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Comment by itake | Hacker News Reader

I see a lot of news articles in Seattle about people that were released from jail by a judge with no bail while they wait for trail and then go on to commit even more serious crimes (arson, rape and murder) in the following days.

I think society struggles with knowing who is a threat and who isn't. The consequences of being wrong is rape, death, and arson.

> released without bail and was arrested 10 hours later for arson

https://westseattleblog.com/2022/10/crime-watch-followup-ars...

> A judge released him [..] one week before this Monday’s murder.

https://westseattleblog.com/2022/06/crime-watch-followup-arr...

> Fulk is a convicted felon and was arrested just eight days earlier in neighboring Pierce County for threatening to kill a Pierce Transit public safety officer.

https://komonews.com/news/local/witness-describes-vicious-vi...

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> I see a lot of news articles in Seattle about people that were released from jail by a judge with no bail while they wait for trail and then go on to commit even more serious crimes (arson, rape and murder) in the following days.

Yes, and that happens with people released on cash bail as well as no-cash-bail; there's no evidence, despite the fact that large no-cash-bail jurisdictions have existed in the US for quite some time (D.C. has been essentially no-cash-bail for three decades, for instance) that having money in the mix for pretrial release protects against that.

Pretty good article on how bail gets used:

https://hachyderm.io/@mekkaokereke/109558870665603162

It notes that a Judge can still say that an offender should be remanded to pre-trial custody because they're a threat to the community.

That's because it makes the headlines- working out the real statistics wouldn't even be that hard and would totally remove the need for such sensationalist nonsense, but of course that doesn't pay the bills.

It's not easy to work out the statistics because the vast majority of crimes go unsolved. The sensational headlines are the ones where criminals managed to get caught. The ones who were out on bail (or released on their own recognizance) but didn't get caught won't show up in the stats.

A cursory google suggests that 50% of murders go unsolved. Obviously people out on bail are far more likely to be investigated than those who aren't (especially considering that the intersection of "criminals who haven't gotten caught" and "people out on bail" is empty, so we're looking at the finer category of people who have been caught once), but lets pretend that the opposite is true, and that every single unsolved murder is committed by someone out on bail. That utterly made up statistic would still have more value than every such fearmongering headline combined.

There are many more crimes than murders, and the chances of getting caught are much lower. For example: in San Francisco, the clearance rate for reported larcenies is 2.9%.[1] So a thief can expect to steal another 23 times before having a 50% chance of being caught. SF's 6.4% clearance rate for vehicle theft means that a car thief can expect to steal another 10 cars before getting caught.

1. https://www.sanfranciscopolice.org/stay-safe/crime-data/clea...

I presume the actual distribution is highly skewed, so “expect to steal another 10 cars” is likely better said as something like “expect to steal twice as many cars than they have already stolen” plus a clearance rate for a first time offender. Obviously difficult to get reliable information on the true distribution - but perhaps can be predicted by the outlier fat tail?

More simply put: much more than 50% of people that have stolen 1 car will get caught before they have stolen their tenth car, and if someone has stolen a hundred cars then their chances of getting caught before stealing 110 are much less than 50%. Edit: note that my figures don’t match your numbers - they are only examples.

> the intersection of "criminals who haven't gotten caught" and "people out on bail" is empty

This is not likely true, and it is definitely not necessarily true.

There are quite likely people out on bail who have (1) committed at least one crime, (2) never been identified and arrested or charged for any crime that they have committed.

Do you have any articles where people were not released from jail and they went on to kill an innocent victim while awaiting trial?

Uhhh… what? So what level of rape/murder is appropriate/acceptable for criminals out on bail to commit, statistically speaking of course?

I’m pretty sure the rest of us think it should be 0… but maybe that is just me. 3 notable examples in the last 6 months in one area… not zero… not anywhere close.

Obviously higher than 0, all else being equal. I have priorities other than keeping people locked up on the off chance that a tiny fraction of them might commit a crime- given that most people would at least claim to support fair trials with evidence and such, I suspect that 0 is actually a pretty rare response.

edit: I think your edit made things a little clearer. I doubt we agree, but we've talked past each other here. The relevant statistic is [number of people who commit crimes on bail]/[number of people released on bail]. If we had Minority-Report-style precogs, we could have had 0 such cases in the last 6 months while denying only 3 more people bail. But we don't have that option- there's not much to be done about the sensitivity, so all we can do is crank the cutoff of doubt higher or lower.

With tens of thousands of people released on bail, and assuming that identifying the nth potential murderer roughly follows a power law distribution (a fairly reasonable assumption in a sensitivity/specificity situation like this) we're talking about jailing thousands of innocents to prevent one guilty man from going free. If look at violent crime in general the numbers are less skewed (around 2%), but I'd hope that most people balk at the idea of preemptively jailing ten people without trial to prevent just one from committing a crime. I mean, recidivism rates after prison are way higher than that- perhaps "the rest of us" would favor life sentences for every crime, but I doubt it.

Bail is a filter. People that are functioning in our society and have something to lose will have earned the resources (either financial or social capital) to post bail.

People that are not functioning on any level (just because they're low-income doesn't mean they don't have friends or family to help) should be treated with caution, because they have nothing to lose.

They already are facing jail, so why should they try to function?

> So what level of rape/murder is appropriate/acceptable for criminals out on bail

What level of rape/murder is acceptable from criminals who have not yet been charged with a crime?

The answer is the same as for your question, so unless we are going to preemptively detain everyone not yet charged with a crime, I don't see how the answer to your question can imply we should lock up people who are charged but not convicted.

> What level of rape/murder is acceptable from criminals who have not yet been charged with a crime?

Huh? What are you talking about? You don’t even get a bail hearing unless you've already been charged with a crime.

It's the same in that the "answer" is 0. The commenter is pointing out that fear of murder alone can't justify arbitrary intrusions on rights

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