In NY major crime complaints fell when cops stopped ‘proactive policing’ (2017)
latimes.com
latimes.com
Until we stop criminalizing normal activities, this won't change. The stupidity of the drug war is now clear for all to see. In Colorado and other states you can peacefully walk into a store and buy weed. In a state like Alabama you might spend years in jail for a joint. The stupidity, inhumanity, and cruelty is glaring and disturbing. And the system of violence that is perpetrated by this situation in non-legal states and as regards to other illicit substances starts and ends with the police. They arrest people for breaking windows or some other such nonsense, then throw them in prison, give them a record, and basically turn them into real criminals since they no longer have a chance to contribute to society. The less involvement the police have, the better off society is.
Does it make sense to criminalize jaywalking? We're giving the police a reason to potentially kill someone for crossing the street at the same time. That goes for every petty crime out there. Every single crime that police enforce might require that police use deadly force. Do we want to use deadly force for weed smokers, jaywalkers, and single cigarette sellers? Because that's what the 'broken windows' policy of idiocy advocates. Then we wonder why cops are kneeling on people's necks or choking them out for selling a single cigarette? Because as a society, we condone this and we especially encourage it be done to minorities through the laws we pass, the police we hire, and the rules and procedures we approve for enforcement.
Is 3-6% a significant enough difference to draw conclusions from?
I wonder what is the normal variation in major crime complaints from one six week window to another?
> “Major crime complaints,” such as murder, rape, robbery and felony assault. > ... > The scientists found that civilian complaints of major crimes dropped by about 3% to 6% during the slowdown.
>“The cessation of proactive policing corresponds roughly to the relative decline in crime that earlier research attributed to the effects of mass incarceration,” the authors noted.
The article is careful to include the researcher's caveats; ant further study would have a better chance to address the question of a decline in major crime reporting rate. However if somebody tried to report a major assault and was turned away from reporting, I'd hope that the story would get reported on. And if people were assaulted but more fearful to go to the Police than they were before, hopefully there would also be reports. But with the police harassing individuals less, I would think people would be no less likely to go in.
And of course murders are pretty much impossible to not report. But in the time period there may not have been enough to notice a statistically significant decline.
50% of homicides are brought to justice in Chicago, but the remaining half are not normally distributed in terms of crimes per criminal. ~50 people are responsible for half of the unsolved homicides in Chicago.
I am not going to be able to provide a direct reference for this claim. My point is that the rate of severe crimes can be efficiently diminished by targeting professional criminals and the networks that enable them. Policing minor crimes is counterproductive because the harmful side effects of policing (racial and social injustice, legal costs, adversity between police and citizens) are greater than the benefit to the community of removing misdemeanors like vandalism and drug use. You might say that broken windows policing is not Pareto efficient.
The first can get you trust needed to identify your major criminals, the second creates an alliance of presumed criminals that shares little with the police.
What does this mean? If we know who did them, how are they unsolved?
This is based on a pay-walled article that would be interesting to read. One major question that is unanswered in the abstract is whether a reduction in complaints is a useful correlate for reduction in crime. That is just something I don't anything about.
Another question, that I would bet is answered in the article, is if civilian complaints of petty crimes increased or decreased after reductions in proactive policing.
Lastly, the results suggest that proactive policing may not deter major crimes as it is meant to. Do the authers (or others) think this is because proactive policing causes an increase in major crime? Or does it just distract police from major crime? Or is it something else entirely?
It's a pretty common theme in the various incarnations of Batman that the primary reason Gotham City gets so many crazies is that the existence of Batman either attracts or indirectly/accidentally creates them.
If the solution is more damaging than the problem, (and where I grew up, with jumpout vans driving around to stop and pat down random groups of teenagers, it certainly was) then the solution seems unnecessary.
I feel like many commentators here are divorced from what policing on the ground in these places really looks like, there is no finesse or discretion to it.
Mugging is a violent crime and should be policed - but studies also show that people vastly overestimate their risk of being mugged. It definitely happens, but I am very skeptical that "broken window" policing addresses these sorts of violent crimes.
A better move would be to de-densify poverty with mixed income housing, provide support resources, and build trust with police so people will report violent crimes.
> having their car broken into
Cars being broken in to? That's a different matter - I really don't think we have the capacity to police this in any meaningful way, it's a problem endemic to urban neighborhoods and is incredibly hard to police in a way that isn't super disproportionate.
Don't leave valuables in your car, don't lock your doors - they'll just open, rifle through, and leave. I've had my car rifled through tens of times and the most they ever got was some quarters I left in there.
