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Comment by kstenerud | Hacker News Reader

This is normal in a country where inequality is too high. The lower class starts to feel excluded from society. Over time as the groups are separated from each other by wealth, security gates, policing etc, they lose empathy for each other. As inequality grows, the underclass grows resentful, then eventually hostile.

"Reaching out" and "being compassionate" won't work, because it does nothing to solve the underlying problem (poverty and exclusion). In fact, it just comes off as condescending (which it is). "Getting tough on crime" only accelerates the decline because now you're declaring war on the underclass. Now they REALLY have nothing to lose, and are fighting for survival.

And so you watch in horror as your once beautiful city goes into decline, feeling powerless to do anything. The left pushes for more leniency, the right pushes for more punishment, and the whole city goes to shit while everyone ignores the elephant in the room.

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Lumping together the violent criminal class as the underclass is pretty offensive. Just because you're poor/working class doesn't mean you have to resort to... er... cracking people's head open with a baseball bat unprovoked.

This is not normal.

Actually, it's quite normal in highly unequal societies, and has been documented time and time again throughout history, as has the cycle of wealth redistribution. Nobody has managed to stop the inevitable march to redistribution, although they have managed to mitigate the late-stage violent period in some cases, and even avoid violent revolution.

there are many much more unequal societies than the US where this just isn't a problem. russia or china, for example. their rates of violent crimes like this are far below that of the US.

it's a pretty idiotic trend in recent years to reduce every societal problem to a income, wealth or other types of inequalities. there are societal problems that are completely and utterly caused by different issues, and this is one of them.

China has a huge wealth gap like in the US, yes, but _everyone_, even peasant farmers, can afford health care and real food that isn’t McDonalds. The lowest class materially knows their life is improving, year over year, so they don’t have cause to act out.

Saying “look at their rates of violent crime” overlooks how the Chinese government _very heavily_ cracks down on dissent or violent offenders in the general case, usually by shooting everyone indiscriminately or making a public example out of them.

Anecdotally, I’ve been at a Chinese bar when a fight broke out. People tried resolving it quickly, before the police found out. If a situation escalates enough, a whole truck of police show up and beat everyone there, including bystanders, for not “keeping the peace”.

> russia or china, for example. their rates of violent crimes like this are far below that of the US.

Hm. I am myself not from Russia exactly but from 90s Baltics and I personally remember repeated occasions I had to do end up in fights with local “trash”.

Once that ended with a guy punching one of the girls from our crowd in the face because she was being too outspoken about him trying to incite a fight with one of us. To be fair we should have expected that but none of us had any time to react.

To be clear that is actually quite a normal thing. Well, at least at the time it was and the area I lived in was not one of those incredibly poor areas. Russia has way worse places.

So yeah, we never reported that because truth to be told it was very usual and the whole general philosophy is to endure or to fight back yourself and not go to the police. So I would not think this stuff ends up in statistics.

What ends up in the stats is all of the really bad stuff like rape and killings at the same time. I would not even expect any medium-hard definition of “rape” would be reported on a regular basis let alone someone getting punched in their face.

china has been working continuously to get people out of poverty and that work continues. from the perspective of the people they mostly feel that they are better off than they were a decade or more ago.

this is the difference to the US. poor people in the US do not see that things are getting better for them.

also in china, everyone, even the poorest have access to affordable healthcare.

most poor people in china do not live in cities but outside where they have land to sustain themselves, so while their life may be poor for our standards, it is nothing like the experience of poor people in the US.

china values social stability first and foremost and works to keep it that way while in the US poor people are blamed for their own condition, like they should just work harder to get out of poverty, little is done to actually enable them to do so.

so no, china is absolutely not more unequal. much less so. there are poor areas and richer areas, but within each area everyone is pretty much equal.

So your preferred solution is to segregate poor people? Wild.

Tell that to the police, who target the working class with crimes like loitering, jaywalking, or "driving on a suspended license" (inability to keep up with court fine on top of court fine)

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/04/coronavirus-ne...

