stats can be easily and massively gamed.
What if there's a living person who would have died if they had not received prompt medical care?
https://www.umass.edu/newsoffice/article/research-finds-us-m...
It's probably caused by the ban on leaded gasoline. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead-crime_hypothesis
https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/624/media/images/74298000/gif/...
https://www.motherjones.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/blog_...
Extrapolating from a single neighbourhood to an entire city is not valid reasoning.
Perhaps the neighbourhood was especially amenable to the program, perhaps the crime rate failed to stay low, perhaps some extra-judicial phenomena struck that particular area (say a new factory opening up that boosted the local economy significantly). Or coming at it from the other angle, who's to say New York hasn't had one or two of its neighbourhoods experience extreme marked drops in crime year-over-year too? The 75% over a decade figure is an aggregate for the entire city, and surely it's going to have happened faster in some areas and slower in others.
Only by comparing apples to apples, or in this case cities to cities, and not just for a single year but over many years can we reach valid conclusions. And in that case we find the VRU approach in Glasgow failed to out perform the null hypothesis.
When averaging results over a whole city, you've eliminated most sources of noise. But if you average neighborhood by neighborhood, then you have 20x smaller samples, and on top of that, 20x more chances to p-hack. So it's unsurprising to me that there exists some neighborhood where crime rates dropped significantly in one year.
I think GP's comment would be stronger if they had given absolute numbers instead of "67% decrease".
These students groups were also great recruiting grounds for nazi later on too.
I am only pointing out ritualistic marking of men as a sort of "manhood rite" is hardly unique to Glasgow, or the poor/rundown. It has historical precedent all over the world with all kinds of groups, from landed German aristocrats to ...well Violent Glaswegians (which I am surprised to learn is actually a tv trope!).
>These students groups were also great recruiting grounds for nazi later on too.
The Prussian junkers were really not too fond of the Nazis, and were behind several attempts to assassinate Hitler including the July 20 plot.
It does not says it is unique nor that is unique to poor/rundown. It says that it is bad sign. Landed German aristocrats, aka military of country with about to expand and with highly militarized culture is not an argument it is ok not that it is not bad sign.
The Prussian junkers were supporting monarchism, were anti-democratic, were largely racist. Some were against nazi, others joined being attracted to fight-eager culture and ideology of great Germany.
Not everyone in 1890 Germany was racist. There were big political fights between anti-Jewish groups and those who wanted to keep Jewish emancipation and freedom alive. Seriously, in general, the worst person of period X is not typical representative of that period.
Also, parent said that: "The Prussian junkers were really not too fond of the Nazis, and were behind several attempts to assassinate Hitler including the July 20 plot."
Junkers description in around 1930, including racism, is absolutely relevant to that argument. In 1930, they were supporting monarchism, were anti-democratic, were largely racist even by contemporary standards. Manhood defined through eagerness to go to war, willingness to kill/hurt/be hurt and related manhood rites are not coincidental.
The original argument was "male scarification is an old and well-recognised social phenomenon, that transcends social class". Not "those old German aristocrats sure were swell fellas".
2.) My argument is that the ritual is related and caused by other cultural factors. In case of Junkers, male scarification is absolutely related to their military culture, overall violence, eagerness to go to war, authoritarianism and so on and so forth. It is not independent factor.
Male scarification like that is what cultures about to turn violent do, like for example culture the parent has choosen as example.
2) Sure. Traditional masculinity is closely tied to strength, violence, authoritarianism and such. I bet there's plenty of that in Glasgow street gangs, much as there is in many working class cultures.
3) More like, male scarification is what traditional masculine cultures do, and thus is likely associated with militarism, warfare, subjugation and other such pursuits.
As is murder, so how is that not weasel wording? The person quoted in the article doesn't make the point that "this is entirely new and unique", so to bring up that it's not is kind of a strawman in the first place.
If one wants to imply that something not being unique makes it okay, let them make the actual argument directly (and honestly instead of responding to something that nobody said), which I notice nobody even attempted.
> militarism, warfare, subjugation
Not to mention despair, nihilism, self-destruction, probably a whole metric ton of problems in bed, shitty music, and of course fried heroin.
Prussian militaristic culture had to do and influenced with both events.