The utilitarian in me feels like being exposed daily to random patdowns and harassments and having people jump out on you is much worse than that. Nobody should live in a neighborhood where the law enforcement doesn't treat them with dignity, just because of the color of their skin or their class background.
You can't cleanly separate what crimes you choose to care about from the policies in place. When voters tell elected officials "decrease car breakins, that's what impacts my vote" that'll translate to these disproportionate policies because the communities being policed do not have the power to sway the policy and it is easy to hide the impact of the policing from the voters.
Not sure how much of an issue this still is, but thieves used to steal airbags. That's a lot more expensive and a PITA to replace.
More on-foot friendly patrols (which should be perfectly doable given much higher density in cities), for example. Or maybe police actually trying to catch actual criminals instead of just acting like insurance agents.
Turning up the pressure to catch stupid, small crimes while letting actual large problems (like consistent theft of wages that outnumbers money lost to robbery 3 to 1) will lead to stupid solutions.
Absolutely and I think there are models of policing that reduce petty crime and obviously people would rather have less petty crime than more. We are all in agreement here.
I just want people to be aware that the policing of their imagination is not always the policing of reality and oftentimes what your gut instinct tells you might work will have pretty large and distorted negative impacts.
I really do think we're all on the same side here. Nobody likes crime and nobody likes police excess. The problem is just that sometimes where we grew up and what experiences we've had can lead us to underestimate one impact and overestimate another.
Now I just leave nothing of value inside the vehicle - even removed my glovebox (another thief ruined the locking mechanism trying to get it out).
I live in a very nice area of DC, cars would get rifled through every ~2 months or so, very late at night and they would move very quickly. Many people have decided that it is worth their while to live there despite this minor inconvenience. If you don't want to live there, that's fine - but please don't vote for people who are going to institute stop & frisk and heavy policing of poor neighborhoods. Those policies don't even work to stop it - the cause is large wealth disparity in a small geographic region.
You may have the choice to live in a certain area, many do not have the choice to live in areas where they are subject to demeaning patdowns and stops.
Pretty much every city is moving to less aggressive policing of petty crime largely because of its pretty blatant failure and the substantial negative impacts it has. Generally sounds like you'll probably want to stay in suburbia.
> Generally sounds like you'll probably want to stay in suburbia.
It rather sounds like you have a strange perspective on urban living. I can't speak for the US, but it isn't normal in any city in Europe for your car to be rifled through every 2 months in a nice area of a city. It isn't even normal for bad areas of cities. If it happens once in a person's life it would be bad luck.
I don't know how you have knowledge of the normal number of car break ins in every neighborhood of every city in Europe, but yes car breakins are not infrequent in the urban US. Ours was probably particularly frequent because it was being targeted by some sort of organized setup, but it is not uncommon.
It's a function of the amount of inequity - Europe is generally has somewhat less wealth inequity in the United States and less generational poverty.
> Generally sounds like you'll probably want to stay in suburbia.
So the poster you replied to was correct to say that they can just move to cities where it isn't accepted that cars are frequently broken into. They don't have to stay safe in suburbia after all.
In sum, car breaks in happen, policing it generally doesn't work very well, stop & frisk is bad, don't vote for people who do it, thank you for coming to my ted talk.
As a Brazilian, wow, that's a high crime area. People here voted a crazy wannabe dictator into the presidency because he promised to fix places that were less bad than this.
Anyway, yes, random stop & frisk probably makes things worse, not better.
Brazil's homicide rate is like 7x the United States, I find it hard to believe that the occasional opening of a door and looking through your car would be high crime by Brazilian standards where people will literally get stopped by armed gangs and kidnapped out of their car.
There were no murders where I lived, no muggings, no particularly violent crime of any kind - just some people would drive up to the rich neighborhoods at like 2:30 am and go through some cars.
The going logic is that the gang violence was isolated to their turf, and the property crime happened in the rich neighborhood on the other side of the housing projects. So there's sweet spots out there.
How would you know if your car got broken into if your doors were unlocked? What city was this (one of Baltimore, DC, Oakland, Chicago, NYC?)?
YMMV but it's not like car break-ins are rare.
Will this affect your insurance if the car is stolen?
Do car thefts of this form even really happen anymore? How would they even prove the doors were unlocked?
I am not sure whether a negative answer would have affected my claim.
Reminder - more total money is stolen from workers in the form of wage theft than is robbed by a factor of ~3 [0], why don't we focus on policing that?
[0]: https://www.epi.org/publication/wage-theft-bigger-problem-fo...
And the rest of your comment is pure whataboutery - yes, we should do both.
> If your country cannot fund a police force that could do both these things then you have much bigger problems.
Underfunded local institutions are the reality in most of the world, not the exception. I'd rather have bodies investigating people who are witholding wages and illegally paying below the minimum wage then spending their day pretending to be a tourist in the hope that someone pickpockets them.
