Shutdown of the court system as a possible factor in the crime wave
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
I am currently suing a former landlord in NYC — a lecturer at Columbia Law school no less! — for illegally withholding our security deposit in an open and shut case.
We’ve been “awaiting a court date” for over a year now. We don’t need the money and were planning on donating (the significant) damages to non-profits helping people who wouldn’t otherwise have the resources to get justice, but it’s still super depressing that the court system basically gave up during COVID and doesn’t appear to be trending in the right direction to be fixed anytime soon.
No doubt our legally sophisticated landlord knew this and took the bet that we would have no real recourse for over a year toward anything they did.
It is an interest free loan to the landlord or management company for the entire time you live there.
Usually it's the management companies that are really difficult to work with.
There are, of course, landlords who do not follow the law. As with drug dealers, pimps, and phone companies they generally prey on the less fortunate. Legal aid and the landlord-tenant tribunals keep busy.
It’s not escrow, the landlord has full control over the account. But it’s not a loan either.
But the interest rate is set by the tenancy act...
So where I live now, legally, landlords have to pay your security deposit back plus an interest rate of 0%
Hilarious stuff
Your leverage is in embarrassing them. Counsel should be able to advise you of ways to do this.
This is like saying "Don't bother contacting support, raise a ruckus on Twitter or contact an insider if you have a problem with <insert tech company>."
Yes, maybe maybe public embarrassment, Twitter, and insiders are the most practical, effective ways of resolving issues today, but that's not the way it should be.
Lawsuits are part of a negotiation. Everyone wins if the parties can settle out of court. In most lawsuits, the court is a bogeyman: you’re posturing to show you’ll win and that the other side should capitulate before wasting everyone’s time and embarrassing itself in a public forum.
> counsel should be advising they use the courts
Counsel should recommend what works. New York’s courts work. But they work slowly.
> like saying "Don't bother contacting support, raise a ruckus on Twitter or contact an insider
No, it’s saying consider doing all those things.
Sorry, I was using a different kind of "should" - you were thinking of the pragmatic, I was speaking philosophically. In a hypothetical, just, efficient, utopian society, I think that world would be a better place if lawsuits were judged and enforced more consistently and more quickly, and if people in that society chose to avoid using public embarrassment as leverage to circumvent the courts. Obviously, we don't live in that world, so the pragmatic approach is to use the tools that are most functional. I wish that we could change our actual society to conform more closely to that hypothetical one.
Also, part of a trial is to make the judge/jury like you. No matter how right you are, if you're an arrogant person, you won't get much sympathy. It's much better to wait for the courts to settle the issue, where a judge could impose punitive damages (interest).
New York seems to have this, for instance, with a 9%/yr annual rate. See, e.g., https://www.propertyinsurancecoveragelaw.com/2020/07/article...
When Cuomo told people they couldn't get evicted and didn't have to pay the last month's rent, I had tenants with white collar jobs decide to leave an apartment I rent a mess b/c "hey, you have no security deposit".
I could have gone to the courts but would have been the same outcome: wait a year and who knows what would have happened.
Because speedy trial is a matter of Constitutional right in criminal trials, it is almost certainly more of a problem for non-criminal trials than criminal ones.
Perhaps he should have been charged with attempted armed robbery (IIRC from law school the punishment for attempt crimes is the same), but overall these charges sound right.
In general, there are two kinds of assault: putting someone in reasonable fear of imminent unlawful battery, or attempted battery (even if you miss). This would have been the former.
There may be specifics of the relevant statutes (in whatever jurisdiction) that made one of these charges inappropriate, but the reporter doesn't give any indication this is the case.
Does anyone else (who works in criminal law, or at least remembers crimlaw better than I do) have ideas on the appropriateness of the charges?
The layman's understanding of assault is probably closer to battery.
Assault is threatening violence, aggravated can be when done in conjunction with a weapon.
Not a lawyer. Some states define these terms differently.
Source: Way too much time as a rent-a-cop. Even dealt with a couple instances of armed shoplifting.
But a quick google [1] shows that in NM, assault counts as aggravated if you're just holding a deadly weapon. So the reporting is just a bit sloppy — the charge itself doesn't reference "with a deadly weapon". It's just aggravated assault (because a deadly weapon was involved).
1: https://www.newmexicolegalgroup.com/criminal-defense/new-mex...
on edit: however the article doesn't seem to tell anything about property crimes or other things that lead to people getting money out of it, it seems more concerned with violence (which I guess should be concerned with) but then I still don't know, hey how are all these people who don't want to work getting by. It's not really the kind of problem you can assault your way out of.