From what I have seen in Minneapolis/St. Paul, those are things (low-level, livability crimes) which have stopped being enforced over the past 5-10 years. We are starting to see the effects of this inverse-broken-windows social experiment, and it's not looking good, at least where I live.

e.g. Aggressive panhandling, tent cities, traffic infractions, public transit fare evasion, shoplifting (<$1k), etc.

And that will continue getting steadily worse until public outcry causes the city to reverse course and get "tough on crime" again. After that, the "us vs them" mentality crystallises into fractured communities that eventually start to be run by gangs, similar to what you get in Brazil.

cool, the typically slippery slope. wonder if there could be other reasons for latin american countries being destabilized... hmm

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...

b/c there could be no other reasons for this to be the case, and the only solution is to arrest, jail, or fine people potentially exacerbating their poverty?

this sounds like pearl clutching and not wanting to think more about an issue with tons of variables.

If you maltreat 10 poverty stricken people to the point of desperation, one or two probably will act out this way.

More will probably kill themselves, though.

I think we have to talk in broad swaths here, we can't zoom in on individuals.

Unprovoked? Neither “class” has realistic access to social services or health care in the US, so the mental health and addiction issues that often lead a person down this road go unaddressed.

Further, the US legal system (and US society) heavily stigmatizes “offenders”. Once a person is down its extremely hard to get back up, and people need money survive.

Not saying that violence is ok, but in many cases people just need help instead of punishment.

Agreed, we need to treat addiction much much more aggressively.

Here in CA/SF the current policy is to simply ignore low-level crime (which funds their drug addiction aka "to survive")... instead let's take people off the street (and take them off drugs).

Inequality is problem, but the problem sure as heck can’t be solved at the local level. Being tough on crime can help push the problem somewhere else at least: next door Bellevue will send SWAT out on anybody who so much as lays down on a bench (annoying the homeless population enough that they move on to Seattle). Being compassionate works in the opposite way: Seattle attracts people from as far away as Texas who have no chance at housing really anywhere, because they will get more support here than where they are from (recently read about some guy who decided to use their on release Texan prison open bus ticket to head to Seattle and then got caught breaking into someone’s house to sleep). Local solutions obviously have adverse impractical effects: you can push the problem to someone else or try to solve the entire country’s problem, there isn’t much middle ground to be had.

Some sort of federal solution really is needed, or our cities could be in huge trouble.

Unfortunately, history doesn't offer much comfort. The usual way that wealth is redistributed after a period of high inequality is via revolution. FDR managed to stave off disaster last time with the new deal, but congress was far less split along ideological lines then.

Most social revolutions only occurred because the people in charge were incompetent and almost completely clueless. As long as the regime can co-opt (or otherwise remove) the potential leaders of this revolution and commit to some modest reforms it can survive almost indefinitely (without external interference, e.g. climate change, plague or war) at least this seems to have almost always been the case historically.

The USA has gone through periods of high inequality before without relying on revolutions to solve the problem. Higher taxes on income and wealth, more support programs for the poor, etc… our political system is robust enough that we can solve our problems without shooting each other (I hope).

> Higher taxes on income and wealth, more support programs for the poor, etc…

Half of the country thinks that doing those things will literally destroy the country. The other half is willing to compromise with the first half. The same folks who preach no compromise, and tend to own more than one gun apiece.

Not holding my breath here.

My impression here that this sort of problem is a progressive problem though, seeing that the worst cases I see around here are always the progressive cities(Sf, etc). The right have their own issues, but this doesn't seem as severe in their strongholds?

Or perhaps it's a city thing. How does this compare to other cities?

Pretty much every major city is seeing skyrocketing housing prices amid wage stagnation. The economy is driving homelessness. Progressive policies attempt to serve the homeless population where in place, authoritarian policies house and feed the homeless in jails. Either approach works in a steady state, but they're addressing symptoms and not the root cause, a sick economy.

Are there conservative "strongholds" with rising or high population? That's most likely where you would see more of this stuff, areas with more people

No clue to be honest. I've seen the finger pointed at progressive handling of crime in SF and Seattle, so I was curious if anyone had a counterexample for this.

Stop excusing bad behavior.

Stop spoiling The Batman, please

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