It's odd - it seems among this class of HN commentator-cum-policymaker, evidence driven policy is an unknown concept.
When you're living in poverty, withheld wages is a much larger problem than your apparently daily encounters with aggressive pickpockets, are you kidding me?
What an incredibly tone deaf comment.
Wage theft: didn't get paid for doing something before clocking in or got their hours messed with or whatever, which is also very bad of course, but more spread out and not as directly disastrous as the other scenario even if the total numbers might be higher.
So no, it's not tone deaf if you look past your knee-jerk reaction, it's just a well-reasoned justification why someone might be more mad about thieves than wage theft. It's not unreasonable to have the view that one murder is worse than a trillion people stubbing their toes once a week for a year even if the second scenario might add up to a higher score if you added it up by some quantifiable ethical metric.
Or like you're paid $6/hr to do migrant farm work when the minimum wage is $12. That adds up much more quickly and leads people to turn to things like theft.
That's already half your net worth right there.
> Robbery, pickpocketing, car stolen
The average person, even the average person in poverty, is not going to lose the majority of their net worth from pickpocketing, that's just absurd.
Now you're adding in two other crimes, which you didn't mention in your original comment, (you just said pickpocketing is worse than wage theft). Most people in poverty don't own cars in the first place.
My reaction wasn't knee-jerk - the suggestion that pickpocketing is some sort of epidemic across America affecting the nation's poor is just absurd on face.
Theft is the unlawful taking of property. Robbery is a subset of theft where violence or the threat of violence is used to accomplish the taking.
Pickpockets are thieves, not robbers.
I was making the assumption that total $ robbed was an upper bound on total $ pickpocket, which seems reasonable given what I've observed in the United States - but I am having trouble finding reasonable statistics about incidence in the United States.
“The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.”
People are harassed and delayed for no reason just because of the way they look or where they are coming/going from, even if its their neighborhood. They're also ticketed for minor offenses due to those same "reasons" meanwhile people elsewhere are not having those same offenses punished. You will find plenty of stories from people who lives in neighborhoods where this was applied where you literally have to allow extra time to come and go from your own home because its likely you will be stopped and questioned just going about your daily lives. That would not fly in more affluent communities.
"Proactive Policing" allows implicit and other biases of the police force to be acted on directly because there needs to be no crime to stop someone, its entirely on the polices judgement on who to stop and why.
[0]: https://www.epi.org/publication/wage-theft-bigger-problem-fo...
While both are technically illegal, one is low risk and socially accepted behavior, while the other presents a real threat to many people's safety.
When police seek out and punish the first kind of behavior, people see it as predatory. When it's the second, most people are thankful.
In many poor communities, police seem to have their priorities exactly backwards: they zealously seek out and punish petty victimless crimes, while not investigating serious crimes due to a lack of resources.
I'm not sure if your comment was satire or not. But if it isnt satire -- it is exactly why so many people are so angry.
The privileged attitude is best summarized as: yes, i'm doing something criminal, but so is that PoC, lets go after the PoC [while ignoring my crimes].
This is injustice because true justice is blind, not a tool for selective oppression.
This is one of the things I really dislike about a lot of politics, I see it all too often. There's a problem, so we need to do something in the name of fixing it - doesn't matter if it helps or not, we just have to be able to say we're doing something. But maybe we should step back and look at whether there are better ways to deal with the problems.
These are symptoms of wealth inequality. Do you see wealthy people going around defecating on the ground or breaking glass? No. Do you see middle class people doing these actions? No. These are actions taken by homeless people (and teenagers), who have nothing worth while to do with their time, no money for idle entertainment, and awful living conditions.
I prefer to live in a society that doesn't execute non-violent drug dealers.
US: 655/100k
UK: 135/100K
China: 121/100K
Germany: 77/100K
Iceland: 37/100K
It feels like we are consuming just a little too much of the "security" product. Maybe we should try consuming the "justice" product. I hear it's pretty good.
[1] https://www.prisonstudies.org/highest-to-lowest/prison_popul...
Our goal should be to get someone as close as possible to 0 chance of recidivism in as short a time as possible.
Here's a picture and discussion that highlights this: https://smart-online-marketing.nl/en/conversion/cultural-dif...
"you can see how every country on the world scores on individualism, from light-green to dark-green. Light-green means a low score on individualism, in other words, strongly collectivist. Dark-green countries are strongly individualist."
Strong arm tactics used by police do not stop it. It is simply going to happen. Spending resources to make sure everyone has what they need will drop petty crime rates.
this is all my opinion.