IIRC, car thefts do tend to be reported because otherwise insurance won't pay out, and those are certainly up (at least in some areas, I don't know about thr whole country).
Hell even if no one actually wanted to work, that's still something you have to deal with as a business the same way you have to deal with if no one wants to buy what you're selling
Estimates range from 50k [1] to 100k [2]. People were getting $600 per week in federal unemployment alone [3], which is more than many jobs pay.
> NPR spoke to Katharine Thomas, who works the cash register at a small food co-op in Wisconsin. Thomas remembers seeing people around her lose jobs and collect the state unemployment income plus the extra federal relief of $600 a week.
> "I felt very angry," she says. "I have to go to work. And I make less money, being essential. $600 a week — that's almost the whole paycheck for me. Even with hazard pay, I still don't make that much money."
[1] https://taxfoundation.org/total-covid-relief-unemployment-in...
[2] https://twitter.com/MarcGoldwein/status/1371478357418909703
[3] https://www.npr.org/2020/07/27/895674685/-600-a-week-poverty...
No possible way that ended ages ago but is still being used as a talking point for why shitty companies can’t respond to systematic changes in the market
And the amount of benefits received is calculated based on people with children earning $60k per year in GA and $80k in MA (a very high cost of living state). Either way, both of these figures are above median incomes, so is the claim here that people with above median incomes quit their jobs in order to collect temporary benefits and then never re entered the workforce?
[1] https://taxfoundation.org/total-covid-relief-unemployment-in...
[2] https://twitter.com/MarcGoldwein/status/1371277417600454658
You’re right that the maximum amount of money an individual could have received from the government is quite high. But for every household that received more than the 13k I stated above, other households received proportionally less. (Which is to say while undoubtably some people lived the meme you mentioned, the vast majority of people weren’t given that much money) Plus it doesn’t change the main point that the spending stopped in Sept 2021. We’re two months off from it having been a year since extra unemployment benefits were a factor.
There’s a different narrative that goes like this: those companies fired a bunch of people during lockdown, and the government decided to intervene and give them money (not enough to cover the rent and food expenses while lockdown)
Have some “profiteered” from that? Probably. It’s a big number of people. For a lot of people it wasn’t enough. So they found other ways to survive.
Now the companies (who let’s remember, shacked everyone in the first place) want to go back to how things were before. With same rates. And the pandemic hasn’t finished yet (there’s new variants going on). In this context, would it be wise for people to go back? A lot of them have been forced into finding something else (which is more pandemic-resilient). Cutting expenses, moving out of big cities, etc. Another lockdown and they would be fired again.
It looks like a bad deal to me.
Oh you mean when the government essentially shut down their businesses?
They are unable or unwilling to adapt, and did not have enough savings to continue fulfilling their workers employment contracts.
Then the government took care of its citizens financial welfare.
I am not seeing any governmental missteps here. Can you make it more clear where they went wrong?
No. A global pandemic caused disease and death. Governments imposed lockdowns.
Maybe that was the right course of action, maybe it wasn't. But it's done now, and now we have to pay for the cost of the Covid response, something we'll probably be doing for the rest of our lives.
For this kind of people, capitalist supremacists, sacrifice of human lives to the market is ok, might be "sad" but it's necessary in their worldview.
[0] https://kitanyaharrison.medium.com/the-economy-of-moloch-hum...
The mental health problems for many have been enormous.
There are huge educational gaps that have been created due to missed school.
Inflation from overspending is ruining many peoples lives.
The argument is only rhetorical because all governments in every country imposed some sort of lockdown or everyone stayed home willingly.
It's a bullshit argument, the pandemic causes a downturn for in-person businesses anyway.
Also, offices and other businesses that kept open had issues with staffing due to sickness. Go figure...
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...
Mobs are literally going into malls and basically stealing everything in one specific store.
Homeless people are killing people, shoving people into running trains and in a lot of cases the victims are women.
Package theft (porch pirates) is at an all time high.
Mass Murders (gunning down multiple people) is happening every day in the united states.
But yeah I guess other than that, it's really not happening.
People having easily carried valuable items unattended on their porch which is easily accessible to any random passerby for hours at a time is at an all time high.
It used to be somewhat of a hassle to convince a delivery company to leave anything worth more than a few dollars anywhere there wasn't someone to sign for the delivery.
