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Comment by throwaway15579 | Hacker News Reader

One thing that comes to mind here is that on-demand private security with fast response times are common-place in high crime countries and cities (such as Brazil and South Africa). I'm honestly not surprised that people in LA are turning to this and I wouldn't be surprised if this catches on pretty quickly where I live (Seattle).

From what I can tell it seem like almost complete open season on property theft and damage in Seattle.

In short, I don't really blame Citizen for doing this, I blame the politicians for not providing an adequately safe or lawful city.

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It would be scary to see a country like the US fail to point where public police services are abandoned in favor of private forces.

I think it could happen too because private police forces benefit the rich at the expense of the poor and middle class. Why pay for police in the poor neighborhoods if you have walls and private police for your gated community?

What we’re seeing in western countries worries me. The progressive tax system is being attacked IMO because breaking it benefits the wealthy. It’s much cheaper for the richest 20% to fund private police forces for themselves than funding a public police force for everyone.

And IMO the reason the police can’t keep up is because we’ve had 40 years of underfunding public institutions so the wealthy can hoard more and more money. It’s not shocking to see increased levels of drug abuse and crime because those correlate with poverty.

We need to force the rich to pay there fair share of taxes. The resources being used for yachts and private jets needs to be getting put into education, healthcare, infrastructure, etc..

This is a great example of a misallocation of capital. Instead of funding an app for a private police force we’d be better off if that money had been collected via taxes and allocated to building schools.

South Africa and Brazil have a common root cause of their crime problem: a tiny but grossly engorged upper class holds the majority of the wealth and income while everyone else eats mud. As the USA edges closer to that reality, our problems will begin to mirror theirs.

> South Africa and Brazil have a common root cause of their crime problem: a tiny but grossly engorged upper class holds the majority of the wealth and income while everyone else eats mud.

Studies correlating wealth inequality with criminality are less than convincing [1].

    A 2016 study, controlling for different factors than previous
    studies, challenges the aforementioned findings. The study finds
    "little evidence of a significant empirical link between overall
    inequality and crime", and that "the previously reported positive
    correlation between violent crime and economic inequality is largely
    driven by economic segregation across neighborhoods instead of
    within-neighborhood inequality". A 2020 study found that in Europe,
    the inequality-crime correlation was present but weak (0.10),
    explaining less than 3% of the variance in crime with a similar
    finding occurring for the United States, while another 2019 study
    argued that the effect of inequality on property crime was nearly
    zero.

From that same article, Alaska has the lowest wealth inequality in the US and also the highest homicide rate.

Impoverishment doesn’t cause criminality, see e.g. post-internment Japanese-American and early 20th century E.European Jewish American immigrant populations. Rather, the root causes of systemic poverty are strongly correlated with criminality [2]. Which isn’t to say extreme wealth inequality isn’t bad: the French Revolution readily disproves that notion. But the French Revolution is in a different league from property crime.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_economic_inequality...

[2]: https://www.nytimes.com/1994/10/16/books/what-is-intelligenc...

[2]: https://www.nytimes3xbfgragh.onion/1994/10/16/books/what-is-...

Already happening in Seattle you just have to live in Durkan's hood: https://laurelhurstcc.com/security/

The popularity of such security services in Brazil and South Africa is the first thing I thought about when I heard "defund the police" last summer. I then told everyone that people will start spending a lot more money on increasing their security, be it fencing or private security forces. It's not a complicated concept.

Private security patrolling exclusive neighborhoods in LA has been a thing since the 70s. Even the scientology properties all over town have a private security force riding on those mall cop segways.

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