I think the same is true with upholding traffic laws, for example. My home province of Ontario loves to create rules that sound great (and sometimes overly strict) on paper, and then proceed to not enforce them, ever. Municipal police services have essentially given up on speeding unless it's truly outrageous, like 50kmh over. But what they fail to realize is the causal link between small offences and large ones. Hypocrisy about "small" offences breeds general contempt for rules of all kind.
There are subsequent studies that suggest it didn't have as much merit as people imagined it did.
Sure broken windows sounds reasonable. Show examples of where it has worked. Show example of how the poorest folks have benefited from broken windows policing. Your mind will change when you become the target.
I'm not advocating for lawlessness. While obeying all laws I've been abused by police. I'm advocating for police that take time to understand a situation before they start busting heads. I'm advocating for police to follow the law too and not hide behind 'I smelled something', 'this person seemed suspicious', 'this person was resisting' - where all of that leads to my word against the word of a crooked cop who was trained to beat me up and then lie about the reasons why.
It might work if we had a benevolent AI that could hand out tickets for minor offenses without giving any humans access to the surveillance network necessary to implement such a policy. In the real world we have humans self selecting for a job that requires violence, and then being kept in check by a global fraternity, that values protecting each other regardless of the circumstance.
"The broken windows theory is a criminological theory that states that visible signs of crime, anti-social behavior, and civil disorder create an urban environment that encourages further crime and disorder, including serious crimes."
Now when you look at a riot such as the one in Minneapolis and in in prior cases such as California 92, how do you not see a further increase in crime and disorder once a subset of the population realizes that something seems to have gone unpunished? Even in smaller cases such as graffiti, an area tends to have a higher rate of graffiti the more graffiti there is in the area. The reason is simple, others came before and managed to do, opportunistic individuals with broken morals will abuse it.
Yes, sh*& is going down here. We need change. The arrest of Omar Jimenez of CNN on camera accurately represents the situation for black men in Minneapolis. This is not about broken windows or graffiti. This is about George Floyd, Philando Castile, Jamar Clark, the fact that Devin Chauvin who killed George Floyd has been involved in multiple shootings and has never been prosecuted -- even after killing other people. That's your broken window, hah.
Sure you can say intuitively "if people see crimes go unpunished they may be inclined to commit further crimes" but the problem is that policing is an aggregate function of society, not an individual one.
Communities rightfully question the efficacy policing petty property crimes with the total value of white collar crime vastly dwarfs the value of property crime. Often these white collar criminals are connected to or directly the cause of economic devastation in these communities, yet the communities themselves are the ones who bear the brunt of over-policing and the violence that causes.
Certified crazy friend wanted to shoot people at a synagogue. Family, friends, employer and psychiatrist agree he needs to be taken in? Nothing.
Witnessed a person hit my car, give them the license plate? Nothing.
Multiple burglaries in a remote area, with video footage and time stamps? Do they run a Google location tracking query after I point out they can and should? Of course not.
Hand them the address of a repeated trespasser that’s threatened to damage my property, with video footage? They’ll enforce the law ($500 fine next offense, misdemeanor after that) if I spend $10k’s on a civil case, and the court orders them to do so. If I do nothing, they’ll encumber the deed to my property with a prescriptive easement for the jackass.
Nightly drug deals in my back yard keep waking me up? They’ll have a patrol car drive by in 5 hours.
That time the DMV received, recorded but failed to process my smog check? >$1000 in fines, and two days missed work.
Once a black lady ran a light in a car I‘d sold. That was the crime of the century! They tracked me down and threatened to take legal action against me if I didn’t say who she was. I had no idea; it went to an auction house. It took multiple phone calls and two letters to prove I hadn’t had a sex change and somehow switched races. They “resolved” it by saying they’d either drop charges, or they’d assume I waived my right to trial and issue an arrest warrant. They said there was no way for me to tell me which of those things they did. It’s been a few years, and no one’s arrested me. I guess I’m good?
Each incident happened in a different city in the SF bay area.
[1]https://www.npr.org/2016/11/01/500104506/broken-windows-poli...
You get what you optimize for.
no law = no crime
not sure why no one else has ever realized this
guess i am a genius
This happens surprisingly often in the USA. I won't bother inundating HN with all the sources that a simple search will turn up, but aside from many reports of this happening, I have first-hand experience.
I called the non-emergency police number because my neighbor's large dog had escaped and was kind of freaking out the neighborhood, growling at people it didn't know, barking at people through their house windows, etc... Police showed up 3 hours later, issued me a ticket for being parked 14 inches from the street curb, gave me a verbal warning about "showing more respect" to police when I re-stated the reason for calling them, then left without doing anything about the dog. Protect and Serve.