I wonder what the explaination is here. I would think that the increase in sales would be an effect from the perception of increased violence, especially given the sales are background checked. Articles talking about the increase in gun ownership during the pandemic tend to talk about how those people were getting a gun because of the increase in violence. I hear there could be an increase in thefts, but haven't seen the numbers for that. I could see that being a feedback mechanism, but would be secondary to the original cause.
Humans are impulse decision makers. Easy access to the needed tools just decreases impulse resistance. The simplest way this can be observed is in suicide. Lax rules for the access to deadly firearms has a direct effect on suicide rates.
[1]: https://www.vox.com/2015/8/27/9212725/australia-buyback [2]: https://www.zeit.de/zustimmung?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.zeit.de...
I've seen the studies about stuff like suicide being more successful with access to easy methods. But my question is whether the attempts also increase.
Also, this study (not a news article with potential biases) seems to disagree with the effects of the gun buyback reducing firearm deaths.
https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/australi...
This is the problem. Also prescribing too strong drugs.
Then there's this line: > He was charged with armed robbery and aggravated assault with a deadly weapon—despite not actually attacking anyone with the pocketknife
They add "despite not actually attacking anyone with the pocketknife". Like that is a necessary thing?
I don't know but this article is just way off.
But what if the most significant factor is modern society itself?
Prior to the pandemic we had:
- significant cronic poverty
- those a notch or two up live pay cheque to pay cheque with little or no job security, iffy health care, and so on
- the number of people and families in such peril continues to grow
- the article also mentions drugs (i.e., pain killers)[1]
- etc.
See Matthew Desmond's "Evicted" for more details.
Then on top of this sad social situation we added a gloom & doom pandemic? And thru that we were led by a virologist (not a sociologist).
Here's an appropriate example: Fauci did the commencement speech at Princeton Univ a couple months back. He received a standing ovation. Of course he did...the wealthy / elites had been otherwise spared of significant short and long term damage. But that small group is an exception, and certainly not the majority. Yet they continue to remain ignorant of the realities of the world outside their bubble.
Long to short, when are we going to look in the mirror and ask:
- What about collateral damage?
- We were at war (with Covid) and evey war has collateral damage, yet we refuse to look, to ask. Why is that?
[1] drugs aren't a factor, it's the courts?? That's absurd.
everyone still alive punching the air right now
First of all, criminal courts do not (and are not supposed to) lower crime. In their current form, the criminal courts are a principal agent of mass incarceration. Their existence perpetuates the social stratification and economic disparities created by chattel slavery.
In law school, they used to teach that criminal punishment has four fundamental rationale: retribution, incapacitation, rehabilitation, and deterrence. Of those, deterrence has long been considered debunked. There's some debate about it, but here's the rub: the debate usually involves a researcher claiming that very short sentences or non-incarceration outcomes (like mandatory engagement of services) can lower recidivism. I'm not aware of anyone seriously arguing in the 21st century that violent crime sentencing has a material deterrent effect.
Even if deterrence is wholly debunked, it's not surprising that folks like judges and prosecutors constantly cite it because it's the only rationale which supports the false narrative that criminal prosecution makes society safer. That narrative has been a key strategy in mobilizing votes for those officials, who are usually elected in contests with very low voter turnout.
Yet this is a whole article about "the violent crime wave" and the only primary source cited is Mark Kleiman, who was a vocal advocate for alternatives to incarceration (and against long prison sentences), but also whose primary work was about marijuana anyway. Everyone else is a stakeholder who has interest in keeping courts open and getting them "back to normal" rather than reconsidering the system.
To reframe this article honestly, we should look to the quotation from the Seattle public defender, who said that the solution is actually to charge fewer crimes. The hook the reporter uses is the story of a man who was arrested for armed robbery, a felony that carries a nine year prison sentence, and incarcerated pretrial. Then he was murdered by another incarcerated person.
This man never should have been charged with armed robbery--it was a stretch given the facts. The way to prevent this crime would be to have offered him substance abuse, housing, and/or employment assistance before he resorted to desperation. Once he was arrested and charged, the government had a duty to keep him safe. During the pandemic, all jailers have known that they cannot keep incarcerated people safe, but they largely have not consented to or allowed release for both political and existential reasons. Therefore, to blame here are: 1) The state for not funding basic services, 2) The prosecutor for charging a felony and arguing for detention, 3) The judge for allowing detention while knowing the prisons are unsafe, 4) The sheriff for architecting deadly confinement conditions in the pandemic, 5) The Atlantic (which never seems to know better) and Pro Publica (which really should) for printing this piss-poor article.