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1960 events like communist scare, cold war, civil rights fights and lynching are absolutely relevant to contemporary American culture and politics.
The question can't just be, how do we reduce crime? We also have to think about how the system affects the people caught up in it.
Reducing the prison population means diminishing that political advantage, so there will be resistance from those who benefit from it.
The discrimination narrative is very compelling on a large scale, but offers courts no alternatives when facing a specific instance of rape, assault or murder. What is the judge supposed to do, pat the criminal on the head and send him home?
Perhaps we could develop Alpha and Beta for violence as a better tool to understand what works and what doesn't.
I'm curious, was this crime very unusual even for Almaty, that someone gets killed by strangers over something like a car mirror, or is it the fact that it was Ten that caused such attention?
It would be interesting (and a welcome outcome) to see if this insight and method of fighting crime is accepted and used by locales high relative violence rates.
Lauren Southern receives $68,000 bill from Victoria Police
https://www.heraldsun.com.au/blogs/andrew-bolt/lauren-southe...
https://www.heraldsun.com.au/blogs/andrew-bolt/lauren-southe...
If you legalize drugs in Mexico though and they can start legitimate companies that might end the violence, but would be a huge blow to the rule of law.
I disagree with your perceived loss of justice should drug use be legalized. Laws exist to protect people. Drug laws have only served to hurt nearly every person on earth when considering supply chain and tangential effects. By opening up the law to allow people to self medicate we are actually reducing harm at every step from the companies producing raw materials to the end users. To only consider a solution that outlaws the existence of an addict is inhumane, immoral, impossible, and outright delusional. To learn more about these topics and hopefully gain some empathy for addicts I suggest reading Gabor Matès "In the realm of hungry ghosts."
https://barnesandnoble.com/w/in-the-realm-of-hungry-ghosts-g...
If the cartels are allowed to operate legally, I'm worried about them having committed crimes for decades and being rewarded with first moved advantage into the new market. I think that would be a slap in the face to the rule of law. I'm not worried about the consumer as typically people should be able to self medicate and experiment as you suggest.
If you're a meth producer that killed (suspected) competitors and snitches, you're in for a lot of problems if you want to make your business legal.
"Oh, hi. I'd like to register a new LLC, these are my papers..."
I’m not sure you’ve run the numbers on this. In 2016 there was 11k gun homicides in the US, and about 64k people died from opioid overdoses alone. I can’t really see an insentive here for the US.
Anyway I don't think people calling for legalisation are suggesting heroin should be handed out to school kids at break time. You can legalise it and setup strict regulations around it as well as redirect money spent on enforcement to health and prevention.
Until the police/military are strong and law abiding enough, cartels will continue to see violence as a risk worth taking even if their main business becomes legal.
Analyzing our current justice system from this perspective shows just how absurd it is. Sending people to jail for committing minor crimes is like sending people to a smallpox quarantine camp for coughing.
But nobody is testing these things because they think they know better.
Simple assault, theft, fraud, reckless driving. Hey, someone came up and beat the crap out of you for the $20 in your wallet? Well sorry, we can't do anything but talk about how they might of come to this point. Someone who gets the flu, unless they're acting to intentionally infect others, has no "victim".
That doesn't mean justice should be based on retribution, but removal of the offender from society is something which society typically requires.
Alternative treatment of violence is not the same as saying there are "no consequences" - it's acknowledging that to actually "cure" violent behavior requires other methods.
Removing people from society has historically not stopped violence (see Gulags, mass prison, etc). What it does do is instill a sense of fear in the populace that the governing power can use as a form of control. A sense of fear brought on by, you guessed it, a threat of violence!
https://medium.com/@bjcampbell/everybodys-lying-about-the-li...
Note how it is a meta-analysis of 130 actual studies conducted by researchers at actual institutions aimed at establishing causal relationships and not a bunch of unrelated crime statistics pulled off of wikipedia and scattered sources and dropped into an excel spreadsheet.
The policy came about because a particular CDC head in the 1980s specifically said he intended to show firearms as the root cause of violence, nevermind what any actual stats said. The CDC to this day still has problems with doing a study, not liking the result, and then deciding it would rather not publish the study - https://www.forbes.com/sites/paulhsieh/2018/04/30/that-time-...
