Hacker News Reader

Comment by anovikov | Hacker News Reader

Crazy why this is happening in a developed country. Why not just put cameras everywhere, track and remove these people forever? It shouldn't be so hard to do - they aren't some organised crime, just a bunch of homeless drug addicts.

View on HN

Atlanta has one of the highest surveillance cameras per capita rates in the world and people who live in certain neighborhoods there know to leave their car doors unlocked to avoid getting their windows smashed. Having lots of cameras don't do you any good if no one watches or reviews them. Also many of these thieves are already well known to the police and get little more than time-served when they go before a judge for the nth time for the same crime. The jail there has been chronically overflowing for decades, even after multiple court decrees declaring such overcrowding to be illegal. There's little appetite to keep expanding jail space, so even if judges started handing out harsher sentences, unless the crime becomes one that requires prison rather than jail, there's no where to put the thieves when caught.

Why little appetite? What's difficulty building massive (possibly housing many millions, to deter people properly), gulag-style camps? And make sure to keep them till they become too old to be a serious threat.

Seriously, just clean the streets.

Any source for Atlanta? I’ve never heard of high surveillance or anything.

Maybe instead of creating a police state to "remove people forever", we should make sure people don't become homeless drug addicts in the first place?

The US has a dearth of psychiatric beds available, with 14 beds per 100k population. The EU for comparison has 69. Experts say you need at least 50. [0] [1].

You have all these people that need help, but have no way of getting it. Add to that the rampant inequality and the high cost of housing and it's no surprise things got this bad.

We need to fix the systemic issues, not just lock up some poor souls that were failed by the system.

[0] https://www.npr.org/2017/11/30/567477160/how-the-loss-of-u-s...

[1] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/-/e...

this is a naive view of the world. not all homelessness is involuntary. the issue is much more complex than "why don't we just do more to help these people?"

I'm from Austria and homelessness is a non-issue here. There's 15k homeless in the entire country. [0]

I can't even remember the last time I saw a homeless person in Vienna, a city of two million people. The reason it's like that is because we fixed the systemic issues that plague the US. [1]

It's not my view of the world that's naive. It's yours that's overly cynical and that cynicism is holding your country back.

[0] https://www.feantsa.org/download/austria-2017859919493467368...

[1] https://crosscut.com/2017/06/homelessness-housing-crisis-sea...

Factoring for population that's almost identical.

0.16% for Austria and 0.17% for the US, given my back of the envelope math and a quick Google search.

You sure those systemic issues are fixed?

edit: Numbers I used.

Austria 8933346[0]/15000[1] - 0.16%

US: 330000000[2]/580466[3] - 0.17%

[0]https://www.migration.gv.at/en/living-and-working-in-austria...

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29596289

[2]https://www.census.gov/popclock/

[3]https://endhomelessness.org/homelessness-in-america/homeless...

Very interesting, I can't argue with your math, props to you!

I have however lived in cities in both the US and Austria extensively and can anecdotally tell you the homelessness doesn't even compare.

If all those numbers are correct, I would assume it's a distribution issue? Maybe there's a small percentage of homeless folks all over Austria, while they're a lot more segregated into certain cities in the US?

Yes these are called sanctuary cities - liberal-ran cities where bosses just seem to love bums.

How do you propose to "remove" them "forever"? Are you suggesting the death penalty for petty theft? Or housing them and feeding them for the rest of their lives without possibility of parole or remediation?

The US already has more prisoners per capita than any other country in the world. Is the "throw everybody you don't like in jail" approach actually working?

Massive, multimillion people gulag style camp system where people are forced to work on infrastructure projects for 10-15 year sentences (till they are too old to be a threat anymore), for yes things like petty theft. And yes this system must be built with an explicit goal to make a profit and have no outside funding. If it makes no profit, simplify security (less fancy cameras, guard shifts etc and more bullets).

Eradicate the motivation for behaviour like that - make sure people know that stealing stuff from cars results in a multiple year incarceration with hard work and a bullet for minimal disobeyance (and probably, because we all know nearly none of these people can get fixed, with a goal of destroying their health and physical abilities to the point they really won't be a threat once released).

Or there could even just be civilian clothed police and arrest and prosecute the perpetrators... Should give a hint in reasonable amount of time...

That would be racist.

Why should anyone have any freedom or privacy, really? We could have much less crime under a totalitarian system.

Also, to where do you propose to "remove" these people forever, and how much would that cost? Is this a proposal for a "final solution"?

History does seem to point towards the public welcoming more totalitarian systems when more free systems fail to address issues such as public safety. Regardless of if that's good for the public in the long run or not doesn't stop it from seeming like a good idea at the time when the "free" system shows no hope of being able to address the situation.

There's no "freedom" to break into people's cars, and there shouldn't be.

I think the argument isn't that people should be free to do that, but that it may not be worth giving that level of observational ability to the governing body to stop car break ins.

This has to be a troll post. And it seems to have worked.

They didn't just sprout out of the ground. They are not the cause, they are also a symptom of a broken system.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com