It's also worth mentioning that court delay is the norm, rather than some artifact of the pandemic. The article imagines a prior state in which people had confidence they would be swiftly brought to trial, but that's never been true in the modern age. It's a canard. It is true that court delays increased in the pandemic, but irresponsible in the extreme to draw a causal link with the increase in murders and other violent crime during the pandemic.
Rather than maximum value extraction from everyone under the upper crust like we're trying to approach a dystopia.
I also know the construction industry well. You can glue tile to the floor, or screw cabinets to a wall, and own your own home pretty quickly.
If mechanics and slightly skilled manual labors can own homes in California, is there really a problem?
But also 10% of GDP doesn't mean 10% of citizens are employed in those industries. Likely it is less than 10% of the population.
I think your anecdotes do not generalize to the population.
People that are less fortunate are going to start getting investment together to buy raw land, build a house and sell it for upwards of the salary of an AI developer at Google.
This is something people can get started on literally tomorrow.
I don't think the economics work out here for the "less fortunate" because there is a certain minimum threshold of time-plus-money necessary to start this process, and I think without detailed planning provisions it will end up as worse-than-useless sprawl, but it's something to build on, if you'll excuse the pun.
You can live in a structure which is not certified as meeting the code's requirements. But selling it would be hard.
Houses in California cost more than a Google AI developer's salary because you have to know more than a Google AI developer to build them.
Everyone needs shelter but society needs people who are not mechanics.
And we're not even talking about shelter. We're talking about owning a piece of the earth and having dozens of other humans build you a shelter, and then letting you sell it one day. Making other humans build you a home probably isn't going to ever be so cheap that everyone could just buy their own. That's why people live with family or friends or work to learn skills beyond minimum wage.
You need land to construct a home on in the first place, and land prices have exploded over the last decades fueled by insane amounts of cheap dumb investment capital.
Why is there not a single mention of capitalist causes in the entire article?
- Rents (and real estate purchase prices) have gone through the roof over the last decades
- Cost of living (stuff like electricity, gas, gasoline, internet, groceries, basic food) has gone up as well and all but exploded during the last few months following the Ukraine invasion
- meanwhile, for an awful lot of people on the lower rungs of society, wages haven't been going up. Minimum wages have been stuck for years, and the "great resignation" may be a good meme and a desperately needed improvement for millions of people, but still many many more millions of people are stuck in exploitative shit jobs
- in parts of the country that have been left to rot by uncaring politicians, people are turning to drugs to self-medicate the sheer stress that living on the streets or without meaningful perspective in life brings with it
When people are forced to turn to crime, particularly small scale crime such as stealing food, to survive (or to fund their drug addiction), well... they will turn to crime.
- they require endless hoops to jump through (requirements for ID cards, citizenship, proving X years of residence in state/county or detailed financial or employment history when people often don't have the physical records any more)
- they require a bank account or a postal address (which is often hard to meet for homeless or the unbanked)
- they require a computer to fill out the application, excluding the elderly and analphabets without a support network like friends or family that help out
- require personal presence for the application at times where normal people have to work or at a place that cannot be reached by public transport
- the application processing takes many months, which leads to people not applying in the first place because why put in the effort if it will be in vain anyway
- successfully applying for the benefits prevents them from rising up in their jobs ("welfare cliff")
- successfully obtaining mental health care diagnosis and help prevents people from certain jobs or insurance
The system is set up in this perverted way so that politicians can say when faced with public pressure that there is a system in place, but don't have to actually set aside the money that it would cost to serve everyone who's theoretically eligible.
As a result, people turn to easier forms of making money instead: undocumented exploitative labor, prostitution or crime. And the latter two are a permanent source to feed the prison-industrial complex - it has been noted that should the cheap prison/slave labor go away, entire cities would collapse [1].
[1] https://eu.azcentral.com/story/news/local/arizona/2022/07/14...
They are only listing possible causes.
This was obvious when they did it. Don’t let them rewrite history.
It's perfectly fine to complain about police brutality. But it's almost undestandable when you know what kind of crap they have to deal with daily (as exemplified by TFA). It gets old. No surprise only the ones with too thick skin keep on.
And make no mistake, the ones more affected by common criminals are the people with lower incomes. They're the ones that have to use public transport (in some places, of course), go to the sketchy shops in food deserts, where the loss of a vehicle or a phone can be catastrophic, etc
This sounds like hyperbole, although there are some libertarians, especially anarcho-capitalists, who would believe so.
> the ones more affected by common criminals are the people with lower incomes
I'm inclined to agree with this, but it is also true that law enforcement, as a whole, tends to provide better service to higher earners than anyone else.
Very true. They get the worse of both sides.