This has no effect on private research. It only prevents federal money from being used for a traditionally partisan cause.
If even 5% of a research coming out of a publication was biased, nobody would let anything in the publication be cited. When that publication is funded exclusively by tax payer money paid to a government with a fiduciary duty...
The question is not what is legal but what is happening, and whether changing the law would allow a different enforcement.
https://metro.co.uk/2018/07/15/new-york-murder-rate-is-much-...
London is safer that New York on almost every measure, but NYC has come a long way over the past 20 years.
"Where could a public health approach to violence be introduced next? One possibility is London, where in 2017 knife crime among under-25s reached a five-year high. In recent months, the Metropolitan Police commissioner, Cressida Dick, and the mayor, Sadiq Khan, have been among those calling for a public health approach."
If you click on 'References' at the bottom of the article you get a short drop down list.
But there is also a companion article [1] that gives more references and links.
[1] https://mosaicscience.com/story/briefing-reading-violence-cr...
“Despite the fact that violence has always been present, the world does not have to accept it as an inevitable part of the human condition,” says the WHO guidance on violence prevention.
But this is bullshit. Humans are a violent species. Always have been, always will be. The only question that's relevant is: when is it acceptable that violence be used? Ideally it would be a bare minimum, and by people who have nothing to benefit from it. If there's a crack house with a kid that needs rescuing, or a bank robbery gone bad with a hostage, I want somebody somewhere to be using violence.
Public health approaches to social problems are interesting, both because they have some statistically significant benefit -- and because they tend to over-generalize what the problems are and leave out many important edge cases. You can't say they're bad because there is progress to be shown. But you always wonder how many edge cases were overlooked and if overall we aren't institutionalizing a hardcore subset that will never be solved at the expense of making the problem simple enough to mentally engage with.
I would frame it as: Life is challenging and the world is not a nice place. If you succeeded in completely removing all aggression from the species, we would soon go extinct.
So managing such tendencies and channeling them constructively is a necessity. Our very survival depends on not being completely rid of such traits.
We want to be civilized, not "domesticated" like sheep waiting for slaughter.
We want the maximum amount of peaceful diversity we can have both as individuals and as small social groups. It's a prerequisite for survival, as you point out.
I am concerned that we tend to look at problems top-down, in simplistic language and jargon. This almost always leads to a call for more homogenization of the species. That's a survival risk for us.
-- Kung Fu
Why? Because sabre tooth tigers would eat us?
What does aggression even mean, in this context? When someone kicks a homeless person to death, that's aggression. If you step in, and become violent if necessary, is that aggression too in your mind? That's the first time I hear that. From Merriam-Webster:
> 1. a forceful action or procedure (such as an unprovoked attack) especially when intended to dominate or master
> 2. the practice of making attacks or encroachments; especially: unprovoked violation by one country of the territorial integrity of another
> 3. hostile, injurious, or destructive behavior or outlook especially when caused by frustration
What is that good for? You don't even need any of that to defend against any of it. Call it aggression or violence, saying it is needed because only it can defend against itself makes no sense. Just as the claim that we have these dark urges we need to somehow "channel" never really held water IMO, it just gets repeated because it comforts people in their complacency or even guilt.
If this were true, then how come daycare centers and nurseries don't have to deal with violent toddlers all day long? By your premise, our violence is genetic, so infants must be taught to control their violence in order to become succesful adults. At what stage of development does that happen?
Source: GF used to work in kindergarten and now works in school
When you talk about violence being a positivie in solving a bank robberies, you should be talking about how to prevent bank robberies in the first place, rather than designing a solution that presumes the robbery is going to happen no matter what.
Violence has no place in human society, and we have appropriate solutions in place if a human wants to express similar emotions to violence (eg by playing sport, video games etc) that have net positive effects on society.
It doesn't contradict the notion "humans are violent". Social structures are often used to prevail collectively in conflicts, often violent, and one may say that's why they evolved.
Conflict is inevitable. Violence is not.
That's easy to say when you're not the one being held hostage in the bank robbery!
We shouldn't learn to debug code or mitigate downtime either, we should just write code without bugs...
Humans are a flightless species. Always have been, always will be.
Now if you'll excuse me, I'm late for my flight.